The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 12 Rules Portland: Technology, Temperament & Free Speech

Episode Date: April 7, 2019

In this lecture, I describe the surprising popularity of long-form philosophical discussions, making reference to my talks with Sam Harris on science and value and religion and atheism, the vital and biologically-influenced role that temperament and personality play in determining individual interest and ability, and the necessity that free and untrammeled speech plays in aiding people’s ability to think carefully and make proper decisions.

Welcome to the third episode of season 2 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. My name is Michaela Peterson and I've been working with my dad on many of his projects for the last year. We've decided to run this podcast as a joint project. We thought that might be something fun and meaningful to do together. We hope you enjoy it. The podcast will feature discussions with scientific, literary, and political thinkers of the highest quality we can manage so that you have access to honest,

reliable, and engaging information. For this episode, we're presenting Dad's lecture at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon on June 25, 2018. In this lecture, I described the surprising popularity of long-form philosophical discussions. Making specific reference to my talks was Sam Harris on science and value and religion and atheism. The vital and biologically influenced role but temperament and personality play in determining individual interest and ability. And the necessity that free and untrammeled speech plays in aiding people's ability to think carefully and make proper decisions.

Thought is by no means something we only engage in as individuals. I heard there were protesters in Portland. Yeah, well, Portland is the place where you'd expect there to be protesters. And there were probably protesters that somewhere between six and a dozen of the 135 12 rules for life lectures around the world.

No, I didn't know that. Is that anxiety provoking at all? Well, it is when you first hear about the possibility of the protest because you don't know exactly what might come of it. But the way it turned out was, well, first of all, most of the places that advertised the protests, the advertisements for the protests drew out very few protesters. I think that most protests we ever had were maybe a couple dozen, except for one evening when there was a protest for another reason that happened to coincide

with one of my lectures. And so all the protest advertisements did was sell more tickets and advertise the show or the lecture more effectively. And I was pretty shielded from whatever protest there might be because they were always out front and we had security, not a lot. And I was always in the back of the theater preparing. And so that wasn't a problem. And then, although it's anxiety-provoking because you're not certain exactly what might come

up with a protest, the overall tenor of the lectures is so positive that the fact that there's a dozen or two dozen protestors compared to the 3,000 people who have come out who are very happy to be there and who are really engaged in the lectures, it makes it completely irrelevant. So I would say overall for the entire year's worth of tours, the fact of protest was pretty minimal. It didn't have much of an effect on what we were doing at all. That's good. Has anybody come up to you? Like has anybody been negative to you or is it kind of on the outskirts?

It's very, very rare that someone is anything but exceptionally positive to me on the street. I've had really, I would say, one, two rude encounters out of literally thousands over the last year. Most people are very careful, cautious. They always ask me if they're inconveniencing me, and I tell them that they're not. And then we have a conversation. They often want a photo. It's the one-on-one interactions are incredibly positive. And it's also the case with the questions and answer periods

and the meet and greets after the lectures themselves, the opportunity to meet people because I usually met about 150 people per lecture was always extremely positive. And I swore at the beginning of this that if I started to tire of the meeting people, you know who are there to listen to me talking to buy my book and to support me if I ever started to get cynical about that or to get tired of it or to start thinking about as an obligation that I would just stop. But I never did feel that way. I was always thrilled to meet the people who were there because, you know, why wouldn't anyone sensible be thrilled about that? Yeah, that's for sure.

Yeah, and they spent a lot of time and money and effort, and they're already positively inclined. And so I have every reason to be grateful for their attendance and their careful attention and the fact that they're engaging in something serious and that they're serious about it, and that they want to talk to me. It's a privilege, and I felt that way the whole time. Oh, that's really cool. When we come back, we'll hear Dad's lecture at the Keller Auditorium in Portland, Oregon. Hey guys, an update on upcoming events. Dad is going to be debating Slavos Gižek, April

19th at 730 PM EST in Toronto. The debate is Marxism versus capitalism and should be very interesting. Gieck is basically the world's most prominent Marxist and dad thinks Marxism is pretty much the most dangerous ideology out there. Should be spicy. Tickets are completely sold out, they sold out incredibly fast, so we set up a live stream for the first time. We figured people who weren't in Toronto would want a chance to see the debate, plus a lot of Gieck's fans are European. Tickets are being sold at Dad's website, JordanB Peterson.com slash events, and at PetersonverseGiac.com. It should be extremely interesting. Please welcome my father, Dr. Jordan B Peterson.

Thank you. Yeah, and I see Dave mentioned that you guys have generated the largest number of protesters so far. So, apparently they're opposed to violent men, which seems like a reasonable proposition. So I don't know where they expect to find them here precisely, but that's okay. So I thought I'd start by just laying out a couple of things I've been thinking about the last couple of days. I use these lectures to think, you know, and so I guess in that sense they're not exactly lectures. I really think about them more as a discussion. You might think, well, it's kind of funny to term this event a discussion because I'm

talking and you guys aren't talking, but that's not really true because I can look at the audience constantly and do specific people in the audience. And I can see if what I'm saying is making sense and if people are following me and I can I listen to everyone in some sense and I try to make sure that everyone's quiet because then I know I'm on track, right? Because if you're rustling around and moving and whispering to each other and so forth, then I've lost the track. And so then the discussion isn't proceeding properly.

And so it's a discussion. And I've been trying to figure out, you know, I was in Vancouver. I think they've mentioned that talking to Sam Harris. And it was so strange because we were there two nights and it sold out. And the venue was about not quite as big as this one, but pretty close. And so that meant that there was 5,000 people in Vancouver

who came out to see two guys who are basically scientists slash intellectuals. I think that's the right category. Talk about high level ideas full force. The thing that I would compare to most that I've had familiarity with before was a PhD defense. So there was about that level of discourse. Now, it wasn't exactly a PhD defense because I was defending and so was Sam, right? So it was like a dueling PhD defense. But it was so interesting to see that so many people were interested in that.

You know, and we talked for an hour, that's first night, and then we were going to go to Q&A, but the audience didn't want us to go to Q&A. They wanted us to continue the discussion. And so we talked for about two and a half hours, which is a long time for an intense discussion like that, and then the same thing happened the next night. And so it's really made me think, like, what the hell's going on? Why is it that this has become popular? Because it's not obvious at all why this is happening. Or what's happening with this group of people that has been termed by Eric Weinstein, this

intellectual dark weapon. So I've been trying to think it through, so I'll tell you what I think is happening and you can maybe it's useful because obviously here you are all too participating in whatever this is. And it's certainly a discussion about ideas. There's absolutely no doubt about that and hopefully about crucially important ideas as well. So the question is why one question is why in the world is a market opened up for this all of a sudden.

I was thinking one of the things Dave interviewed Sam Harris about two or three weeks ago on his YouTube channel and his podcast. One of the things Sam said, he was talking about the difference between YouTube and the podcast world, say, and the classic media, especially TV. And so TV is a really interesting medium. You know, and it's been accused of dumbing people down. And it actually hasn't, by the way, the data are quite clear. The television has made people more intelligent. And I think the reason for that is that it's taken the people who would have been most deprived without television and given them something.

So imagine that your parents don't take care of you very well when you're a little kid. And so you just have nothing to do, you're just sitting in a room and you have nothing to do. It's way better to have a TV than that. And so TV was an educational tool, and it might have not been the best educational tool imaginable, but it was a lot better than no educational tool at all. And so I think it pulled up the bottom end a lot. But the problem with TV, so Sam made this comment. He said, you know, if you go on John Anderson on CNN and you want to have a discussion about

something important, you got seven minutes. And then it'll affect a million people, say, that's the top end. It's like, well, what can you discuss in seven minutes, and then it'll affect a million people say that's the top end. It's like, well, what can you discuss in seven minutes? And the answer to that is, well, only something that you can discuss in seven minutes. And so anything that would take longer to discuss than that, turns into a parody or a sound bite or something like that. And I've had quite a bit of experience with mainstream television now. And it's really weird to go to a mainstream television studio because you get turned into process content

instantly because the medium is so narrow banned and so time limited that everything is forced into the same, the same strange shape. And that shape is news of the second, news of the second. There's no deep thought. There's no time for letting things unfold. And so it's possible that that shaped our political discourse deeply in ways that we really don't understand. Marshall McCleuen, who was a famous Canadian, what social commentator from the 1960s, he said, the medium is the message.

And by that, he meant that the technology shapes the discourse, right, is that it has a profound effect on what can be discussed and what can't be discussed merely because of the format. And because television, the bandwidth for television was so expensive and so narrow that it forced everything through this tiny little channel. I kind of stopped watching TV news about 25 years ago. And the reason for that was that I noticed increasingly that when the journalists were covering politicians, they had the politicians in the background talking with no sound, and then the journalists were saying

what the politicians said, and I thought, oh, that's interesting, I don't really want that kind of mediation, but the politicians became an excuse for the journalists to have an opinion, and that didn't seem to me to be very useful, and it's far worse now than it was, inconceivably worse now than it was then. But now, so John Anderson gives you seven minutes and you've got a million people, but Joel Rogan gives you three hours, right? Right.

Right. Yeah. Right. So, so interesting. Isn't it interesting that you're all applauding that? Because you think, and no commercials, that's right. Well, that's the other thing. Because while the other thing that TV really serves the commercial market,

and now there's nothing wrong with serving a commercial market, but the commercial pressure for TV because the bandwidth is so expensive, the commercial pressure is completely overwhelming. The whole medium twists to serve the commercial pressure is completely what would be overwhelming, the whole medium twists to serve the commercial market, whereas YouTube is basically free. So it frees you up from the demands, the instantaneous and continual demands of the commercial market. And so, but so, you know, I said, well, Jill Rogan gives you three hours and look at all, a bunch of you applauded. It's like, isn't that interesting that you're so happy

for some reason about the extension of the format to three hours, which is really like a big chunk of time. You're so happy with the extension of the forum that just a mention of it makes you applaud. It's really something. And so it looks like we're doing what we're doing is sort of, I think we're celebrating the dawn of a new educational medium. I really do believe that.

So one of the things that happened to me about a year and a half ago was that, I put my class videos up on YouTube, because I was curious, it's like, well, why not? Record them and put the one YouTube. It wasn't hard. I mean, I used very primitive, well, very inexpensive technology. It's not primitive, I used an iPad and a good microphone. It's like, well, everyone has an iPad, but it's not like that's primitive technology, man.

That's major league technology. But the production cost was very low and it was unmediated. And I'd done a little bit of work for public television in Canada, so I was a little bit familiar with the television world. And there was a bit of a market for what I was doing in Ontario, and that was quite interesting because they were high level lectures. So I thought, oh, what the hell, I'll throw all this stuff up on YouTube, because, well, because I'm curious, that was the real reason, and I wanted to play with the new technology,

and the best way to learn a new technology is actually to use it. Right? So I thought, well, what I'll put these up. And so I started putting up my videos in 2013. And then by the beginning of 2016 in April, it hit a million views. And I thought, huh, because I'm a quantitative guy, I've done statistics for a long time. And I mean, psychology is an intense field. Because I'm a quantitative guy who've done statistics for a long time, and I've made psychologies in intensely uses statistics. And so I'm really interested in numbers.

