The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 12 Rules Vancouver: Five levels of chaos and order

Episode Date: May 26, 2019

Today, we’re presenting Dr. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life lecture at the Chan Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia, recorded on July 26, 2018.

Welcome to season 2 episode 10 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator. Today, we're presenting Dad's 12 Rules for Life Lecture at the Chan Center in Vancouver, BC, Canada. It was recorded on July 26th, 2018. Just to update everybody, Mum's still recovering from her surgery. It's been a rough couple of weeks, more like a rough couple of months, rough year. She hasn't eaten a lot and it's been hard to see.

Fortunately, we've had family come to help, so it hasn't just been us dealing with this. We've also had a lot of visitors. I can't stress enough how important it is to visit people in hospitals or when they're recovering from something traumatic. Sometimes people who haven't been through rough situations don't know that they should do that or go visit, but they should. So if one of your friends is in the hospital, go visit them. It makes a huge difference.

Mom's getting better every day though, so hopefully the update next week will be more positive. When we return, dad's 12 rules for life lecture at the Chan Center in Vancouver. Please welcome my father Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Thank you, Dr. Drenby Kiddison. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I must say, I'm a little disappointed in Vancouver, though. The activists in Calgary, they managed to come up with a petition with 600 names on it. And you guys haven't managed any. It's like, what the hell? I thought this was a hotbed of political correctness. You need to get out there and steam up your activists a bit. They're falling down on the job. All right. Well, actually,

it's a great pleasure to be in Vancouver. I've been here a lot in the last couple of years. Probably six, I think this is like the sixth time I've spoken. So it's really nice to see you all here. And I'm looking forward to talking to you tonight. I thought what I would do tonight is delve into the conceptual under structure of 12 rules for life into the same. There's kind of a landscape, the book occupies a landscape, I would say.

It's a geographical landscape, in part, it's a conceptual landscape, it's an immoral landscape all at the same time, because those are the landscapes we live in, all at the same time. And I laid out the landscape in the first book, I wrote, called Maps of Meaning. Some of you may have watched the lectures on YouTube that are associated with that book. And I put an audio version of it out June 12th. And so if you found 12 rules for life useful and you want to occupy yourself with

more complicated material, I guess deeper material more complicated. No, that's the price you pay for deeper, I guess Then the landscape is really laid out there and so the landscape I want to talk about, from what I've, from, as far as I've been able to determine, from what I've read, we actually modern people there's something wrong with the way we look at the world. And I think that that's what's And I think that's what's making us prone to do things. It's bestowed on us a tremendous amount of technological power. So that's obviously extraordinarily useful.

But it's also made us prone to nihilism and or to totalitarianism, to those two things as extremes. Ideological possessions, say on the one hand, which tilts towards totalitarianism, to those two things as extremes, ideological possessions, say on the one hand, which tilts towards totalitarianism, or nihilism on the other hand. And I think, and this is probably me speaking mostly as a psychologist, I think that a belief system that produces, or a state of belief,

a state of conceptualization of the world, that produces a proclivity towards a hopeless meaninglessness that then makes people bitter or towards a rigid authoritarian viewpoint that makes them, well punitive and arrogant, that's something's wrong, that shouldn't happen as far as I'm concerned. So, with any luck, it's not inevitable. It isn't that we're looking at the world accurately, and as a consequence, we've got something like a choice between nihilism or totalitarianism. The fact that those are the choices that be end, so clearly seems to me to indicate

that something's wrong. So, I've been trying to figure out how it might be possible to look at the world in a manner that would allow us to retain our science and our technological prowess, but at the same time, overcome this, I'm more concerned I would say with the problem of meaninglessness, even more than the problem of totalitarianism. I think there are linked problems, anyways. I think if you solve one, you tend to address the other. But it's meaninglessness and nihilism that's really consumed me as a mystery, or as an illness, let's say,

that's necessary to address. And of course, nihilism is predicated on the idea of meaninglessness, and meaninglessness itself is predicated on something like a, while a rather hopeless, hopeless and deadening. It's not exactly materialist view of the world, but it's close to that.

Okay, so, from what I've been able to determine as a consequence of my investigations into the structure of the brain, its function, and as a consequence of wrestling with the deep structure of narratives, feeling them at least in part from an archetypal perspective, I think that we have our conceptual categories wrong.

So I'm going to lay out what I think the proper conceptual categories are and why I think they're not only more real, perversely enough, than or more comprehensive, more real and more comprehensive than our standard material categories, but also why knowing about them actually addresses the problem of meaninglessness. I think it actually solves the problem of meaninglessness. So, you know, the typical nihilistic perspective is something like this.

Now, the reality is composed of dead material elements, and they've arranged themselves in complex arrays, the most complex of which might be us, but that's a consequence of... It's a deterministic process like clockwork. We're fancy biological machines. We inhabit, there's seven billion of us. Each of us is one among seven billion.

We inhabit a little dust mode of a planet, circling around a no-account star in a desiccated, suburban solar system in a no-account galaxy among trillions of galaxies. So what the hell does it all matter? It's something like that. And, you know, that's not a perspective on which you can really base a solid life. Now, well, that's worth thinking about, because you might be thinking,

you might think for a while that what you need is a perspective on which you can base a solid life. And if the perspective you're offered doesn't seem to offer that, then it's conceivable, although not certain, that that's a mark against it. Now, if the universe is ultimately meaningless, and this is all a cruel joke,

then what I'm putting forward is incorrect, but there's always the possibility that we're not looking at the situation correctly. Okay, so here's some, I'm going to lay out a bunch of ideas that are, they run in parallel. There's this, it's very hard in science to figure out how to establish a truth. People think that's a straightforward thing, but it's not. That's why it's been so difficult to build science, why we didn't really even have science

until about 500 years ago. It's very difficult to determine what constitutes truth from a scientific perspective. And there's this biologist, E. O. Wilson, who used to work at Harvard, he's an entomologist, he studied ants, he's a sociobiologist. He wrote the first book on sociobiology, which

got him a lot in a lot of political trouble, even though he didn't expect it at all. He wasn't a political person. He had this idea of conciliance. And his idea of conciliance was something like if you could see a phenomenon manifest itself at one level of analysis, and then at another level of analysis, and then at another level of analysis,

some similar phenomenon manifested itself, and then at a third level of analysis, you can see the same thing, and then at a fourth and fifth and so on, with each level of analysis that produced the same pattern, the probability that that pattern was solid, real, increased. That's how your senses work, right? That's why you have five senses.