And I hit a million views, and I thought, OK, what exactly does that mean? If you publish a scientific paper and you get 1,000 citations, you've hit it out of the park. Man, that's like 1 1 1% of scientific papers gives you 1,000 citations, you've hit it out of the park, man. That's like one tenth of one percent of scientific papers gives you a thousand citations. And if you publish a book and you sell a million copies, it's like you're doing a football,

touchdown dance in the hallway, right? Where no one can see you, hopefully. And a million of anything is a lot. And I thought, okay, well now I've got a million views on YouTube. What am I supposed to think about that? Because we don't understand YouTube metrics. What does it mean to have a million views? It's a lot.

What does it signify? How much influence do you have? What difference does it make? You know, when people were watching a fair chunk of the lectures, the average was 20 minutes. It's a stupid statistic, the average. You don't want that. You want the typical viewing duration, and that's not the average was 20 minutes to stupid statistic the average, you don't want that, you want the typical viewing duration.

And that's not the average, because most people would click in for 10 seconds, right? But some people are watching the whole thing. It's like, okay, now I've got an audience, it's a million people, the only reason they're watching the videos is because they want to learn. That's it, right? There's no other reason,

because there's no credit given for it, so it's the perfect audience if you're a university professor, because who else would you want to learn. That's it, right? There's no other reason, because there's no credit given for it. So it's the perfect audience if you're a university professor, because who else would you want to talk to other than people who want to listen? Otherwise, it's a lie. You're lecturing to people who don't want to be there, and they don't want to be there. It's like, that's just not helpful, but this is perfect.

And so I thought, OK, well, it's a million. What the hell is this? What is this YouTube thing? Because I thought it's a place, it's a repository for cute cat videos, which is kind of what I thought, okay, well, it's a million. What the hell is this? What is this YouTube thing? Because I thought it's a place, it's a repository for cute cat videos, it's kind of what I thought it, talk about it. And then I thought, well, wait a second, here's something cool.

So, you know, it was only about 400 years ago, 500 years ago, something approximating that, that Gutenberg invented the moveable type press and write all of a a sudden we had books. I mean, there were books before, but they were hand-copied and they were often on leather. I mean, they were staggeringly expensive to have a library meant you were one rich person and most people didn't have books and didn't matter anyways because they couldn't read. So but the printing press came along and all of a sudden you could multiply knowledge and

everyone had access to it. So that was a big deal and all of a sudden you could multiply knowledge and everyone had access to it So that was a big deal and it was a major deal I mean it caused all sorts of revolutions and it raised the average Well the the average intelligence of people immensely, but now look look what's happened is all of a sudden we're in a world where the spoken word Now has the same reach as the printed word. That's never, ever happened before. And so then you can think, so that's a major league revolution. I thought, oh, I see that YouTube, that's a Gutenberg revolution. That's not a repository for QCAT videos.

That's an absolutely transformative technological revolution. So that's one revolution. It's like the spoken word now has the reach of the written word, but it's cheaper to produce and it's faster. And so it has more, it has advantages over the written word. Because like if you're going to write a book, man, first of all, forget it because no one's going to buy your book. I mean no publisher is going to buy your book, so it's impossible. And then even if you do publish your book with a good publisher, which publisher is going to buy your book, so it's impossible. And then even

if you do publish your book with a good publisher, which isn't going to happen, the probability that anyone will buy it is basically zero. So the barrier to books is unbelievably high. And there's some utility in that because it keeps out a lot of terrible books. But the barrier on YouTube is there's no barrier. You can move from conception to publication in like one day And so that's absolutely also that's another technological revolution. You have the permanence of print With the reach of print with no lag whatsoever and at no cost. It's like, okay, that's really something And then there's another technological revolution that's been laid on top of that So you know with Rogan's podcast and YouTube, he has a pretty decent YouTube, and I'm using Rogan because I think he's in some sense

used the YouTube podcast combination for long large-scale, long, long format, intellectual discourse better than anyone else. He has a big YouTube Following and you know he'll put a video up and it can get three million views You know the top-end videos that he does get three million views But that pales in comparison to the podcasts the podcast get ten times that and so Rogan gets a hundred and the last time

I talked to him and this was like six months ago So it's probably more than this now., he gets 150 million downloads a month. It's one point, approximately 1.5 billion downloads a year. He's the most powerful interview that ever lived. So it's, and I asked him, I said, what do you think? Joe, you're the most powerful interview that ever lived. What do you think about that? He says, I don't ever think about it.

And it's understandable because what do you think about that? Who he doesn't know and knows what to think about that? He says, I don't ever think about it. And it's understandable because what do you think about that? Who he doesn't know and knows what to think about that. What would you think about that? It's like, what's that supposed to mean? It's like, he just does what he does and he doesn't really think about it. But see one of the things that's happened with the podcast that's cool, and this is transforming the book market

at the moment, is that this is the other part of the technological revolution. You can't read and drive. You can't read and do dishes. You can't read an exercise but not really. You can't read and walk, but you can listen to podcasts and you can do all those things. And so what that has also done is it's taken a technology that's essentially book-like. And we've already talked about that, technological transformation, and it's transformed it into something

that you can use in found time. So it's like the audio podcast world has added an hour and a half to everyone's day that they can do nothing but learn with. And that's actually what people are doing. Like I see my graduate students, for example, who are highly literate people. Many of them are listening to podcasts instead of reading. And of course, they turn up the speed so they can listen.

Because I don't know how fast you listen to a podcast or a YouTube video. I can, 1.5 seems to kind of top out for me unless the speaker is very slow, because it starts to get muffled after that. But you can double the speed approximately with no real problem. And so, and a lot of these younger people are listening to podcasts instead of listening to music. And that's also really something because music's been an unbelievably dominant cultural force partly because of it's been distributed so widely for about 60 years, but the audio world seems to be encroaching on that.

And you can see this also happening in the book publishing market. So audibles become a real force, say. And the audio books have started to compete with hardcover and paperback books in terms of pure volume of books sold. So that means that people are listening to books now instead of reading them. And then there's another interesting thing that's happening there.

It's like maybe, you know, most people don't read much. And of the people who do read hardly anyone buys books. So book buying is a very niche market. But maybe that's because there's some barriers to reading. You know, you have to be very, very fluent reader to buy difficult nonfiction, generally speaking. But maybe 10 times as many people can listen to difficult nonfiction as can read it. It might be, and if it's 10 times as many people, that's also a major technological revolution because it would

mean that all of a sudden high-end intellectual material that was the province of a very small minority of people has all of a sudden capable of reaching an audience of maybe 10 times that. And so I've been running all of that through my head. I said, OK, well, what's the nature of this revolution? It's like four revolutions at the same time. And so then I was just talking to Dave backstage because we've been talking about this intellectual dark web idea and the tension that's developed perhaps.

We're inside it, so it's hard to see it objectively, but the tension that's developed between this new media podcast, YouTube's say. And the journalism that's taking place online as well plays a role in that versus the classic media, especially the television stations and so forth. It's like YouTube offers absolutely everything that television offers plus a bunch more. So it has all the advantages television and none of the disadvantages. And then it offers immense bandwidth at no cost. So I can't see how it can possibly not win completely. And so I think that part of the reason that you're all here, for example, and that whatever this is is happening, and that there's an emergent market for high-level intellectual discourse, who the hell would have ever guessed that, is because the technology that underlies YouTube and podcasts is so

powerful. It's not even the content. It's not the fact that it's Dave Ruben or Joe Rogan or me or Ben Shapiro or any of the people who seem to have, what would you say, harnessed this? We were in the right place at the right time in some sense, but the underlying technology is such a monster that it's going to just change everything. And so, so wouldn't it be something if we're in an era now where masses of people are really willing to engage in high-level intellectual and philosophical discourse? And it kind of looks like that might be the case. So that's. Yeah, and I mean, who knows for how long this, the hunger for this has been developing.

You know, it could easily be for decades. I think you saw a little bit of that starting maybe with talk radio, right? Because talk radio was at least longer, longer format, but it still didn't have the same massive advantages that YouTube and podcasts have. While the other advantage, of course, they have its own demand. You can access it whenever you want. And so that's a lot of technological revolutions all piled into one thing.

So hopefully, maybe this is the case. Maybe this will make us all smarter. I mean, it's possible. So, it was just shocking to me to be in Vancouver and to see, it was so interesting participating with the audience because, you know, the thing that I did with Harris was build as kind of a debate, like combat in some sense. It was Harris had his point and I had my point and one of us was going to win. Neither of us were really actually interested in that, although that could have happened and it might have been okay. But what happened instead was that we actually had a discussion.

Harris is a smart guy and he's got his points, man. And so we actually had a discussion about what it was that he thought and what it was that I thought and then we were trying to push what we both thought way further along and it's actually what we were doing. It wasn't a game or anything like that. And what was so interesting was the audience was 100% on board with that. That that seemed to be carrying because there's something going on that tracks people's interest in a form like this too. There's something going on. Now, what I think is going on is that everyone loves to participate in, well, I've called it the logos,

and so the logos is the capacity of free and truthful speech to conquer chaos and to further the generation of habitable order. It's the manner in which we participate in creation itself. I would say that's a religious take on it. I think it's extraordinarily accurate. I think that's what people are doing in a form like this when it's working properly.

We're all here to see if we can expand our competence outward into what we don't know a little bit more and we can restructure what we do know so that we're more competent people. And that I think that participating in that process is there isn't anything more gripping than that. And there shouldn't be because what else could you possibly do that would be better than to make yourself competent across a broader territory and restructure

the tools you already have at hand so that they're sharper and that they work better. It's like, why would you be interested in doing anything other than that? And then you see, well, people actually really are interested in it. And then I think maybe some of the contempt that seems to have been generated, like one of the things I've seen, the mainstream journalist types particularly, not all of them, I'm not trying to paint them all with the same brush because it's not fair to do that.

There's lots of credible journalists, but one of the things I have noticed, and I've noticed this more among TV journalists, I would say, than print journalists, is that they have quite a bit of contempt for their audience. You know, they think of their audience as stupid. And then I think, well, why is that? It's because it might be because the medium has made the audience stupid.

It's so, like, if I can only get your attention for six minutes, and that's at the absolute limit of, you know, if I'm very influential, maybe I can get your attention for six minutes, once every six months. It's like, I'm not going to thank much of your intelligence, you know, if I'm very influential, maybe I can get your attention for six minutes, once every six months. It's like, I'm not going to thank much of your intelligence, you know, because I'm viewing you through an unbelievably narrow channel. Whereas all of a sudden now you can view people through this incredibly wide channel. It's like, well, I can talk to you for 30 hours, right? And so that's a whole different issue.