What's essentially occurred from an evolutionary perspective is the realization that if you can see something from using five different senses and they all report that it's there, then it's probably there. So it's the same idea, right? Because sight is a lot different than hearing and hearing is a lot different than touch

and touch is a lot different than taste. And if you can hear something and smell it and see it and taste it and touch it, then it's there. And from a scientific perspective, if you can detect something using multiple measurements, then it's there. Same idea merged in psychology, though the psychologists came up with a terrible term for it.

It was multi-method, multi-matrix construct validation. So it's kind of a mangly phrase, but basically what it means is if you're going to make the case that something exists, you have to be able to measure it in multiple ways and all those different ways of measuring it have to come to the same conclusion. Okay, so that's what I'm going to try tonight. So I'm going to tell you about five different stories and then I'm going to tell you what I think they mean, something like that.

Okay, so the first thing that's cool is that you have two hemispheres. And not just you and all humans that have two hemispheres, it's a lot of a lot of animals, too. And you know, you might ask, well, why would you have two hemispheres? Why not one or six? But you have two. And that seems to indicate that there's some bifurcation in the structure of reality, because why would you need two hemispheres? Otherwise,

and there's decent evidence that each of them is partially conscious, in some sense. So if you, the hemispheres are connected by something called the corpus chelousum, which allows them to communicate, but not completely, it's a fairly narrow channel, which is quite interesting. Your brain isn't structured so that every bit of it can communicate with every other bit of it. There seems to be some optimal balance between having separate units that can do calculations, and then having those separate units communicate.

And that's separateness even applies to the hemispheres. If you cut the corpus callusum, you can do experiments demonstrating that each hemisphere possesses its own consciousness Even though they're still integrated way down at the level of the brain stamp So it's not like you have two people in the same head you have one person who can be segregated into two consciousness so you can trick the two hemispheres

using tricky experiments So that one doesn't know what the other is doing and then they'll produce conflicting reports. And so not only do you have two hemispheres, but they're quite separate in their function, they do different things. The right hemisphere, broadly speaking, tends not to be linguistic. Now, it depends a little bit on the individual, because people do wire themselves up in slightly different ways.

You could say we have specialized cognitive and emotional functions and they tend to be associated with fairly stable positioning in the hemispheres, but if something goes wrong during development or there's some abnormality, then those functions can take up residents in different parts of the brain. So there's similarity across people, but there's plasticity. So what I'm saying isn't an absolute truth, but it's an average truth, right and left. Right isn't linguistic, left is linguistic. So the left hemisphere can talk, and the right hemisphere can't.

But the hemisphere is different in lots of other ways as well. So, for example, the front of the left hemisphere seems to be associated with positive emotion. So if you're feeling happy, or if you're feeling like advancing toward things, which is the same by the way as being happy, then your left prefrontal cortex tends to be activated. And if you're upset and anxious, then it's your right prefrontal cortex. So there's some emotional specialization. And there's also specialization in terms of, well, the emotional specialization is a particular interest because the right hemisphere being responsible at least in part, the prefrontal part

of the right hemisphere is associated with anxiety. And anxiety is associated with uncertainty, and uncertainty is associated with what you don't know. Certainty is associated with what you know, and uncertainty is associated with what you don't know. And so there has been a reasonable body of theoretical speculation generated by credible neuroscientists that the fundamental specialization of the left and right hemisphere isn't language versus non-language.

It's known versus unknown. It's explored territory versus unexplored territory. It's certainty versus uncertainty. And that the left hemisphere tilts towards the construction of encapsulated world models that are stable and complete, whereas the right hemisphere tends to respond to things that you don't understand. And so that's, and the person who, the person who formalized this theory most completely

was a man named Alconan Goldberg. And Goldberg was a student of the greatest neuropsychologist that ever lived, Alexander Luria, who is a Russian. And there's some other great neuropsychologists, but Luria, man, he was up there. He was the person who I would say established the groundwork for the modern understanding of the brain. He had fantastic students, Goldberg being one of them, but also two other people, Vinogradova and Sokolov, who discovered something called the Orienting Reflex, which is, that's a major league discovery, man, that's the reflex that orients you towards what you

don't understand. That's a Nobel Prize winner, they should have won a Nobel Prize for that, it was a major discovery, but they didn't, but maybe that was because they were Russian. Who knows? I mean, Russians do win Nobel prizes from time to time, but it was a big deal, and we'll go back to the orienting reflex later. So it was Goldberg's hypothesis that the hemispheres were specialized, one for familiarity and the other for novelty. So that's kind of interesting, so we'll just put that aside for a minute. And then, so here's another, something else of conceptual interest. So there's a Taoist idea that you're all familiar with at least visually because you've all seen the Yin Yang

symbol, right? So you've seen the Yin Yang symbol. It's a circle. And inside the circle is a block, looks like a paisley and a white paisley in their head to head. They're actually twin serpents. That's the fundamental structure of the Yin Yang symbol. And the black paisley serpent has a white dot in it, and the white serpent has a black dot in it. And that's often conceptualized Yin and Yang

as something like masculine and feminine. But it's symbolically masculine and feminine, and that makes the whole story much more complicated. But that's okay. I'll see what I can do with that. But I think the best translation of Yen-in-Yang is chaos and order, not masculine and feminine. Masculine and feminine are in turn symbolic representatives of chaos and order. And there's a reason for that. It's a profound reason, which we'll get to. But the Taoist idea, the Taoist idea is this. So whatever Tao is, is reality itself. It's not material reality, okay?

It's a different idea about what reality is. Here's a way of thinking about it. You know how matter has two meanings? There's the matter that things are made of, but then there's the what's the matter? When you say to someone, what's the matter with you? Or you say, that, what's the matter with you? Or you say, that's a wady matter.

Or you say, that matters. That's pretty interesting, you know, that there's two meanings to the word matter. Because those are really different meanings. One is something like the significance, right? And the other is, well, the material substrate. But we have both of those usages. And Dao is a lot more like what matters than it is like matter. And so the Daoist idea is something like the world

is made out of what matters. And that's how your brain reacts to the world, by the way. Your brain actually reacts to the world as if it's made out of what matters. Now, there are physicists who've actually taken up this, and I'm not going to go all quantum quantum weird on you here because I think that's counterproductive. But John Wheeler, for example, who's a great physicist, believed that the substrate of the world was something more like information than it like matter. The matter was a secondary consequence of a more fundamental substrate that was information. And so it could easily be that the world is made out of what matters. But it's certainly the case that that's

how your brain responds to it. That's interesting to me because, well, there is this theory if you're a biologist, especially if you're influenced by Darwin. And of course, you are. If you're a biologist, you're not only influenced by Darwin, your whole science is nested inside the Darwinian structure.