We can go into things way more deeply as a consequence of that. And the audible people talked to me this week and they said that because they're experimenting with the audio format now too and they said that people seem to like the minimum chunk that people want is nine hours. Right? Well, and then look at what's happening on venues like Netflix. It's like, it turns out you guys don't want half-hour sitcoms. You want 40-hour unbelievably complicated dramas, right? Right. Right. And people have done content analysis of the development of TV shows across time. And this has really accelerated in the last four or five years. So television shows are way more complex than they used to be, right? Way more characters, way more plot lines, way more complicated plot lines developing

across very long spans of time and people seem to absolutely love that. I mean, how many of you have binge watched a whole series? Yeah, yeah, so that can be, that can be, well, minimum of a dozen hours, something like that. And the more twisty the plot lines and the more complexly layered the characterizations, all of that, the better. That's pretty interesting, too, because it starts to mean that the deep narratives that are being produced on places like Netflix also free of the bandwidth problem,

they're starting to approach the same complexity as great literature. So that's cool, so it could easily be that we're actually smarter than we think. We're smarter than we've revealed ourselves to be through our previous technology. And so that would be really cool. And maybe we could have a sophisticated discourse

over the next 10 years. And I think maybe that's what all of this is. I think it's the beginning of widespread sophisticated discourse that's mediated by this exceptional technology. And so, well, would not be something that would be so cool if it was true, and it looks like it, it's like, you know, this is a big audience for something like this, 3,000 people, that's a lot of people.

And so, and the forums in Dublin and London, I'm going, because I'm doing the last two talks with Sam Harris, one in Dublin and one in London, they're 5,000 expandable to 10,000. I don't know how far we'll go into, I think we sold about 5,000 seats in Dublin. I don't know what that'll expand to, maybe by the time the talks occur, that would be on the 14th of July. But there's obviously a massive market for this. So it's so interesting and it looks like it's so good. It might be that people are way more sophisticated than we think and that we can elevate our political and

our philosophical discourse way above what we're accustomed to and that this is the start of that. Applause So, I'm going to start with, I'm going to move now to discuss rule one in 12 rules for life. And I'm, it's a rule I've hit multiple times because I've been working on it a lot, but it's also, there's things about the way that I've been conceptualizing this rule that have actually changed as a consequence of the discussion that I had with Harris So I'm gonna twist some of that into this tonight. So in 12 rule in in the book the most the chapter that's received the most

satirical attention, let's see, and the most vicious criticism, in some sense, is the first chapter, which kind of surprised me. I thought the fifth chapter was gonna be the one that would do me in, and that's the one that's don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. I figured I was dead in the water for publishing that,

because, well, first of all, I've made the claim that children can be dislikable, which is self-evidently true, but not something you're ever supposed to say. And then the other thing that's completely taboo about that title is that you could be apparent and not like your children, which is also obviously true, but another thing that you're not supposed to say. So I thought the combination of those two would be just dead, deadly, but I got a whole pass for Rule 5, but the whole lobster thing, man, people have been up in arms about that. So, and I didn't expect that at all, but I do understand why.

I do understand why, do understand why I think and and talking to you Harris made it even clearer. So I'm going to lay out the underpinnings of rule one and tell you first of all why I wrote it the way that I did write it. See I've been trying to figure out what our fundamental political debate is about. Now one of the things that psychologists have learned in the last ten years or so, we sorted out the space to describe personality about 30 years ago. It started in the early 1960s, but we had a pretty stable model of personality by the early 1990s.

And so the model is the standard big five personality model, extroversion, it's a positive emotion dimension, neuroticism, it's a measure of sensitivity to negative emotion, especially anxiety and emotional pain, agreeableness, which seems to be on the pro agreeable side sort of compassion and politeness and on the less agreeable side sort of toughness and bluntness, conscientiousness, that's dutifulness, industriousness and orderliness, and openness to experience which looks like a creativity dimension. Now, those dimensions were extracted out from large scale surveys using blunt force statistics.

No theory. The only theory that underlies the big five is the idea that the structure of personality might be encapsulated in language. The personality is so important that we've actually built it into our linguistic system. So if you analyze the language, you can extract out the dimensions of personality. That was the only theory. And then it was brute force statistics that did the extraction of the dimensions.

And then so, and that was all sorted out by about 1992, 1993. And so, and most psychologists, we were debating still about the precise details of the big five model, but most people accept the notion that in so far as you can measure personality with questionnaires, then it has approximately a five dimensional structure. And so maybe it's six, maybe it's seven, but it's certainly at least five. And then once we got that sorted out, we could look at other issues like, well, were there personality differences between men and women? And there are, and then we could decide whether those were biological or cultural,

and they're both, but there's certainly a heavy biological influence. And we could also start looking at political belief. And so there's been a burgeoning field, probably about 10 years in development now, showing that you vote your temperament. Now it's quite interesting because what you think is you look at the facts and then you have a rational discussion with yourself and you come to your reason

conclusions and that's why you're a Republican or a Democrat, let's say. But it doesn't really look like that, because being a Republican is actually heritable, so it's under biological influence, which is quite interesting, same with being a Democrat. And it's also very tightly associated with your temperament, not perfectly, and it's not like you don't think about things politically.

But you see the thing about your temperament is it tends to serve as a screen for the facts. So you think, well, I look at the facts and I derive my conclusions, but what you don't take into account is, well, where do you look for the facts? Right? Because you just don't look randomly everywhere for facts. You have your places to go for facts, and that sort of biases what facts you'll see. And then something in you highlight certain facts as worthy of your attention and others is not,

and that's your temperament, so it's really hard to get access to the facts independently of your temperament. And your temperament basically provides you with a quick and dirty way of interacting with the world. So like if you're extroverted, for example, you're going to exploit the world in so far as the world is social and you're a social being. And if you're agreeable, then you're going to orient your life around relationships. And if you're conscientiousness, if you're conscientious, then you're going to orient your life around duty. And if you're open and creative, then you're going to organize your life around entrepreneurial and creative activity. And so those are your niches. And it's not exactly that that's your choice, although that enters into it.

It's like that's who you are. And if you have children, especially if you have a couple of them, you can see how different their temperaments are right from very, very early. You can really see it, I think, right away, but you can certainly see it by six months. So anyways, it turns out that your political choices are very heavily influenced by your temperament. And so this is how it works. So if you're liberal, you're likely to be high in trade openness, which is the creativity dimension, but low in trade conscientiousness. And so that's industriousness and orderlyness. And if you're conservative, it's the reverse.

You tend to be high in conscientiousness and low in openness. And then that has occupational significance. So what that means is the liberals tend to be the creative types, artistic writers, you know, the whole artistic domain, plus they tend to be the entrepreneurs. Whereas the conservative types tend to be managers and administrators.

And so there's an interesting kind of economic rule that goes along with that, which I think everyone should think about for like about 10 years, which is that you conservatives and liberals actually need each other in an economic sense, because the liberals think up all the new companies, but they're too scatterbrained to run them. Right, exactly. And the conservatives can really run something like, mad, once they know what it is, but they can't think of anything new to run. So, liberal start companies and conservatives run them. And so that's quite it.

And so those are different niches in some sense, right? So the liberals are the people in some sense who are out on the fringe, and they're dealing with new ideas continually. And the fact that they're low in conscientiousness is actually somewhat of a plus in that domain, because one of the things that characterizes entrepreneurs is that as they're pursuing their new technology,

they have to be willing to break rules. Because if you're doing something new, you can't do it the old way, but if you're a conscientious person, do it a full, industrious, and orderly, then it's really going to bother you to break rules. Because you think those damn rules are there for a reason, which they are. And so you should have a good reason for breaking them, right? But for an entrepreneurial type, it's like, well, I'd need to get this done. And I'm pursuing what I'm interested in, the stupid rules can wait.

And then you need, of course, you need the conservative types to kind of mop up behind you and make sure that you implement things properly. So that's worth knowing because if you're really liberal, and you know, you see the world through that lens, you still might think, yeah, yeah, but we need these damn annoying conservatives because we would never be able to implement something. We'd never get something running stably. We'd never have anyone to pay attention to the details, the painful details, if we didn't have conservatives. And the conservatives need to think, well, yeah, you know, it's really good to do things

that tried in true way, and by the book and so forth, and in a discipline and militaristic, say, patriotic, orderly manner, but now and then we're going down the wrong path in a very efficient way, and we need someone to, well, that happens a lot, man, that happens a lot, happened to Japan, right, because Japan was unbelievably on the ascendancy up till the 80s, and they ossified, and they don't have a very entrepreneurial culture. I mean, the Japanese are doing fine, and they don't have a very entrepreneurial culture. I mean the Japanese are doing fine, but they don't have a very entrepreneurial culture. You know, one of the things you Americans have got brilliantly, and I don't really know how you managed it, was that the managerial and administrative types can run corporations, but you let creative people knock the corporations away when they're no longer

useful and produce a new one. It's that's painful for everyone, right, especially the people in the old corporations, but it's absolutely necessary. So then you think there's a fundamental tension there, right? A fundamental tension that's never going to go away, and that tension is between old structures and their utility and new structures and their necessity. So the liberals are always clamoring about new structures and their necessity and the conservatives are always clamoring about how we need to preserve the old tradition

and what's horrible about that is they're both absolutely right. And so here's another way of thinking about it. There's an intractable problem here. It will never go away. And the problem is, you need structures to orient you in the world. But the structures become old and out of date, and they need to be updated and sometimes abolished. And so then the question is, when do you preserve and when do you transform? And the answer to that is, you don't know and you never will.

And the reason for that is that, well, this is the big problem. So you don't know and you never will. And the answer is why? Or the question is why is that? Why can't you solve this problem? And the answer is, because the environment keeps shifting on you. Unpredictably, here's a good example. Try to predict the stock market.

It's like, good luck, you can't. You can't. And actually, if you do random selection, that's about as good as you can do. So this has been tested over and over. So like, if you take a cohort of money managers, money managers, and you look at how they do in terms of stock market investment over a five-year period, you find that if a random selection process will beat them on average, money managers do worse than random on average.

And the reason for that is because the stock market is actually unpredictable. And the reason for that is that even if you got an edge and you could predict it for like a minute or, or let's say an hour, someone is going to figure out that you're predicting it and they're going to change their behavior and that will screw up your prediction model immediately. So, the stock market is twisting around and moving and the reason I'm using it as an example is because it's a good analog of the environment as such. The environment's unpredictable, fundamentally. And you know that, you all know that

because you can have a good plan and you can be laying it out and something can come along and broadside you, right? Something you didn't expect, you'll get ill, your family member will get ill, you know, your boss will turn out to be a psychopath, someone that you have a relationship will be, will be, will be trey, you like, things are coming up in life or there'll be a radical, radical, political event that flips everything upside down or you just have no

idea. And, and so you can't predict the environment perfectly and it's around. And so what that means is you can never tell when the structure that you're using needs to be preserved and when it needs to be updated. It's like, should I preserve this? Should I continue what I'm doing, or should I change it? It's like you've been in that agonizing position when you wanna change partners, let's say,

when you wanna change your educational pathway, when you want to change your career, should I keep doing what I'm doing, or should I do something new and better? It's like, you don't know? You don't know. So how do you solve the problem? You think. So that's why you have to think.

Because you might think, well, why do you have to think? Well, you have to think, because what might think, well, why do you have to think? Well, you have to think because what you already thinking isn't good enough. Because if what you already knew was good enough, you'd never have to think. You could just be who you were. And you'd run that out like a clock. And everything would work out fine for you.

It's like that doesn't work at all. You're thinking all the time. And what are you thinking about usually? You're usually thinking about problems. And the reason for that is because you have problems. And the reason for that is because you have problems. And the right, and the reason for that is you can't predict everything. So you've got a problem.

Okay, so we got to think. So then the next question is, how do we think? And the answer to that is you think badly. And so do you, and so do you, and so do I. And the reason for that is, well, how could you not think badly, and so do you, and so do you, and so do I. And the reason for that is, well, how could you not think badly? First of all, things are way more complicated than you are smart. So that's a massive problem. And you know that, right? It's like, that's obvious, bad. And it doesn't really matter how smart you are. You still have that problem.

But it's worse, too, because you're biased, partly by your temperament, partly by your blindness, partly by your malevolence, partly by your stupidity, partly by your ignorance. Like, you've got major cognitive problems, man. Like, they just stack up, right? So even if you can't, and this is also assuming that you know how to think, and you probably don't, because thinking is actually really hard. So to think something through, it's very rare to see someone who can do this. If you have a complex problem and you want to think it through, you have to really define what the problem is. And so that might mean you have to define it six or seven ways and those ways will contradict

one another, having one opinion about some complex thing that you're trying to think through isn't thinking at all. It's just the application of your assumptions. To think you have to take six different stances on the same thing and then you have to have a fight between those and you have to do that internally. And man, it takes it takes a long time to train someone to do that. And even if you do train them, they can usually only do it within the domain that they're trained in. And most people aren't trained to do that. And so most of us can't think.

So not by ourselves, that's the crucial issue. Not by ourselves. So then the question is, well then how do we think? And the answer to that is, by talking. And that's what made me a free speech advocate. You see, because that's how we think. So, you know, okay, so you can think about this technically first. I know you can think in images and some people do, but a lot of the way we think is in words.

I think, well, how did we learn the words? Well, obviously, by speaking, right? And you don't just sit in your crib and babble to yourself, you learn language by communicating with other people. So what that means is the very tools that you use to think if you're just thinking are still social, right? Because they're derived from social interaction.

So the tools that you use to think even as an individual are social tools. So even when you're thinking that you think by yourself, you're not. But even more to the point, look, if you have a family, a family is a thinking unit. Okay, so how? Well, you're always talking to each other. Now verbally and non-verbally, and you're jostling, right? So you imagine that the family is it's like a group of sailors that are trying to figure out how to determine how the ship is going to progress across the stormy seas right and everyone is

talking to each other to determine how the navigation is going to go and the talking's intense some of it's just sharing of ideas but a lot of it's arguing and fighting it's like I want to do but a lot of it's arguing and fighting. It's like, I want to do this. No, I want to do this. No, I want to do this. Like it's contentious. And maybe you're not so good at it.

And one person's voice always dominates and it's a bit of a tyranny, which is a bad idea. It's not a good long-term stable solution for your family. So what happens is that everybody voices their opinion if it's working out, and as a consequence of voicing those diverse opinions, then you come to some sort of consensus, and you assume that the consensus is a better arrangement than anything you might have come up

with on your own, better because more people had input. So that's good, because they can take you away from your biases, right? So you wanna have people around you who aren't the same as you in case your stupid bias doesn't work in this situation, because there's places where your bias is gonna work, but there's places where it's not gonna work at all. So like if you're the entrepreneurial type

and you have to make conscientious, dutiful and orderly decisions, you're not the person to be thinking about those. You need someone that you don't even want to talk to to help you with that. So you put together a family unit saying everybody's communicating and hopefully what comes out of that communication, if it's truthful communication and everyone is engaged in it with an eye to making things better, let's say. What emerges out of that is a pathway that's better than any of the pathways

that any of the individuals would have come up with had they be on their own. And that's kind of self-evident because why the hell would you have a family otherwise? Like if it's a worse solution than being alone, then why bother with it? So, and it isn't. I mean, the data on that are pretty clear. It's, for example, people who are in long-term relationships do better, generally speaking, than people who are single. Now, that's partly because the people who are single, some of the people who are single are sick in many ways,

and that's making it difficult for them to find a partner. So, it's a two-way issue, but it still does seem better for people to be in a relationship, which is kind of why most of us are searching for a relationship, right? And usually it's medium to long-term relationship. And then you see in that diatic interaction, the same thing. So I'll tell you a little story.

This is a very cool idea. Go lateral here for a minute and deeper, because I want to show you how some of this has a metaphorical underpinning as well, because I'm trying to also make the case that the truth that you express in speech is the thinking that redeems pathological structures and that stretches us farther into the unknown.

It's a really, really important, I would say, that's actually, that idea has been encapsulated in our deepest stories. So let me give you an example. In ways we don't even understand. It's encapsulated so deeply that we don't even know we've done it. And so, and the stories that I'm thinking about

are at the base of our culture, because our culture is predicated on the idea that you're actually a locus of invaluable communicative capacity. And that's why you, that's why our society is grounded in respect for your sovereignty as an individual. It's a very, very deep, fundamental idea. I had this friend who went to Sweden to get married. And in the marriage ceremony, it was a Christian marriage ceremony that bride and the groom had to hold a candle above both of them, right? Well, they were taking

their vows. You think, okay, well, what the hell is going on there? Exactly. So it's a dramatic ritual, right? It's like a play in some sense. It's even like the things that kids do when they're pretending. It's a play. Well, what is the candle represent? Well, it represents the same thing that the candle represents if you put it on a Christmas tree. Now, you have a Christmas tree at the darkest time of the year, right? Because that's that's around December 21st. So, the light needs to come back at the darkest possible time. And so, the tree signifies, the tree with the lights on it, that's what it signifies.

It signifies the re-emergence of illumination in the darkness and illumination is associated with light. And so the light is the candle and the candle is the thing that you hold above both people in a in a marital relationship as the value to which they both bow because you might say well who's subordinate to who in a marriage? You can have a big fight about that. Well if if it's a patriarchal marriage, then the man's in control. And if it's a matriarchal situation, then the woman's in control. But someone has to be in control, or something has to be in control. It's like, no, not necessarily. It could be, it could be a process that you're both engaged in, that you're both subordinate to. And that's what that, that ceremony represents. It's the idea is, no, no, you're both subordinate to and that's what that that ceremony represents. It's the idea is no, no, you're both subordinate to the principle of

illumination. It's like yes, that's what you want to be subordinate to, that's for sure. So it isn't that I have to abide by what you want and it's not that you have to abide by what I want. It's that both of us should be oriented towards the future, the positive future, and then both of us should be telling the truth, and then that'll produce a kind of dialogue, and we're both going to abide by the consequence of that dialogue. So we're subordinate to this higher order principle of illumination. Now because I said already this was a Christian ceremony, the illuminated candle was assimilated to the idea of Christ, and so the notion there, and this is an extraordinary old notion,

it's the notion of the sacrality of marriage. And so the idea there is that the principle of illumination is what unites a man and woman in a proper relationship. And so, and the principle of illumination is associated symbolically with the idea of Christ. And so then the question is, well, then this is where this gets insanely complicated. It's very, very difficult to lay out. So then what is that superordinate principle as it's encapsulated in that symbolic structure? Okay, so it's not it's not illumination as a mere verbal abstraction. Okay, so it's not it's not just something that's abstract. It's something that you have to act out. So it's not only that we've formulated this relationship that that puts us both what it subordinates us both to the truth.

It isn't that we're only supposed to speak and think the truth, it's that we're supposed to act it out. And so that's the idea that the word should be made flesh, that's what that idea means, that it has to be acted out. And so the symbolic reference for Christ in the Christian system that at least in part underlies our culture is the idea that the truth needs to be embodied in action, in embodied in action, that's right, and that's what you're supposed to be subordinate to,

and that's the principle that revitalizes and unifies. So that's that set of ideas. Okay, so now, back to the idea of free speech. So, so the reason that free speech is an inviolable responsibility, we always think about it as a right. It's like it's not the right way to think about it. It's actually a responsibility. You have the right to free speech because we need you to speak properly because if you don't speak properly then you can't set the world right and we lose your perspective and that's a very bad thing. And so you have the right to free speech

so that you can adopt the responsibility to speak freely and truly so that you can set things in order and we can hear what you have to say. And that's really how it's laid out. So, and the reason that we need free speech is because it's through free speech that we think because we can't think on our own. And we need to think because we can't update our traditions and our structures and we can't transform ourselves when we're necessary unless we can think. And so that means that unless we have free speech, then the process by which we stop our structures from degenerating, and we don't want them to degenerate, it's a bad thing, right?

Because they can rigidify and become tyrannical, and God, that's horrible, or they can dissolve and disappear, in which case, what have you got? You got nothing, you got nihilism, you got hopelessness, You got aimlessness. You've got the suffering of life, but no purpose. Well, that's no good. No one can live. We can't live with those two extremes. We can't live in the tyrannical extreme when it's everything is structure and nothing gets too updated. It gets old and dead and kills everything. And we can't live with the dissillusion of structure either, because then we have nothing.

And so we have to keep the structure alive, and the way we keep the structure alive is by talking about it. But we have to talk about it properly. We have to talk about it like civilized, intelligent, committed citizens who take the responsibility that goes along with individual sovereignty as if it's the most important thing there is. Because it is. And so maybe that's why it's so good that we're engaging in this sort of dialogue and that the forum for that has started to expand. Because right now, there's any amount of political pathology tormenting our culture. I would say both on the left and on the right.

And it's destabilizing us. And the left pathology tilts towards chaos and nihilism. And the right pathology tilts towards tyrannical order. And we've had experiences of those recently enough. We might think, let's say, throughout the 20th century, so that we might have learned our lesson and figured out that if we could negotiate between those two extremes, wouldn't that be much better for everyone?

And then, of course, the question there is, do you want things to be much better for everyone? You know, and you might think, well, obviously the answer to that is yes, it's like it's not so obvious, right? It's, you know, perfectly well, if you sit on the edge of your bed and you have a little meditative what discourse with yourself, discussion with yourself, that your motivations are far from pure. And the probability is that some of the time that you're aiming down and not up for whatever purposes you might have, revenge your anger or hostility or trauma or resentment or whatever it is, whatever chip you're carrying

on your shoulder, whatever way you feel victimized by your unfortunate circumstances. And they are unfortunate, right? Let's make no mistake about that. You know, when people consider themselves victimized, it's often because, well, life is extraordinarily difficult and tragedy strikes everyone and we're often betrayed and we're subject to malevolence

and it's no bloody wonder that we wander around with chips on our shoulder, but it isn't helpful at all. And so that's why the rule in 12 rules for life is, well, twofold. It's to stand up straight with your shoulders back because that is an injunction to adopting a certain, what would you say, physical stance towards the world, that in at least in principle can undergird this psychological stance that I described. It's like, well, you have to be willing to take the whole force of the world onto yourself in some sense, and it's a catastrophe. But if you don't take it on, then you can't solve the damn problem, and you don't do that

by crouching and hiding, and you don't do that by adopting an aggressive stance. Like there are times when those things are useful, but fundamentally that's not it. Fundamentally you open yourself up to the world, right? And that's what this stance is, is to put your shoulders back. And because it's to expose yourself, in some sense, to the full force of the world. You know, and the chapter's been criticized because I made a case for hierarchies, I said, which is a classic conservative case. And although I wasn't trying to say that hierarchies are

immutable or appropriate in their current form or anything like that. It's complete misreading of an absolute misreading of what I was trying to put forward. I was trying to put forward the proposition that you have to have structure You can't interact with the world without structure. It's not possible. This is actually the argument that I ended up having with Sam Harris was really about something like this. It's like, we have to have structure. What does the structure look like? Well, we're still debating that.