There's no getting out of it, and there's the idea that if you're a Darwinian, that, well, that you're adapted to reality, that's a definition, it's not a hypothesis, right? Reality is by definition what you're adapted to if you're a Darwinian, because reality is what selected you over the course of evolutionary time. And there's no more fundamental definition of reality than that which selects from a Darwinian perspective. That's it. That's as far down as you go.

And that's something that actually has profound philosophical significance, which the American pragmatists realized that virtually as soon as Darwin published his great work. So the fact that your brain reacts to the world as if it matters, as if it's made out of what matters, it's actually damn significant even if you happen to be a scientist. Now it's weird, it highlights a strange dichotomy in science as far as I can tell between what you might describe as sort of Newtonian clockwork determinists

and Darwinian biologists. And because exactly the same conclusion about the structure of reality isn't derivable from materialistic physics and from evolutionary biology, they give you different readouts on what the fundamental reality is. And they're actually in conflict. I think the Darwinians are right.

And anyways, but the point is, is that your brain does react to the world as if it's made out of what matters. And it's also bifurcated in this interesting way that makes it part of it deal with what you expect and what you know and part of it deal with what you don't expect and what you don't know. And that maps on very nicely, by the way, to the Taoist conception. Because chaos is what you don't know, and order is what you know. And the interplay, as far as the Taoists are concerned, it's the interplay between those two things that makes up Tao and

Tao is meaning. That's a good way of thinking about it. It's also the way or the path of life. But that's the same thing. This is another thing that Taoists got so right is that the path of life and meaning are the same thing. Well, what are you going to do with your life? Well, what should you do with your life? Well, those are all questions about meaning. And you walk a path of meaning, meaning is something you act out. And so the Taoist idea that Tao is the way or the path of life, and that it's associated with chaos in order makes sense. It stacks on the neuropsychology quite nicely. And there's more to it than not to because the Taoist claim is

something like, well, there's chaos here and there's order here and the question is, well, where should you be in that? And the answer is right on the border between the two. That's the place of maximal meaning and that's the proper orientation in the world. And I think that's true, and I think it's neurologically true as well, because I think what happens neurologically is that when you're on the border between what you know and what you don't know, you find that meaningful. And the reason for that is, well, think about it, where else should you be? If you're only where you know, that's secure, man.

No problem, right? So it's secure. It's like you're in a walled fortress. In fact, the walled fortress is one of the symbols for what you know. But the problem with being secure only is that you're not being challenged, right? So first of all, you might get bored.

Everything's always the same, you know? And so no one likes that. You don't want to piece of music to just endlessly repeat. It would drive you start craving that, even though it's perfectly predictable. And certainly not the least bit dangerous. You want a little variation in there. And that's what you want in your life,

is you want some stability, because everything can't be completely different all the time at every possible level of analysis, but you want a little variation. And then the question might be, well, how much variation do you want? And the answer is, it's hard to compute, but you can use your sense of meaning to determine how much variation you want, because if there's too much variation and things are changing too quickly, then all that happens is you get anxious. And no one wants to get anxious.

In fact, anxiety is exactly what protects you against too much uncertainty. It's more than that because you can be anxious about something specific that's dangerous, but we could call that fear. Psychologists have kind of decided to do that. Anxiety, on the other hand, is an index of uncertainty. And if the uncertainty levels go up too much,

if there's too much variation in your life, I can't control it. Things are beyond me. Everything's falling apart. It's like, well, then you're too much over on the chaos end of the distribution. And so you don't want to be in order only because you're not expanding your domain of competence.

Because you might think, well, you have to do two things. You have to be secure and stable, but you also have to be learning and growing, because not only do you want to be secure and stable, you want to be more secure and more stable across more situations for longer periods of time, and include more people in that, right? It's an expanding game.

You don't want to just play the game. You want to play an expanding game. Because that's better than just playing a game. Even if you're just playing a game, usually what you do, if you're good at playing a game, is try to make yourself better at the game all the time. So it isn't just that you're playing the game or that you're playing the game to win. It's that you're playing the game to win so that you can get better at playing games to win so that you can get better at playing games to win And that's and why wouldn't you do that because why wouldn't you be wired up so to speak from a Darwinian perspective to continually expand your domain of competence?

Now there's nothing about that. I would say there's nothing about that. That's even particularly contentious from the perspective of mainstream psychology. I mean, it's a truism to some degree among reasonably well-informed psychologists, cognitive and behavioral, biologically informed social psychologists for that matter, certainly clinicians, that people have a drive for knowledge, we're curious, we're trying to learn and to grow,

and that there's something that that's not a secondary consequence of some other instinct. It's an instinct in and of itself. So makes sense that you have one foot in order and one foot in chaos, and that if you have those balance properly, well then that's the next issue. What happens if you have those balance properly, well, then, then, then that's the next issue. What happens if you have those things balanced properly? Well, what's the consequence of that? Well, it looks to me like the consequence of that is that you experience a set, a sense of engaged meaning.

And so that meaning basically, you think about that. So interesting is that that sense of engaged meaning then does say that you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. And so it's not epithenominal, it's not a secondary consequence of some more fundamental material process, it's none of that.

It's the most real thing, at least in so far as you're a biological organism concerned with actually living, you know, which seems to be a relevant issue, since that's what life does and has been doing for three and a half billion years, this isn't something trivial. Well, then the Taoist story is all interesting as well, because it's such a sophisticated representation. So in the black serpent, there's a white god and in the black serpent, there's a white dot

and in the white serpent, there's a black dot. And the question is why? And the answer is, well, because one can transform into the other at the drop of a hat. And you know that in your own life, because maybe you're cruising along in your family and everything's pretty stable and then all of a sudden, well, maybe someone has an accident.

They fall down the stairs or even you go, you go, you go, you have a heart, you have a little heart murmur, a pulpitation one day and you go to the doctor and you find out that you need a coronary bypass or you go to your job and it turns out your boss has been in bezzling money and even though you've been working hard and your life is set up properly, poof, you're unemployed. It's like what this sort of thing can happen, not only can happen, it's not that it can happen, it happens all the time, right? That your domain of stability is blown apart by the introduction of something chaotic. And so, and that's life, man, is that no matter how secure you make things, it's the

same idea as the snake in the garden. It's exactly the same idea. No one can make a garden so safe, not even God, that there is no snake in it. And that's life. And so the security can turn into instability at the drop of a hat. But likewise, you also know this too.

Now and then, things are really chaotic in your life. This is usually something you best apprehend when this sort of thing is in the past. You go through a period of crisis and everything is unstable and chaotic and you're overwhelmed by anxiety. And sometimes that just kills you. Like there's no necessary reason

that you're gonna get out of that. But sometimes you do get out of it and you return to a place of stability and you think, oh, God, that was really something. But all things considered, I might have learned something worthwhile and be put together better now than I was before. Right? Because then that's kind of how people look at the challenges in their life. I mean, I'm not being naively optimistic about this. I know you can get taken out. People do die after all. So it's no game. It's not like just because there's a challenge you're going to come out of it better, but it's certainly not an unexpected occurrence for you to undergo a severe trial and come out of it better. It's not necessarily the case, but it does happen. Well, it's also the ground

for much of our great optimistic literature. That's the structure of comedy, essentially. I don't mean that sort of funny, humorous comedy. I mean, technically, there's comedy and tragedy and literature. And comedy means you take a quick trip to hell, but you come back out. And tragedy just means not tell all the way down. Right? And that, both of those things are realistic possibilities in life, but we're certainly hoping for the comedy, right?

Because that means success. So that's the second. So the first layer is, we kind of got three layers going here now. The first layer is the neuropsychological say, and then you can lay the Taoist layer on top of that and think, oh, those things, those things mesh in a really interesting way. And you might think, well, that's just, I'm just randomly recognizing patterns. That would be the sort of thing. It's easy to accuse someone of that if they're

Overinterpreting a story, let's say. Now you're just projecting a pattern onto the, onto the, onto reality. It's like how do you know if it really matches. Well, maybe two examples isn't good enough. So then you need another example. So here's, here's another example. So, and it has to do with the structure of stories. So this would be an example drawn from lived experience.

So let's say we use the example of things falling apart on you. So there's this idea in literature that is associated with the descent to the underworld onto a trip to hell, let's say, but before hell was an organized conceptualization, it was more like a trip to the underworld. So it's a mythological motif, and you see it reflected in stories like the Hobbit, which is a retelling, by the way, a very, very old story. In fact, the oldest story that there is, I would say, and Tolkien knew this. He wasn't stupid. He was an Oxford professor.

He knew perfectly well what he was doing, and he knew that he was taking a very old story, which is a variant of St. George and the Dragon, which is a variant of a story that's even older than that. And he was retelling it. And it's not fluke that those stories were overwhelmingly popular, that sold millions of copies. They'd been made into incredibly high budget movies. And everyone knows the story. The Hobbits in their little circumscribed and safe domain, that's order. And then in the geography of the Hobbit,

the perimeter of the Shire is patrolled by the descendants of great kings, the striders. Errorgorn is one of them. And they protect the Hobbits, who are these little decent sort of bourgeois people who are very naive, and who have no idea what the hell is going on outside their borders. Out in the land of chaos, we're evil dwells. They're protected from all that, and they're kind of skeptical of the striders,

these ancestral figures that actually protect their borders. Because there's Saddam Naive, they don't know you know that you need ancestral figures to protect your borders, to patrol your borders, because they don't know of the horrors that lurk beyond the domain of naive order. And everyone has some intimation that that's what they're like, right? I mean, when you read the Hobbit, you're supposed to identify with Bilbo. Is he the first one?

I was getting them confused. It's Bilbo, and then Frodo is it Frodo and then Bilbo? Frodo first? Bilbo first. Bilbo, thank you. Yes, Bilbo first, Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. God it. And so what is Bilbo do? Well, he does a couple of things. There's a call to adventure for Bilbo, essentially. It's mediated at least in part by the wizard Gandalf. There's kind of a god-like figure.

He's an approximation to God, let's say. He's a wizard, after all. And he tells the Hobbit, even though he's a little guy, that there's a hell of a lot more to him than he knows and that he should get the hell out of his little naive box and go out there and take on the suffering and malevolence of the world. And that's exactly what happens. Although, in a strange way, what Bilbo has to do is to become a thief. It's so interesting. It's a very good

example of the idea of the union incorporation of the shadow, because for Bilbo to stop just being a naive hobbit, he has to become a very skilled thief. So he has to become worse before he becomes better. It's very, very interesting. You see a bit of that in Breaking Bad. You know, well, that Breaking Bad is really interesting, because you can't really tell if the teacher, the protagonist, was worse before he became batterer, worse afterward, because whatever he became was there to begin

with, he just didn't bloody well know about it. And even, and he can't even tell the difference between his original morality and cowardice. And his wife certainly can't. And they're all attracted by that dark side. And that's because there's something that beckons beyond naivety. And that's partly why the criminal is such an attractive figure in literature. It's like, you think you're good. It's like, you're not good.

You're just a hobbit. Right? You're protected against all sorts of things, including those things that might corrupt you. And the fact that you haven't been exposed to enough temptation to corrupt you doesn't mean you're good. It just means you're naïve. And so it's very frequently the case that to go from naïve to good, you have to pass through something that's very, very dark. Now, so Billbo, to some degree, has to come to grips

with the capacity and even the necessity, maybe, of malevolence within himself, but he's also called upon to go out into the unknown and to go down to the bottom of things and to find the great serpent and to contend with it, right? And he turns out to be the hero of the story because he goes and confronts the dragon and he gets the gold,

and then he brings it back to his community and revitalizes the complete hero myth out to the unknown and back. And okay, so that's another layer. It's the same structure, known territory, outside that unknown territory. And then there's another kind of an interesting symbolic overlay on that because you have the introduction of the serpentine form.

That's lurking in the Indian Yang symbol because that's two serpents head to head. Anyway, so that's there in a latent sense in the Indian Yang symbol, but it's more developed in the Indian yang symbol. But it's more developed in the Hobbit. And so the notion is he who prevails is he who develops his capacity for What would you say for aggression and courage something like that? sufficiently to confront the horror that dwells underneath the structure of reality. Well, that's where you go when the bottom falls out of your life,

and the bottom falls out of your life a lot, and so it's good to be prepared for that, and to be prepared for the bottom falling out of your life means you don't get to be naive. And you might think, well, why should we believe that? Well, you can read the clinical literature. You want to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. The best way to start that is to be naive. It's not enough because to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, you have to be naive. And then you have to have contact

with something malevolent. And the combination of those two things will give you post-traumatic stress disorder. And so, the way to avoid post-traumatic stress disorder is not to encounter something malevolent, but sometimes that's not in your control. The other way to avoid it is to not be naive. And the thing is people confuse, this is a Nietzschean comment, people confuse naivety with virtue. And that's a big mistake. And that's why these stories emerge constantly.