But there are ways to solve that. And I address some of them in 12 rules for life. You have to have structure, but structure tilts towards tyranny. And so that's the right wing conundrum. You need structure, but it tilts towards tyranny. And the left wing conundrum is, well, if you have structure, then it produces all sorts of negative consequences. So hierarchical structures, for example, emerge when you're trying to pursue something that's valuable, which you need to do.

You pursue something that's valuable, and it turns out that some people are better at that than others, whatever the valuable thing is. So you get inequality. As soon as you pursue something of value in a social circumstance, you get inequality, because some people are better at it than others. You know that, plumbers, some plumbers are better

at being plumbers than other plumbers, and all plumbers are better at being plumbers than people who aren't plumbers. So you've got that in it. Well, right, you've got that inequality built right in. It's a major inequality. If you have a skill, then you produce inequality in the world. It's like, what are you going to do? Get rid of all the skills? That's not going to be helpful. So the necessary consequence of developing specialized skill is the generation of inequality. And so if you're going to benefit from the fact that people have skills, you're going to have to accept the damn inequality.

OK, and so that's what the right wingers are always on about. It's like you have to accept the damn inequality if you're going to benefit from the skill. And fair enough. But the left wingers say, yeah, but there's something important that you're forgetting here, which is that if you produce a hierarchy, even if it's skill-based, then most people aren't going to benefit from that hierarchy. The benefits are going to go to a small percentage of people at the top.

Are they going to go disproportionately to a small number of people at the top? And that's also the case. So another part of the political dialogue that has to be continually active is, okay, how much inequality can we tolerate to benefit from the differential in skill? And the answer to that is the same answer as the answer to the problem of structure versus transformation. It's like there is no answer. You have to debate it all the time. It's like so the people who are on the side of the structure have to say, well here's all the benefits to the structure. It's worth paying a cost for. And the cost is the dispossession of the people who stack up at the bottom. And the left says, don't go too far with that because if your structure gets too steep and too rigid then the whole thing will collapse. It's like, yes. So how do we mediate? Between those two

catastrophes and the answer is, we talk to each other and we think. And so the political landscape looks like it's set up to do two things. One is to help us determine what parts of the structure we can maintain and move forward with and what parts we have to transform. That's an active dialogue. And then the other part is to determine if we've got the hierarchies adjusted such that we're maximally benefiting from the skill, but minimally dispossessing people. And you might, now, and the part of the problem is, is because you bring your biases to the dam argument, and you can't help it,

is that if you're a conservative type, you're going to think, well, if the conservatives would just win the argument once and for all, then we wouldn't have a problem. And the liberals think if those dam conservatives would just go away, and the liberals could arrange the world, we'd have the utopia tomorrow. And the problem with that is we wouldn't.

And the reason for that is, well, as soon as you generate up your utopia, whatever it is, it turns into a structure, and then it has the same problems as all the other structures have ever had. And so, and there's no issue, you know, one of the things I outlined, I have this book that you might be interested in. If you like 12 rules for life, you might be interested in the other book I wrote, which was called Maps of Meaning, and I've done a bunch of lectures about maps of meaning online. I just released the audio version of that on June 12th.

I think if you're going to tackle that book, it's better to tackle the audio version because it's a really, really hard book. It just about killed me to write it. And so it'll probably just about kill you to read it. So it was sort of actually designed for that purpose, by the way. It's not so funny, it's actually true. So but the audio version, I think, makes it much clearer, but what I was trying to outline in that book was the fact that this set of problems that I just laid out for you, although it didn't describe it in quite this way, it's a permanent problem. It will never go away.

One of the ways I did that was I looked at the ancient Egyptian cosmology. So the Egyptians had sets of gods. And they actually had gods that represented these processes. So one of their gods was Osiris, and he was the god of tradition. And Osiris had a problem. This is a problem you're all familiar with because you've seen it in movies. So Osiris was the once great king who had an evil movies. So Osiris was the once great king who had an evil advisor. It was his brother. So that was the Egyptian setup, just like the set up in the Lion King. It's exactly the same thing with Mufasa and Skar. It's the same story, fundamentally. And so what the Egyptians had figured out 4,000 years ago was that every structure, so every king, tended towards malevolence, that was its evil brother, and that the malevolence would undermine it at some point, because that's what happens in the Egyptian cosmology, is the God Seth, Osiris is the God of structure, there's a God named Seth, who's the evil brother of Osiris. His name turns into Satan over time.

So it starts as Seth, it's Seth, and then it's turned into Satan. So that's kind of where that idea comes from. It's absolutely fascinating. Seth waits for Osiris to have a weak moment, and he cuts him up into pieces and distributes him across the kingdom. So things fall apart. That's what the Egyptians figured out. Things fall apart.

And they do that of their own accord, but we speed them along by being malevolent. As brilliant, it's absolutely brilliant. And so that's what happens in the Egyptian story. And things fall apart. And then the goddess of chaos emerges. That's ISIS. And she makes herself pregnant with the fallace of Osiris, so he's broken

up across and spread out across the country, things fall apart, but that's potential, right, when things fall apart there's new potential. They merges out of the chaos, that's ISIS. ISIS gives birth to a new God, Horace, and you all know about Horace, because Horace is the Egyptian eye, right? Everyone knows that symbol, still interestingly enough. So the Egyptians figured out, this is so cool. I've never recovered from figuring this out. It's what they discovered was so absolutely unbelievably remarkable that while that it produced a whole religion and a whole culture

that lasted thousands of years, right? Because that's what happened in Egypt. Horus is the eye. Now what's the eye? The eye is paying attention. So the God's figure, the Egyptians figured out that when things fell apart as a consequence of malevolence and everything fell into chaos,

the right thing to worship was the ability to pay attention. So and that's not the same thing as the ability to think. It's different. The ability to pay attention. So, and that's not the same thing as the ability to think. It's different. The ability to pay attention is before thinking. And the ability to pay attention is, oh, something's gone wrong here. I'm in a state of chaos. My marriage is falling apart,

or we've had a bad fight, let's say. And I don't know what's going on. How am I going to figure out what's going on? How about if I pay attention, right? And you think, well, what do you have to do to pay attention? You have to think Well, the reason we're having a fight isn't because my wife is an ignorant bitch, although that's a very well What the hell are you gonna think to begin with, right? You're gonna think I'm right I'm right and she's wrong because that's bloody convenient because if she's wrong then she gets to change. And you can just say this thing. That's right exactly. And you don't want to change because you know if you're going to change something that you like doing, you're going to have to start doing, that'll be the first thing.

And so, and then it won't be the last, you'll have to figure out why you're stupid and wrong, that's annoying. And then you'll have to rectify that, and then you'll have to tell her how you rectify it. It's like, God, that's annoying. And then you have to rectify that. And then you have to tell her how you rectify it. It's like, God, that's so annoying. It's easier for her to be a stupid bitch. But then, definitely. But then you have a problem. And the problem is you have to live with a stupid bitch. Yeah.

Yeah. And so one of the things you might ask yourself is if you do live with a stupid bitch, then perhaps you deserve that, and not only that, perhaps you had a major hand in creating it. So well, it's worth thinking about. It's worth, although who wants to think about that, man? Nobody. Nobody wants to think about that. So, anyways, so what happens is, ISIS makes herself pregnant and she goes to the underworld.

She goes to the underworld and she gives birth to Horace. And Horace is a bunch of things. So he's the eye, first of all, but he's also a falcon. So and that's a really interesting. Do you remember the Lion King again? So it's a good way of making sense of the story. You know how the king Mufasa had that bird? I don't remember his name.

Zazu, that's him, that's him, yeah. And he was the eye of the king. And so what does Zazu do? He went above everything, flew above everything, and he watched everything. So he was the eye of the king. And so the Egyptians knew that Horus was the god of attention, and so Horus was a falcon, and the reason that Horus was a falcon is because falcons can see better than any other animal. They're the only creatures on the planet that can see better than human beings, birds

of prey. So that's why they use the falcon as a symbol of paying attention. Now, so Horus grew up and he was different than Osiris. Osiris was the god of tradition, blind, willfully blind, couldn't pay attention to his evil brother, he didn't notice that he was being threatened, could have, but didn't, was willfully blind. And so he was overthrown by the forces of malevolence. Permanent problem in human history. Horus was born and his alert attention, he can see. But now he has a problem. What do you see when you can see? And the answer to that is, you see what you don't want to see.

Because you know, it's easy to see what you want to see. It doesn't take any real vision to see what you want to see. To see what you don't want to see. That's a whole different story. And that's the thing about Horace is he could see what he didn't want to see. And what he really didn't want to see was the nature of his evil uncle.

And so he goes back to his kingdom, same story as the Lion King. Again, by the way, he goes back to his kingdom and has a battle with his evil uncle to regain his kingdom. Which basically means that if you're going to pay attention That's what you're going to do is you're going to encounter the what would you say the permanence of malevolence and ignorance You're going to encounter that and you're going to see it and so Horace goes back and has a fight with Seth and While they're fighting Seth tears out one of his eyes and there's a warning there too which is that if you're gonna see you're gonna pay a price for it and the price might be so high

that it actually damages your ability to see so and which is partly why people don't want to see and it's no bloody wonder because there are things that you can see that you do not want to see and they're the things that really bring us down. There are the things that really do us in. And not only the things that other people are doing, tyrannical people, people who commit atrocities, murderers, that sort of people, but all the things you do in your own domain,

all the parts of you that are malevolent, all the parts of you that aren't sorted out properly, that aren't serving the world properly. You take a good look at that. The probability is very, very high that it will damage your vision, and that's why people don't do it. So anyways, Horus has this terrible battle with Seth, and he banishes him to the nethor regions of the kingdom. Can't kill him, no getting rid of him, because the malevolence and ignorance are a permanent

part of existence, and ignorance are a permanent part of existence and there's no permanent solution. The best you can do is banish it temporarily and he gets his eye back. And so then you might think, well, what does he do? Slaps his eye back and his head in rules. No, that's not what happens and this is where the Egyptians really surpass themselves in their brilliance. Horus takes his eye and he goes down to the underworld, again, the kingdom of the dead, essentially. And Osiris is down there, his father, but kind of dismembered and ghost-like, you know.

And so Horus goes to find his father in the underworld to rescue him from the belly of the whale. Let's say like Pinocchio does in the Pinocchio story. It's the same idea. And when he goes to find Osiris, he gives Osiris's eye and that reanimates him. And so then Osiris and Horus go back out of the underworld, arm and arm, father and son. And it's their union that rules. And so for the Egyptians, the Pharaoh who had sovereignty was the union of Osiris and Horus,

the union of tradition and vision. It's so brilliant, it's so unbelievably brilliant. And they associated that with the immortal soul. That was the Egyptian idea, that the immortal soul was the union of tradition and vision. And so, well, that idea had an immense influence on the development of Judaism, and an immense influence on the development of Christianity.