Harry Potter is the same thing. So Potter has to take on malevolence, right, in the form of Old Immort. And the only reason he can do it is because he's touched by the serpent himself. Right? He can... maybe he belongs in the house of Slytherin. And he's got a, I think he has a piece of Voldemort's soul lodged inside him. Isn't that isn't that what gives him the ability to speak with snakes? And he's always breaking rules, nonstop. Him and his friends, they have their friends in Hogwarts and some of them like Neville Longbottom are a little bit too in sconst in order and unwilling to break a rule

when necessary, but the main protagonists of the lengthy story are Hermione and Ron and Harry, and they're just breaking rules nonstop. So there's something about, and part of that is a consequence of Harry's, the fact that he has enough evil within him so that he can understand it, he can understand malevolence. And that gives him a certain kind of power as well because it also makes him tough and aggressive enough to break stupid rules when it's necessary. Even though, you know, naive morality that would encapsulate you only within what you know would say never break a rule. The way to be good is to follow the rules.

And there's something to that because if you're not capable of following rules, you're completely useless. And that's partly why I wrote 12 rules for life, even though, well, even though I know, I know that to fully reveal yourself as a moral individual, you have to do more than follow rules. But to start to do that, you at least have to be able to follow them to begin with. And so that's another thing. You don't want to think that you're a desperate adventurer on the high seas when you're just an undisciplined and useless loud. Those are not the same thing. So you might say that you have a right to break the rules once you've

mastered the rules, but not before. And you see that in all sorts of domains. So if you're a musician, the great musicians, you know, you listen to a great violinist, anybody who's really good with a acoustic instrument, they know how to do things perfectly. And then they know how to twist it a little bit so that every note has got a little torturous edge on it, you know? Because they're almost breaking the rule.

And it makes the music haunting and powerful, because they're daring to push their interaction with order right out to the edge of chaos. And you can hear them, well, that's why they're playing music. You can hear them doing that all the time with their musical instrument. And that makes a remarkable, remarkable performance. I mean, it's something to hear someone play a piece of music perfectly. But it's really something to hear someone who could play a piece of music perfectly, play it imperfectly on purpose. That's really something, you think.

Man, that grips you in a way that mere perfection can't. Okay, so that's the next level. So we've got the neuropsychological level, and we've got the Taoist conceptual level, and we've got the narrative level. Now I laid out two narrative levels. So that's four levels. So then we can think about this in your own life.

This is where you have to draw the relationship between the archetypal and the prosaic. People tell stories all the time about the bottom dropping out of their life. I made reference to that before. Example, I've often used with my students is, imagine you want to go to medical school. So you think you're pretty smart, because otherwise,

you wouldn't be thinking about going to medical school. So you probably thought you were pretty smart in the past, and you think you're pretty smart in the present, and you presume you're going to continue to be pretty smart into the future. And then you go write them, Kat, which is a standardized test that you have to write if you're going to go to medical school. And you need about 95th percentile to qualify as a medical student, which means you have to do better than 95 percent of the people who write the test, which means 19 out of 20 people are quite disappointed. And you know, one out of five of those people scores 20th percentile

or less. And so maybe your student who wants to go to medical school and you've been studying a long time and you write the MCAT, the results come back. It's like 20th percentile. It's like what the hell are you going to do without piece of information? Bitch, a lot about the test. That'll be the first thing, and no bloody wonder, because what's the alternative? You know, not as smart as you thought you were. You never were as smart as you thought you were. Well, that's a lot more terrifying, right?

Because that means you had this conception of yourself that you relied on for a very long period of time. And now that's unstable. And like, it's one thing to have the present destabilized. I mean, that's annoying. And it's certainly no fun to have the future destabilized. And by the way, that also happens to you when you score 20th percent hell on the MCAT.

But it's a completely different thing to have the damn past destabilized. Because you thought you already had all that taken care of. And turns out, no, there are pieces of information that can be delivered to you that not only destabilize your present and your future, but also your past. So that's another example of how you can encounter chaos. You're in an orderly domain. You have your conceptions of yourself organized, and all of a sudden you run into a piece of information

that suggests that something is fundamentally wrong about the way you're organizing your world. And people, now, you know, maybe if you're sensible, you might take a year or so. You think, well, I didn't really need to be a doctor. I just wanted to help people. There's other health professions I could enter. It doesn't mean my whole damn life is over.

It doesn't mean I have to jump off a bridge. You know, but that sort of blow can really knock people for a loop. And so it's not that easy to reconstitute yourself after encountering something that shatters your pre-suppositions. They can be shattered in that manner. They can be shattered if you have a relationship with someone, let's say it's an intimate relationship and you trust them. So you have a particular view of them, you have a particular model of them, and use that

model as a predicate for a lot of your perceptions and your actions. And then they betray you. That's a rough one. In Dante's Inferno, Dante's Inferno is a story about a journey into the structure of evil. I don't know if you know that, but that's what it is. It was an attempt to produce a hierarchy of evil, and Dante put the betrayers right at the bottom in the worst part of hell. And I think that's really good, because I don't think they put the betrayers right at the bottom in the worst part of hell. And I think that's really good because I don't think there is anything that disturbs people more than being betrayed, right? Because it destroys your fundamental trust in humanity, and that's rough.

And you know, most people are betrayed in their life. If they're not betrayed by someone else, then they're betrayed by themselves. And so, and that can knock the bottom out of things. And we know what it means to knock the bottom out of things. Everyone understands that. That's what Jaws was about. Is the bottom coming out of things, right?

And that's the same ancient story of conflict with the beast that lives in the bottom of the abyss, and that's the thing that represents what takes the bottom out of things, or even what lurks in the bottom. And so there's an idea that runs through literature and mythology, that there is a terrible thing that lurks underneath everything, and that it can make its emergence. That's the story, that's every damn horror story ever written. It can make its emergence and take you down

and the proper response to that isn't to cower in your room under the blanket, even though anyone with any sense would want to do that, but to go down into the layer of the beast itself and to encounter it, which is what happens in the Hobbit, which is what happens in Pinocchio. You've all watched Pinocchio, right? Pinocchio is a movie about, it's an animated movie,

so it's drawings, so it's drawings, it's unbelievably removed from reality, right? It's drawings about a puppet. It's not even a puppet, it's drawings of a puppet. And a marionette, yeah, who's being, who's being played, right? A marionette is something that is operated by someone else pulling its strings. And so there's an intimation in Pinocchio that that's who we are. We're marionettes who are being moved by forces that are beyond our comprehension.

And perhaps if we have a benevolent father and a little bit of intercession from nature in the form of the Blue Fairy, then we can lose our strings and start on the process of individual development to become something that isn't just a naive puppet or a brain jackass, which is also what Pinocchio transforms into, right? A lying brain jackass as he moves through his transformation cycle. And in order to fully manifest himself as autonomous, he has to go down to the bottom of the deep, to the deepest possible place, to the place where everything is afraid, all the fish leave, right, to the monster that lurks at the very bottom of the ocean. And in that monster, he finds his father and rescues him and brings him back up to the

surface. I didn't actually understand what the hell that meant. Well, I still don't understand it completely because you can't. It's an inexhaustible story. But I figured this out about three days ago when I was talking about this again. I thought, because there's this idea that if you go to the edge and you look over the abyss, you see a monster lurking down there.