And so it's an idea that's way at the bottom of our culture. But, and there's something unbelievably profound about it, which is that's what you should be, is you should be the union of tradition and vision. But the price that you pay for that is that you'll pay attention, and the price of paying attention is that you will see things that you do not want to see. But the thing is you can. That's the thing that's so remarkable is that if you're willing to allow yourself to

see the things that you don't want to see, you will discover that you can see them, and that you can actually tolerate that. And I would say we actually don't know a more deep clinical truth than that. So because I could take this out of the domain of metaphysical speculation, even though it's not precisely necessary to do so, if you're dealing with someone who's very anxious and who's stumped in their life, they can't move forward, they're stopped by their anxiety and their terror. What you do is you break down their terror into manageable pieces.

You say, okay, what are you afraid of? Well, maybe I'm agrophobic. I'm afraid of elevators and death. I know it's a big leap, man, but when an agrophobic person looks in an elevator, they see it too. Like, it's death they're afraid of. They're afraid they get trapped in the elevator and they'll have a heart attack and they won't get to a hospital and they'll die. Or worse, they're afraid they'll be trapped in an elevator with a bunch of other people. That they'll have a heart attack and make a fool of themselves so that while they're dying, everyone will be looking at them.

So it's social judgment plus mortality all bowled up into one. And so, and really this is the case. And you can understand that because the two great fears are to be humiliated and to die. And so if you really want to be terrified, you want to be humiliated while you're dying. Right? Right. So then what you do with the person who's afraid is that you

help them gradually encounter the thing that they're afraid of. And what they learn, so you expose them to the elevator say in Bits and pieces first of all they stand ten feet from it and then five feet and then maybe they look inside it Then maybe they step inside it well you hold the doors open and then maybe they travel down one floor and they don't get less afraid they get braver Right and this is also what you want for your children. That's rule 11. Don't bother children when they're skateboarding because you don't want them to get less afraid. You want to get them to be braver.

And you do that by exposing them to things that are beyond them and to encourage them. And that's what you do to people. If you want to help them overcome their justifiable terror of existence, you find, well, if you expose people to challenges that are slightly beyond them in a rigorous manner, then they get stronger and stronger and stronger, and stronger, and we have no idea what the upper limit is to that.

You can't discover an upper limit to that in a therapeutic session, because if you're dealing with someone, say, over a decade-long period, I had a client recently when she first came to see me. She was so socially timid that even though I was her therapist, we couldn't go into a coffee shop to have a coffee together. That was not possible.

And at the end of 10 years, and I'm not to incredible for this by the way, she did this on her own, which is what you have to do if you're successful in psychotherapy. Anyway, she was doing stand-up comedy at clubs. It's like, right, man, that's a big difference. That's a big difference. And it's not because she became less afraid of people. It's because she discovered more and more about what she was actually capable of despite the fact that she was afraid. And that's way better because good luck getting rid of your terror.

And that's just not going to happen because there's endless things to be terrified about and they are absolutely real. So the best you can hope for is courage, not a cessation of fear. And so, well, so, well, what's the underlying theme in 12 rules for life? Well, I've laid it out to some degree today, a discursive talk, but nonetheless. It's like, I suppose the fundamental theme, and I think the thing that makes this book different, perhaps, than what's been pushed forward

by perhaps well-meaning psychologists for some of them for a while is that I'm not particularly interested in whether or not people are happy or whether or not they have rights or really anything about even they're free to my suppose I'm much more concerned about their responsibility and there's a reason for that two reasons one is unless you shoulder your responsibility things fall apart and that that's actually true. You fall apart. Your family falls apart, and your community falls apart.

And it's way worse that you don't shoulder responsibility than you think, because you have a lot more at your disposal than you think, for better or for worse. You're certainly, and you know this, because even if you're not so convinced that you could be a powerful force for good, your bloody well convinced that you could be a powerful force for mayhem. And you certainly have been, you know, in the mistakes that you've made in your life. You know how devastating your inaction can be for you and for your family and hypothetically for the community. And so if you're that much of a force for catastrophe, it's conceivable that if you got your

act together, you'd be that much of a force for the opposite. And I do really believe this is the case. I think the individual is far more powerful force for good and evil than any of us are willing to realize. And I don't think that we would have found our entire culture on the proposition that sovereignty inheres in the individual. If we wouldn't have figured that out at some point, or is that just a game? sovereignty and hair is in the individual. If we wouldn't have figured that out at some point, or is that just a game? Is that just a game that sovereignty and hair is in the individual? Or is it real?

The whole, your whole culture in particular, the Americans, you guys in particular. It's like it's explicit in your, in the structure of your society. It's on you, and it's not because of your rights. It's because of the necessity for you to adopt responsibility for your own shortcomings and the shortcomings of everything around you. And so, and it seems to me that that's, I think that's just a statement of fact that that's how the world works.

I think that that's why our cultures work, the cultures that are predicated on the sovereignty of the individual. Because we got something right about that, but it's not right, it's responsibility. But what's cool about that, and all end with this, this is what's so interesting about that, it's like you know, are already said that like Horus, you have reasons not to pay attention. You don't want to lose an eye man It's like you really want to pay attention to the terrible things that are going around on around you or within you. It's very brutal It's very brutal. It's like, well, why bother? Well, here's a reason.

It's like, you're stuck with the suffering in life. And you're stuck with the malevolence in life, which is associated with the suffering. I mean, you're in a fragile physical form. You're going to age and die. You're going to get sick. That's all going to happen. And then it's going to be made worse

by your own foolish errors and the willful errors of people around you. There's no getting away from that. But the question is, well, what can you do in the face of that? I would say, well, you can pursue what justifies that, the suffering and the malevolence, and the answer to that is, you need to do something noble and worthwhile. You think, well, despite the, what would you say, the unacceptability of existence, there

are things that you can do that make it worthwhile, right, that make you want to get up in the morning when it's a hard morning to get up, you think, I've got things that are worth doing. It's like, well, where do you find the things that are worth doing? It's not an impulsive pleasure and the seeking of every privilege you have because you have rights. And you know that. You don't admire people like that. And the admiration is the spontaneous manifestation of your sense of how to orient yourself in the world.

You admire people who take on the responsibility of life. They take care of themselves. And they take care of, they have excess capacity, so they take care of people around them, their family, and maybe they can even transcend that, they take care of themselves, their family and their community, and they have a reason to get the hell out of bed in the morning when it's a brutal morning. And everyone needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning when it's a brutal morning, because the brutal mornings, if they're not here they're coming and so happiness isn't going to get that for you because

those aren't going to be happy mornings and you need but you need to be able to think to yourself yeah I'm going to haul myself up by the scruff of the neck because I got things to do that are worth doing the world will be a less worthwhile place if I don't put my damn feet on the ground and move forward today and to take on the responsibility and And that's part of, let's say, standing up straight with your shoulders back, right? And to confront the world in a proper manner. And so, well, that's the fundamental ethos of 12 rules for life and the fundamental issue in chapter one.

fundamental issue in chapter one. And so, and so that's for now. I'll come back for the Q&A, but that's a good place to stop. Give it up for Jordan Peters and everybody. You're delivering me a computer like a waiter. All right. So, I want to start with this one because there were about a hundred questions like this, but I thought it was worded the best way. What do you think of all the soy boys across the street? I think that you have to live with them. Well, but that is what I think. Like, look, I was on Bill Marshall about two months ago.

And it was interesting. It's interesting to come down to the States, because I really liked the States. I lived here for about six years in Boston. And when the internet was taking off, it was real. Your country was just a bloody juggernaut there for about eight years. So that was really something to see. But I have a little detachment as well because I'm from a different country. So I'm not quite as tangled up in the things you're tangled up.

I'm tangled up in my own things, obviously. But while I went down to see Bill Marron, one of the things that was happening, he had a bunch of people who were more liberal leaning on the same program that I was on. And Mar liked my book because he's kind of a free speech guy, which is a good thing, because he's stand up comedian, so he bloody well, better be a free speech guy.

So, but it does conflict to some degree with his more left-leaning proclivities. So, but you know, it does conflict to some degree with his more left-leaning proclivities. So he's trying to work that out, but I was sitting at the end of it. I was sitting at the show at the end and they do this thing that just goes to YouTube and there was a governor of Washington, I think it was the governor and a couple of journalists one from the New York Times and one from the Atlantic and there was a fourth panelist who I don't remember. And they were just bashing the hell out of Trump someone from the Atlantic, and there was a fourth panelist who I don't remember. And they were just bashing the hell out of Trump. And I thought, well, first

of all, it's not that hard. Well, he's just kind of a strange guy. And it's not like anybody in here couldn't list 30 things about Trump that you could have issue with. So it doesn't take a tremendous amount of perspicacity to come up with a list about things you might find questionable about Trump. It's also not that interesting. You know, I went and saw John Cleese in, you know, from Monty Python. I saw him in Toronto a couple of weeks ago and he told stories about the meaning of life and about

the holy grail and the life of Brian and the Monty Python shows. And that was so interesting. And no one could tell those stories except John Cleese. It was like, yay, I get to hear these stories. And then he started talking about Trump. And it was like listening to your great uncle talk about Trump. Who cares what he thinks about Trump and it was like listening to your like great uncle talk about Trump who cares what he thinks about Trump. He thinks the same thing everyone else thinks about Trump. It was dull. Anyways, so they were all squawking about Trump and I was sitting

there thinking. You Americans have voted 50% Republican and 50% Democrat for what, 20 years, right? And you did exactly the same thing in the last election. It's a 50-50 split. And so maybe you're more polarized than you were and maybe you're not, but that hasn't shifted. And so these people that voted for Trump, these reprehensible people, it's like, they're half your people. They're in your people. They're in your family, they're even in your head,

you know, because you have to be a pretty blind liberal, not to have wished when you went into the voting booth to say, oh, to hell with it, Trump. Right, right, and so the issue isn't, the issue is how do you bring these people back into the fold? How do you get the dialogue going again? Because you're stuck with, the liberals are stuck with you Trump lovers and you Trump lovers are stuck with the liberals.

The reason your country works is because you've been able to talk. So the talking better continue. And that's what I would say about the people outside. I mean, I don't know what they're up to. What they're doing out there today. We don't like violent men. It's like, OK, I don't know why that's particularly relevant in this particular circumstance.

Well, Dave is one of the most violent men I've ever seen, actually. But when you see him in private of course, but I think what you want to do is you don't want to win any more than you want to win an argument with your spouse, because if you win an argument with your spouse then they lose. Then you're stuck with a loser. And so you don't want to do that. You want to come up with a loser. Right? And so you don't, you don't want to do that. You want to come up with a solution where you both win. And so that, that's the right way to deal with this. And I know it's very difficult to do that as the

people you're talking to go farther and farther out on the ideological spectrum, right? And at some point maybe civilized discourse becomes impossible. And that's, but hopefully that doesn't happen too much. Because when that starts to happen too much, then the sides start to step farther and farther apart. And that's what I'm worried about right now is that you see these, you can get a situation where it's like a feud or a vendetta. You know, I tap you, you slap me, I punch you, you hit me with a stick, it's like we're and we're and we're going.

And that's a positive feedback loop and like those positive feedback loop is like when you bring a microphone too close to a speaker, you know, and it starts to howl and it blows the whole system up because the input gets amplified. And we don't want to have that happen, we want to dampen it down. And I think you dampen it down through, by listening and through intelligent discourse. And I think maybe the real proper way to do this, I'm hoping, is that you tell a better story. Right?