And then if you go down into the monster, you find your father. It's like, what the hell? That why would that be? What kind of crazy idea is that? And what's even crazier is you accept that without question. You watched Pinocchio, and it didn't bother you that a puppet with Jackass ears was following a cricket to the bottom of the ocean into a whale that breathed

fire, by the way, so it was actually a dragon, to rescue his father. It's like, yeah, no problem. No problem. Well, think about that. It's completely insane. Why would you be willing to suspend disbelief, to follow that story? Well, it's because it fits an archetypal pattern. So what I realized the other day was, so here's a couple of things. The first thing is that

if you take on successive challenges, you could say going to the bottom of the world and rescuing your, going to the bottom of the world and encountering the ultimate monster is the ultimate challenge. You'd say that's challenge as such, but you can face smaller challenges in your life. They're like small monsters, you know, just lizards maybe, not the whole bloody dragon, just lizards this big, that's all. And you can deal with those things. But you're laying out the pattern, and by challenging yourself that way, you inform yourself. You become more developed, partly because, well, because you're gathering information.

If you deal with a bunch of different kinds of people, that's a challenging thing to do, especially if you're introverted, not very socially skilled. You go out there and you meet 200 people. You have to get along with them. It's like you're way more informed at the end of that than you were at the beginning. Or maybe you take your degree or you develop some new skills or you learn to play a musical instrument. Or maybe you get over your fear of dating, you know, and your former relationship, or you learn to speak publicly. You do some damn thing that you were afraid of that requires some skill.

You go do it. You get more informed. Okay, so then you might think, well, what do you turn into if you get more informed? You're a more informed person. You have more form. That's what it means to be more informed. And you're more information, so you're more in formation, so you're more organized, because that's what information does. It puts you in formation. And so you become more than who you are by becoming informed. But here's some, and that relates back to what I talked about at the beginning, about the world being made out of information. But there's more to it than that. So this is something that's only been discovered recently. So let's say you go somewhere you haven't been

and you take on a challenge. That actually matters that you take on the challenge. Because if I just stress you, you have one kind of physiological response. So let's say it's involuntary. Here's a stressor. You have a bunch of stress responses. You're kind of like a rabbit. You're like a prey animal. Seriously, that's how

you respond. That's the circuitry that turns on. It's prey animal circuitry. You freeze, your heart rate goes up. You produce cortisol. It's a prey animal response. But if you take the same stressor on voluntarily, whole different psychophysiological pattern, completely different. You don't produce stress hormones, for example. So, I think it's because if the thing is thrown at you, then you're a rabbit. But if you chase it, then you're a wolf. And your body knows the difference between being a rabbit and a wolf. So anyways, when you take on a stressor, you put yourself in a new situation, your DNA in your brain codes for new proteins

and produces new structures. So that's an interesting thing. So what that implies in some sense is that you have an immense biological potential. Much of that locked in some senses that you have an immense biological potential Much of that locked in your genetic structure Which will not manifest itself until you demand that it does You have to put yourself. Well, it's not that unbelievable I mean what happens when you go to the gym is you know you lift light weights to begin with and then have your weights and have your weights And you get stronger and stronger.

You can get stronger by lifting weights. Well, why couldn't you get to be more than you are by challenging yourself? Well, you know you can, that's what you tell your kids. You don't want them just sitting in their room hiding under their covers. You know, you want them out there encountering the world because you know that in that encounter they'll become more than they are. Who knows what the ultimate limit to that is? Well, that's what that image portrays. You go to the abyss. That's the edge of everything. You look down and you see the worst possible thing, but inside that, that's your father. That's the ancestral spirit, right? That's the thing you could become. The thing you could become is locked in the belly of the beast you're most afraid of. That's exactly what that image means. That's why Pinocchio has to go down to the bottom of reality and rescue his father. He has to become his father.

He has to become everything that all of your ancestors were. That's what you have to become. And the way you do that is by taking on the maximal challenge. So that's the next level. That's the next level. All right. So I've been trying to work out. So, in the Taoist view, there's Chaos in order.

And the Chaos, let's say, is underneath the order. And it's always threatening to pop itself up to pop its ugly head up and to terrify the life out of you, just like the shark and jaws. You see that echoed as well. Most of you have seen the Second Harry Potter movie. You know, there's a basilisk, not one. There's a magic castle. You don't have any probe with that.

Magic castle. The magical children are in the magic castle. Underneath the magic castle, there's plumbing, and in the plumbing, there's a giant snake. That's all okay too. Then if you look at the snake you turn to stone, just like a rabbit when it sees a wolf. That's what that means. That's why if you look at a gorgon you turn to stone because that's a symbol of that

which terrifies you and that will freeze you. And so when Potter has to undo the curse of the Basilisk, he has to go down underneath the structure of the magic castle into the depths to encounter something that will poison him, which it does. He rescues a virgin, by the way. Geneva, Virginia, Virgin, that's St. George in the Dragon. The reason for that is that, well, there's a lot of complicated reasons. The Virgin is partly a representation of the soul.

That's one way of thinking about it. Anima is soul. Anima is feminine. If you go to the darkest place then you rescue your soul, that's one level of analysis, but it's also the case that you're maximally attractive to virgins if you're courageous enough to confront the serpent. And that's as old as story as there is that human beings have, and obviously that's the case. So anyways, Harry goes down to the bottom with his bag of tricks and his ability to be malevolent and break rules when necessary, and confronts this Basilisk, which bites him because it's a Basilisk, right? This is no joke.

Mess up, die. Right? Well, that's life. That's life because you can die. And if you mess up, then you die. So it's no joke. So he goes down to the bottom and he gets bitten. And then this is a side story, but we use it. This is the comedic part of the story. You go down into the underworld and you everything but die, let's say, maybe you even die, you burst back forward. There's something in you that can die and be reborn. That's what happens to Harry Potter multiple times, by the way. But when he is bitten by the baseless, what rescues him? Phoenix. Phoenix is the thing that dies and can be reborn. Right? And that's partly a symbol of you because you are the thing that can die in your

present form and then be reborn as something else. And that happens when you encounter something that's really challenging because the challenge burns up what there is of you that isn't useful and lets what is proper continue. Okay, so the Taoist idea is that there's chaos, order, sorry, that's order there, it's chaos here and that you should be positioned in the middle and it looks to me that that's true and that the world is made out of chaos and order. It's made out of the things you don't understand that can always leap up and take you down

and the things you do understand, it's made of unexplored territory and explored territory. I'll add a little level of complexity to this. See if I can do this. I haven't been able to do this before. I don't know if I can do it or not. Here's another way of looking at chaos in order. So you could say that chaos is everything that there is. It's the set of all possible facts and combinations of facts. That's way too much for you. And, you know, one of the facts is there's 150,000 things that can go wrong with your body. Pick up a medical text or better yet don't. Or pick up a text on

psychopathology. Man, there's lots of ways to be crazy and you probably have practiced most of them. So chaos is the set of all possible facts, let's say, and all possible combinations of facts. And you don't really have much contact with that. And thank God, because there's just too much out there for you. So you have to filter that. And you filter that with the structure of order. And you have to filter that and you filter that with the structure of order.

And you have to filter it. The reason you have to filter it is because there's all those facts and there's all those things you could do about them, but unless you reduce them to one thing that you're going to do, you can't do anything because you can only do one thing at a time. So you have to take all that there is and convert it to the thing you're going to do. And that's hard. There's an intermediary structure. There's a lot of intermediary structure that's necessary to take that ungodly collection of everything and reduce it to just the thing you're looking at or just the thing you care about or just the thing that you're acting on. So you're looking at or just the thing you care about or just the thing that you're acting on. So you're a reducing veil like eldest Huxley claimed

influenced by Henri Bergson, right? And Huxley's idea, by the way, was that if you took a hallucinogen, then all that filtering disappeared and partly what you saw was everything that there was and that that was absolutely overwhelming. It's a good theory. It's actually in accordance with the neurobiology. If you know something about how hallucinogens work, that is looks like how they work. They stop the, they stop the lamic gating. That's the technical issue. So anyways, you have to take this really complicated world, chaos, and you have to filter it right down to one thing.

And it's order that does that. And then you think, well, how is that order established? It's established the same way the stock market establishes value. Okay, so way the stock market establishes value. Okay, so what the stock market does is it compares everything that there is to everything else that there is. And then it rank orders and it uses money, right? And so like if someone asked you, well, which stock, you can have a thousand stocks.

You think, well, which stocks would I take? Well, that's easy. That's an easy question. you can have a thousand stocks. You say, well, which stocks would I take? Well, that's easy. That's an easy question. Take the ones that are worth the most money. All right, that's what money is for, is to tell you, it's a symbol of value that collective wisdom has produced to value and array of material goods.

I'm not saying that that's the only process of value. I'm saying that the way that we determine what constitutes value is by coming to a collective decision about it. We cooperate and compete in the world to value things. You're going to value what other people value, not completely because you've got your own being, but you're going to value what other people value, not completely because you've got your own being, but you're going to value what other people value. Our whole culture is our whole culture, the hierarchy of our culture is set up to produce a structure value out of the cooperation and competition that we're all undertaking. And you incorporate that structure. That's why the idea of the

patriarchy is so compelling. You incorporate that structure and then you look at the world through it. And that works because not only does that reduce the world to the things that you're acting on, but it reduces it in a way that's in accordance with the way that everyone else is reducing the world. Because we have to agree on what's of value because otherwise we fight. So for example, all of you when you came here sat in your chair and that man we didn't have to fight about it.

And we've come to an agreement that the manner in which you purchased your ticket, the order in which you purchased your ticket, the fact that there's information printed on this particular piece of paper, entitles us to sit in a hierarchical arrangement, right? From, let's say, the best seats to the worst ones. That's you, poor saps way back up there. Right? But we're all in accordance with that. We've all agreed that we're going to hierarchically rank

the seats in this auditorium according to an agreement that was derived from both cooperation and competition. And we do that with everything. And we incorporate that, and that's what we see the world through. And that's what reduces the complexity of the world to the single things that we move towards. Now, most of the time, this is no oversimplification.

Most of the time, you're going to be trying to do with your time what other people most value. That's what you do when you get paid, right? Not all the time, because you can do whatever you want with your time to some degree. But that's still going to be informed by other people's opinions. And so we've produced a collective structure,

that's order, and that's what filters the world so that we can act in it. OK, now I'm going to try to tangle all those things together. So I'm going to look at my phone to do this, because it's too damn complicated to keep track of otherwise. And I, OK, so the person who stands on this line between chaos and order, this is the characteristics of that person. The first is the willing to take responsibility.

That's for responsibility for suffering and malevolence. So that's the two major categories of catastrophe in the world And so to confront the unknown and to face the dragon and to do all those things that are heroic Essentially means that you're willing to take on responsibility for suffering and malevolence because those are the two big dragons Courage Responsibility that's number one courage. that's number two. You're not going

to do that without courage. Encourage is a form of faith, right? If you're courageous, it means that you think that there's something in you that will respond to the challenge. And that's the same thing as believing that the father lies in the monster. That's the next thing that characterizes this ideal person. Why? Well, because to pursue things of ultimate value, you have to delay gratification if you're going to pursue a pathway of meaning and responsibility. If you're going to take on great tasks, you can't act impulsively. You have to plan into the future. And so that means you have to be willing to sacrifice

what's expedient in the present so that you can do what's appropriate into the future. And then there's another element of sacrifice, which is that you have to be willing to let go of the parts of you that aren't up to the job and shed them constantly. And that's a rough thing because that can mean shedding most of you, can mean shedding your friends, can mean shedding your family, can mean shedding your career, whatever the hell gets in the way.

All right, so what else? Resiposity. If you're going to solve difficult problems in the world, you're going to take on the problem of suffering, let's say, you're going to take on the problem of malevolence. You have to be able to cooperate with other people. And so you have to be able to cooperate with other people. And so you have to be able to engage in reciprocal action. You have to be able to play fair,

because otherwise you won't be able to organize yourself socially and put any sort of force of organization behind you. You're not going to only operate alone in the world, even in the story of the Hobbit. There's a crew of people that go out to confront the dragon. And in the final analysis, there's only one person that does it, but that doesn't mean that people do things alone. And so you need to have a crew around you,

and you have to be able to cooperate with them, and you have to be able to compete with them. You have to do that in a meaningful way that's oriented to something that, let's say, is both responsible and courageous. Right, so. Judgment. You have to be able to use judgment.

That's the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. So partly you judge other people, because that's actually part of the way that you help them. To judge someone is not to condemn them. To judge them is to tell them the difference between what should be kept in them and what should be let go.

And to judge yourself is the same thing. The judgment is actually a purification process. It's not a damnation process. Judgments got a bad rap in our world now. But without judgment, then you can struggle forward with all your stupidity intact. And that seems like a bad idea. Mercy, that so that development can be possible and encouraged.