So someone's stuck in an ideology and it's got a narrative angle and it gives them some meaning. You've got to come up with something that's more attractive. It's the best way, it's the best attraction forward. You know, and I'm hoping, at least in part, that this doctrine of voluntarily accepted individual responsibility as a pathway to meaning, because it's never put, it's never put that way generally speaking. It's usually a duty, you should accept responsibility. It's like, no, no, no, you need to accept responsibility because that's where you're going to find the meaning in your life.

I'm hoping that that's a better story and I believe that that's the fundamental story upon which your civilization is predicated in any case. And so we got to pull people back to that. So, so that's because the alternative, what's the alternative? The alternative is, well, maybe you get to punch someone. You know, and that's real gratifying, perhaps, when you're angry for like a 20th of a second. But as a medium to long-term political strategy, I wouldn't recommend it.

It doesn't go good places. And those good places it doesn't go are really, really, really not good. And so let's not go there. We don't need to go there again, really, really not good. And so let's not go there. Like we don't need to go there again, yet again. So... What's an issue that you thought you had figured out, but it's since changed your mind on. Don't say punching people. Well I think one of the shifts I had a shift when I was talking to Sam Harris because Harris insists that values can be derived from facts and I've been kind of hammering about that because there's

a way in which that's not correct. But when I was thinking about how to communicate with him and to move the communication forward, I realized that when I wrote my first book, when I wrote maps of meaning, and it's in 12 rules for life too, I was actually trying to drive values from facts. I was just doing it in a manner that was different

than he recommended. And I think a more suitable manner, which still needs to be discussed with him, because I think that what I laid out is how values were derived from facts over the evolutionary timeline, rather than over the timeline of a single life. So Sam seems to think, and maybe this is wrong, that the facts are there and you can derive values from them. And I think, no, the facts are there, but they have to be there for a very long time. Like, who knows how long?

A million years, five million years, ten million years. I don't know, for you to derive acceptable values from the facts. And then the mechanism by which those values are derived is biologically instantiated. And it's sorry, I know this is very complicated, but and then it serves as the mechanism that determines which facts manifest themselves to you. So there is a connection between facts and values that I had glossed over in my attempts to make a case for the primacy of stories instead of facts. So that's one thing that's changed very recently. And so, and I think that that's that's been helpful.

And I think it makes the situation clearer. I think it also perhaps opens the door for a more profound and lasting mediation between the claims of the atheists and the claims of the religious. I think there's a biological solution to that argument. So, well, so that's one thing that I've been changing my mind about. I bet you didn't expect that it would be that. and miss Piggy in an abusive relationship. No more abusive than most. Oh, this is interesting. How do you know when it's time to cut out a toxic friend?

Right, right, right. Well, that's a good example of the sort of thing we were talking about tonight, right? When you cut your losses, that's a good example of that terrible tension between structure and the continuation of the same thing and transformation. Well, I can I can tell you an answer to that in bits. See, I can't give a canonical answer to that because the devil is always in the details, right? So if I was dealing with that problem in a clinical setting, I'd have the person lay out the whole story of the friendship and then lay out their strategies for dealing with it and then lay out a set of potential strategies. And if we couldn't come up with a potential strategy that seemed implementable that would salvage the relationship, then we would decide that perhaps we could explore

stepping away from it. But the devil's in the details, right? That's a very particularized solution. And so trying to extract out a general rule of thumb from that is dangerous. But having said that, I can give you some general rules of thumb. So if you're dealing with an intransigent family member,

let's say, who stuck in a rut, and maybe is complaining about the rut all the time, but doesn't do anything to change it, and you've suggested changes, and you've suggested them three times, and nothing has happened, then I would say stop suggesting changes. And because there's an Old Testament statement,

don't cast pearls before swine. And which is a very rough statement, man. It's a really, it's a harsh statement. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about it because it's so harsh. It's like, okay, what does that mean? It means if people aren't listening to you, then shut up. Because you're not where you think you are, right?

Because if you're having a conversation, and it's a real conversation, then I'm listening to you and you're listening to me. And if I'm talking and you're not listening, then I'm not where I think I am. And so there's just no sense doing it again. Now, you can also sometimes suggest to the person that they don't tell you that

problem anymore. It's like, tell you what, you have this problem, I've heard about it eight times, I've made some suggestions, none of them were implemented, will make a deal. You don't tell me the problem anymore and I won't tell you any solutions to it. And then often what happens because of that is that and then you have to enforce it, right? Because they'll try to tell you the problems a few more times. You have to enforce it. Often what happens in that situation is the person will go away and think. You know, because it's, it's, the psychologist often call this enabling, like if you allow

the person to complain about the same problem without changing and just complaining and you listen, then you're allowing, what you're doing is allowing them to pretend to themselves that they're trying to look for a solution. Because by telling you about the problem, part of what they're doing is acting as if complaining about it is a solution to the problem. But it isn't because nothing's happening. But if you're listening, then you're acting out the part of someone who agrees with the proposition that they're trying to work towards a solution. And if you just say, hey, I'm not doing that anymore, then you've deprived them of one piece of evidence that that's a useful solution,

especially if you actually love them, too, because then you're a credible source. And then maybe they have to go back and think. It's like, oh, I see, that person won't put up with my nonsense anymore. Now, they're not going to be happy about that, but, well, some of them will be, some part of them will be. But then sometimes they'll think,

and then sometimes they'll come back to you with a different take. It might take a while. It might take three months, it might take six months, but that will often move something. So that would be a small scale step away. Then I would say, too, is like, here's another hint, this is a broader hint for your life in general. It's like, let's say you have a person who's burdening you a lot, and it looks kind of counterproductive in that it's hurting you and it's not helping them.

Because that's kind of the calculus you're making, right? It's when you're talking about a toxic friend, it's like the friend's life is all screwed up. And that's bad, but then that's screwing up your life and maybe that's acceptable if there's some progress, but it's screwing up their life and your life and it's getting worse and nothing's improving. there's some progress, but it's screwing up their life and your life and it's getting worse and nothing's improving.

It's not helpful. It's like, so how can you tell when you should step away from that? And I would say, notice if you're resentful, but I would also say, especially to you agreeable types who are always trying to help other people. And so, and who will sacrifice yourself to do that. It's like, watch your resentment, because agreeable people get resentful. And the reason they get resentful

is because they allow themselves to be taken advantage of. It might also be because they're whiny and immature. And so you ask yourself that first, I'm resentful. Maybe I'm whiny and immature. Then you can go ask someone. Here's the issue. I'm resentful. Am I being windy and immature? And they might say yes, and then you should fix that. But they might also say, no, you're being taken advantage of. It's like, well, if you're being taken advantage of,

stop being taken advantage of. Because it's not acceptable for you to allow yourself to be taken advantage of. In rule two, I laid out this proposition that you should act towards yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. It's like you have an ethical duty to yourself to not be taken advantage of. It's not helpful to other people to allow them to take advantage of you. Maybe if they're six-month-old infants, because they will take advantage of you,

because what they help choice do they have. But if they're like 35-year-old brother, it's like he's not a six-month-old infant. You don't have to let him take advantage of you. And if you're resentful, you're gonna get brutal. Because resentful people take revenge, and they do it in subtle and not so subtle ways. And so once you hit the point of resentment,

assuming you're not being windy and immature, then you have to make a decision, and the decision might be, should be, I'm not being taken advantage of anymore. And so then you take your toxic friend who's taking advantage of it, you need to say, look, you took advantage of me this way, and then you did it again, this way, and then you did it again this way, and then you did it again this way.

You need three pieces of evidence by the way. You can't just go after the person with one piece of evidence because they'll just rationalize it away. You got to collect your damn evidence. It also works well in the workplace or whenever you have an argument with someone. One transgression, you ignore. Two transgressions, you note. Three transgressions, you communicate. And then it makes you very deadly because you say, you did this. They say, no, I didn't. I said, yeah, you did. And then you did this, which was the same thing. And then I didn't even say anything then, because I'm so patient. And then you did this, which was the same thing again. And then it's almost invariably the case that the person can't come up with enough rationalizations that quickly to justify doing three of the same things in different contexts. You usually win if you're that patient.

And that's a good way of also dealing with your resentment. But so I would say, if you're being taken advantage of, you're going to get resentful. And that resentment is so useful, especially to agreeable people that you can't believe it. It's one of those things you don't want to look at, because it will hurt your vision, because you think, well, I'm such a nice person, I can't be resentful. It's like, you are not that nice. Don't kid yourself. So you're not.

And so then you can consult your resentment, and in that you can find the strength to defend yourself. And that can separate you can find the strength to defend yourself. And that can separate you from people who will pull you down. You know how you approach someone who's drowning in panicking, like this. Right? And so you come up to them and you say, weirdly, because they're drowning, you say, calm down, because I'm not dying with you. Right.

And then if they come and grab onto you, push them away, because them dead and you dead, that's not better than just them dead. Right, right, exactly. And so it's the same in life. It's like, you know, you dead and them dead is not better than just them dead. And so also if you allow someone in that situation to pull you under, then they see that you

don't value yourself enough to stop yourself from being pulled under, and that makes them even more hopeless about their own lives. So you have every reason to defend yourself against being pulled under. It's not helpful and being nice and being compassionate and all of that. Save it for the babies. So... When's the last time you got really drunk? Oh, about probably a year ago. I have a friend in LA and he likes bourbon and so we drank a lot of it one night and I really enjoyed it. But it wasn't a good idea.

Like so many things that you really enjoy. What specific thing do you see as the biggest threat to free speech? Patriot of the truth. That's it. You know, they say the truth will set you free, and it certainly will, but the question is, do you really want to be free? Because the kind of free that the truth provides for you is a freedom that's contingent on letting everything that isn't worthy in you burn to the ground.

And that's not pleasant. And so people don't, you know, this perfectly well. Whenever you learn something profound in life, which is a life-altering revelation, let's say, it comes at a cost, you say, oh, I sure learned that the hard way. It's like, yeah, you learn everything the hard way. If it's worth learning, you learn it the hard way. And so the truth is the hard way. And so, of course, people oppose its expression because it's the hard way. The only thing harder than the hard way is the way that isn't the truth. That's the problem. It's like it's no wonder that people wanted to see you and hide. The problem with that is that it's worse.

It's worse. It's better to get the damn problem out in the open right now and to confront it voluntarily at a time of your own place, a time of your own and place of your own choosing. You let it aggregate because you're hiding. It will take you out. And I would also say that's another one of the most ancient stories of mankind. That's encapsulated in the Mesopotamian creation myth, which is the oldest story that we have. You let monsters breed in the dark, small monsters breed in the dark. They

turn into something massive and it will take you out and it will wait until you're weak and hurt and then it'll manifest itself. So, as terrible as the truth is, it's better than the alternative and that's basically what we've got. So, we've got a choice between those two terrors and so, the people who don't like free speech, they hate the truth. And it's no wonder, but it's not helpful. So. So. So. So. So.

So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So.

So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. comes to be. Because that's even more important than the truth, you know, because what's true now might be slightly different in a week, which is why you have to keep talking to the person you're married to, right? Because what worked yesterday isn't exactly the same thing as that it's going to work today, so you have to update it. So there's this process

of contending that actually constitutes the truth as such, because the truth isn't a set of propositions that will never die. The truth is a stance on life, like standing up straight with your shoulders back, and people who are opposed to free speech don't like the stance itself, because it calls on them to be brave and responsible, and they avoid that.

And you say, well, why would you avoid being brave and responsible? It's like, well, because it's easy to be, because it's easy to be lazy and weak, obviously. Doing hard things is hard. So why wouldn't you do them? It's like, well, that's a stupid question. It's easier to sit and do nothing than to bear a heavy load. So it's a nonsensical question.

But the real enemies of free speech are the people who are enemies of the process by which the truth is revealed. It's worse than even enemies of the truth. It's worse than that. So... Alright, let's change someone's life tonight. I'm here with my eight-year-old son. He's very curious and concerned with what is going on with his generation.

Can you speak at all to the children directly? Where is this eight-year-old? Where are you? Hey kiddo, what's your name? This guy round of applause everybody. Applause. Applause. Applause. Applause. Applause.

Applause. Applause. Applause. What's your name, kiddo? Say again? Table. Table. Table.

Hi, table. How are you doing? Look, so a couple of things. First of all, things are better now than they've ever been. And not only that, they're getting better faster than they've ever gotten better. So as terrible as things are, they're way better than they were. And there's every reason to assume that that will continue. And so I would say, don't despair, live in

hope, kiddo. And... And occupy yourself with the things that you should be occupied with when you're eight. Make your friends have your fun, do well in school, that's how you contribute to doing things, to making things better. And don't worry about things that are beyond that at the moment because you've got enough to occupy yourself with being eight, and that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Everyone in this room is like, do me, do me! Oh, as a lefty, I like this one. De-left-handed people carry a different perspective of the world

since their dominant brain hemisphere is rooted in the unconscious. No. Did people carry a different perspective of the world since their dominant brain hemispir is rooted in the unconscious? No. Oh. They die more often, though. Those damn sinners. Yeah, it is, it is.

Well, because they're in a right-handed world, they're more accident prone. No, there's not a lot of credible evidence that handedness plays a profound role in personality. There's some quirks partly because there's multiple reasons for being left handed. But generally what happens is that a right handed brain is organized, and this is two hemispheres, in case you were wondering.

A right handed person's brain is organized in a particular manner with certain modules in the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. That's the standard neurological configuration. Left-handed person's brain isn't organized that way, but they have the same modules. They're just put in slightly different places. So there isn't a tremendous amount of difference between left-handers and right-handers, apart from their proclivity to die in accidents more often. About you using the word proclivity, right? Unfortunately, proclivity?

Yeah. All right, we can do two more here. I've moved farther right over recent years, but my wife is still an ardent left-wing feminist. Somebody out there knows who's being talked about. How do I keep my views while avoiding relationship troubles? Well first you can't avoid relationship troubles, so but look I would say Most of the proper concerns for an intimate relationship are intimate concerns Right, so so It isn't obvious to me how much the political has to enter the local. I think that what you try to do is to solve the problems that directly confront you.

It's like, look, when I'm helping someone straighten out their marriage, let's say, we do very mundane things, you know. We first of all try to calculate what do you actually do together as a couple? And this is, you know, people think, well, we go to movies, we go to plays, we go to see friends. I don't care about any of that, that's not relevant. You hardly ever do that. That's irrelevant. What I'm wondering is, what, What I'm wondering is, what,

when, what, what, what, interrelationships do you have that constitute the bulk of your usage of time? Well, that's easy. You eat together. You do that every day. It's like, there's five hours a day, it's right. It's 35 hours a week. So that's a whole work week, every week

that you eat together. And so that's, let's week, every week that you eat together. And so that's, let's see, 40 hours a week, it's 160 hours a... Well, we'll leave it at that. It's a major... Well, I can't do the math at the moment because I'm a bit tired, but it's what third of your bloody life, you're only awake for 16 hours a day. You spend a third of your life feeding with your spouse. Get it right.

So what else? You come home every day. That takes 5, 10 minutes. Somebody meets you at the door or not. How does that go? Did they meet you at the door nicely? Have you got that figured out? It's 10 minutes a day.

It's an hour a week. It's four hours a month. It's 50 hours a year. It's one work week. You spend one an hour a week. It's four hours a month. It's 50 hours a year. It's one work week You spend one work week a year getting greeted at the door Have you got that down? Have you figured out how to go shopping together? It's like there are things you do together that are mundane things So those are the things you do every day, but they're your whole life you get those things together and then don't worry about the political stuff

It's secondary and so I would say if then don't worry about the political stuff. It's secondary. And so I would say, and it'll fix the political stuff anyways. If you get all that local stuff set out right, so that your meals together are enjoyable, and you've distributed the domestic duties so that you're both happy about it. That's a war, man.

You try to do that. That's a war. You get to do everybody laughs. It's like, yeah, it's a war we haven't solved yet. It's like no kidding. No kidding. There's a Canadian poet Leonard Cohen. He has a famous song about the homicidal bitching

that goes down in every kitchen about who is going to serve and who is going to eat. It's like, yeah, no kidding. It's a bloody, really. It's an absolute minefield in most households. And so, and that's because people haven't talked it through. It's like, well, how do you want the meal time to go? Do you want to be at each other's throats metaphysically?

Or do you want to sit down and have a lovely meal? And every day, because you're going to do it three times. It's like, well, what are the preconditions for having a lovely meal? Everybody isn't feeling oppressed. Yeah. Yeah, no kidding, you know, and so it, but it's not so easy to have a meal in peace. It's not so easy. And you can think, well, there's the fundamental fundamental political problem. How do you have a meal in peace?

Solve that, man. You've got one third of your life fixed if you solve that and so really you really do it's really hard to solve Right because it means you have to have consciously sorted out the hierarchy of responsibilities between the sexes in the household It's like good luck taking that on yourself You know because there used to be gendered rules to deal with that. Now, there aren't. So what do people do? They fight stupidly. That's what they do. And the alternative to that is to actually negotiate every damn detail. Who buys what? Who does the groceries? Who does the shop? Sorry, who does the groceries? Who prepares the meals? When do they prepare the meals? What's that worth in terms of trade-off for other tasks? How do you thank someone for

operating property in the kitchen? Who loads the dishwasher? Who does the dishes? When do they do the dishes? How fast do the dishes have to be cleared off the table after you eat? Which dishes are we going to use? What are we going to eat? What's the role the kids are going to play? Do we sit down together? Do we have regular meal times? It's like each of those is a bloody war and it's a political war. If you get that right, then you'll solve the political problems because it's way easier to solve the political problems than it is to get all those things straight. That's for sure. So start by getting those things straight and see what happens.

Then they'll have peaceful meal times and then maybe you won't die. So. So. So. So. So. So.

So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So.

So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. So. with this one with people, several people wanted to know why the blazers drafted Sam Buoy instead of Michael Jordan, but what's next for you after this tour? Well you're assuming this tour is going to end? I just extended a couple months, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we announced 20 more American cities today. So, yeah. So, but I think we're, because my wife is traveling with me and is very, very helpful in all of this.

So, yeah, well, that's something too, because she's actually on board with this. And some of that's a consequence of having had a very large number of fights. I'm serious, man, like hundreds of them. But they were, they were, they were, they were fights with the purpose. And the purpose was so that we could, we could fight it out till we had a solution, so we didn't have to fight about that thing anymore. And the solution was that when we jointly agreed on. And so one of the consequences of that,

and that's taken a very long time, and it's never ending process, because you encounter complex things when you're a couple, and that solutions to the more obvious, and one person thinks one thing, and the other person thinks another thing, and who the hell knows what? Who's right.

So you have to have a struggle about it and you have to come up with a consensus and it's really hard. But I'll tell you a couple of the advantages to that that have been advantages to me. So because we had sorted out, we've been married almost 30 years now and we've had our fights about many many things and but always made peace because it doesn't matter if you fight you have to fight what matters is whether or not you make peace as a consequence of the fight that's what matters and to make peace is to come to a negotiated solution and so we came to a negotiated solution about a lot of things and And some of that was really helpful because we had done that.

My daughter got really ill for about five years. And it was an absolute bloody catastrophe. But we weren't at each other's throat during it. And thank God because it would have sunk us, for sure, because we were pushed right to our limit. And had we had 300 unresolved fights we would have been done and so and then in the last two years when all this political stuff emerged it's being quite the chaotic mess and We but we had things in our family pretty sorted out and

Because of that we weren't at each other's throats while all of this political stuff came down. And at the same time, that happened. I had a lot of health problems. And so now, there was a reason I was telling you all this. It was related to what I was doing next. So anyway, so we've been able to pursue this tour. That was the whole point of this. to add these 20 cities and that's working really well.

And I wanted to tell you that story because I wouldn't be able to do this without her help. And she wouldn't be able to help me unless we had got things sorted out because she's been able to throw her full support behind all of this. And that was necessary in order to do it right. So that was all real useful. We haven't figured out, yeah, that was it, because I said we, we haven't figured out what we're doing next, because the situation is changing so dynamically that it's not really easy to figure out what the right thing is to do next.

You know, I don't know. This is, certainly, uncharted territory for me. It's like, what the hell are all you people doing here? You know, it's not obvious at all. None of this is obvious. And so it seems to me, though, that like I'm enjoying these talks, and the audience seems to be enjoying them. And you seem to be enjoying them.

And so we're going to keep doing that because it looks like a good thing. And so, and then probably what I'll do is go back and write another book at some point, probably an extension to the one I just wrote. Oh, and one other thing. I am definitely assuming that I don't expire before it happens. I'm definitely going to go back to the biblical lectures because I'm going to do... So I'm going to start with the Exodus stories in November. That's the plan at the moment. I'm really looking forward to that. I don't think there's anything more important if anything that I'm doing is important. I don't think there's anything more important than continuing those biblical lectures because

I've really learned a lot from doing it and they seem to be useful to people. So great. So yeah. Thank you. Buzzfeed headline tomorrow. Jordan Peterson tells alt-right crowd what the hell are you doing here? Yeah. Ha, ha, ha.

All right, man, well, I'm going to get out of the way here and let them applaud for you. But there's been a couple shows along the way, the way that I felt like things kind of leveled up. And I think tonight was one of them. So on that note, I'm going to scooch this way, give it up for Dr. Jordan Peterson, everybody. All right. Thank you all very much for coming.

It was a pleasure talking with you. Good night. If you haven't already read them, you might think about picking up dad's books, 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos, and maps of meaning, the architecture of belief. Go to JordanBPeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links. Next week, I'll present my conversation with British DJ, musician, artist, and meaning

wave originator, Akira the Dawn. Akira mixes music with content from my lectures and those of people such as Jockel Willink, Terence McKenna, and Ellen Watts. He's very careful with the choice and cadence of the words, the timing, and the melodies, and he's accrued millions of devoted listeners in the process. Thank you. That was my, yeah, I really didn't want to do the service to those words because I respect them great and I'm very grateful for them. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.be.peadersome. Details on this show, access to my blog, information

about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanBe Peterson.com. My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com from the Westwood One Podcast Network. you