So even if you're judging, you're doing it in a way that encourages development. That's what you do with the child, right? Because you don't just crush them with your judgment, although you want to help them separate wheat from chaff, you encourage them, because you know that there's potential there, and that requires a certain amount of mercy, a certain amount of forbearance, so to get that balance between judgment and mercy right, that's a real task. and mercy right, that's a real task.

Attention to and resistance to tyranny and deceit. You see that in the Pinocchio story too. When Pinocchio ends up on Pleasure Island, it's run by totalitarians who transform them into a lying jackass so they can sell them as a slave. There's a real message in that. That film was made in the 1930s. Part of that ability to take responsibility, the ability to be courageous, the capacity for judgment, capacity for mercy, capacity for reciprocity,

it's also manifested in the willingness to pay attention to tyranny and to stand up against it. And the intermingling of all those things, as far as I can tell, and all those things are what sets you right, sets your family right, sets the community right, maybe even sets the world right, the intermingling of all of that is manifested in the sense of meaning. And that's what your mind is reporting when you're in the right place at the right time.

And so that all that just seems real. And so... Well, so back to what we were talking about at the beginning. I said that I thought that we looked at the world wrong, you know, that we have this materialist view, fair enough. It's very powerful from a technological perspective. But it treats meaning as an epithetmum, and it's something that you can dispute the existence of meaning, and that leaves people into either internalism,

which is not good, or into the reaction against that, which is how totalitarian is a manifest itself as far as I'm concerned. It's like it's the reaction to that abyss. It's the reaction of improbable certainty, something like that, as the antidote to intolerable uncertainty. It's not good, neither of those are good. They're both based on the nihilism, certainly, based on the denial of meaning. The totalitarianism is sort of based on the idea

that there is meaning, but it's static and you've got it now. But meaning itself seems to be predicated on the necessity for continual development, right? It's, you're not good enough the way you are. You have to be more than you are. And the meaning is to be found in the being more than you are. And then it's composed of these subsidiary virtues, the ones that I laid out, and perhaps a whole variety of others. It seems to me that, okay, so then we can conclude, I guess, well. There is meaning in life, which is the meaning as far as I can tell, that I just laid out.

You need a meaning in your life because life is very difficult and there's plenty of suffering and malevolence and that's enough to take you down and take you under and tear you apart. And the way of coping with that appears to be to turn around and face it, much as you can, and to understand that in that act of facing, in the act of facing, you rescue from that terror exactly what it is that you need to overcome it. And it looks like that's actually how the world is structured. to overcome it and it looks like that's actually how the world is structured. So all of that seems to me to be very much worth knowing, which is why I've been thinking about it and

why I want to talk to you about it tonight. Thank you. Something nice about this room, right? We can kind of see everybody. It feels good. Yeah, it's a big room. It's like a big musical instrument. Yeah. Pretty cool. It looks like the Senate and Star Wars. I know you're more of a Harry Potter guy, but give me a little something here. Okay, we are in Canada. West Coast aliens. Yeah. So because we're in Canada, this one keeps coming up, so you know I'm going right to it. Will you please, please, please run for Prime Minister. There's about 800 versions of that question. I can't speak French. And as you know, that disqualifies you.

Okay, moving on. All right. Okay, so look, I've been, what would you say, curious about a political career ever since I was a kid. And I thought about it a lot at various times, but every time I thought about it seriously and thought about acting on it, the sorts of things that I was talking to you guys about tonight, studying them continually took precedence. And I think that was proper.

And I'm not done studying them yet. It probably won't ever be. I think it's better for me to do that, so I think I'll just keep doing that. That's what it looks like. Applause. How should we interact with ideologies in everyday life when we're vocally outnumbered at work or at school.

James Demore, for example. Well, James did pretty well. He's a courageous guy. Sort of accidentally, in some ways. James is a pretty soft spoken character, and he's certainly not out to. Intentionally, damage anyone. He's just an engineer. And, you know, what happened to him at Google, it's really quite funny in the dark comedy sort of way.

He went to one of these social justice orientation, idiocy things that they inflict upon people in corporations. And I was a diversity seminar or something like that, run by absolutely unqualified people, moping platitudinous stupidities to make themselves seem virtuous. And. But Jordan, how do you really feel about them?

That's the thing. Well, and then they asked for feedback. Well, and James is an engineer. So he thought they wanted feedback. So he wrote what he wrote and went and read the literature to provide feedback. He thought, well, there's a bunch of things you said that just seem to be wrong. And here's the data that tell you why these are wrong. And so

there's my feedback. Now it was the end of it as far as he was concerned. And then it got circulated as an internal memo. And then it got released. But he didn't release it and certainly didn't expect anything like that. And so then it got released and they fired him. It's like how absolutely appalling is that, but he didn't back down, which is really something. And he's suing them. I think there's a class action suit against Google

with any luck they'll win. They certainly should win if they don't. That will be a very dark day in the judicial history of the United States. Maybe there are technical reasons why it's a hopeless case. What do you do if you're in a situation like that? Well, look, the only thing that you've got in your life as far as I can tell is truth.

You think, well, do you believe that? It's like, well, let's consider the alternative. The only thing you have in your life is falsehood. No one believes that. Even people who lie, which is all of us, by the way, no one believes that that's really a good idea. They just think they can get away with it. Like no one thinks that you don't sit your kid down on your knee

when he's forward, say, look kid, best thing you want to do, if you want to make it through life, is to surround yourself with a tissue of fabrications, right? The deeper and more corrupt, the better. That'll get you where you want to go. No one ever does that because everyone knows that's not right. It won't work. And so if you do engage in deceit,

the reason you're doing it is because it's easier or you think you can get away with it. That's it, not because you think it's right. Well, and then you can engage in deceit in a couple of ways. You can say things you don't mean or you can just shut up when you have something to say. Now, the first one, classically, that's a sin of commission, is regarded as worse than the second, although I'm not so sure about that, but we could just leave that lie. What do you do to yourself if you don't speak when you have something to say?

You turn yourself into someone who can't speak when they have something to say. And there's no difference between speaking and living. Speaking is just the pro-droma for living. You speak about something and then you do it. If you have any sense, I mean sometimes you act first, you know, but you're supposed to think a little bit. If you turn yourself into someone who can't speak, then you turn yourself into someone who can't think.

That seems like a really bad idea. Who's afraid to think? That's even worse. So you always have to ask yourself, is like which hell are you trying to avoid? You know, there's the hell of telling the truth and there's the hell of not telling the truth. Those are your options. Now I'm not saying that you should leap up in the middle of your workplace and tell your boss to go directly to hell. You know, I mean, telling the truth isn't the same as being

impulsively aggressive, you know, and if you let your resentment build up for five or six years, you don't get to go in and let it all out in a burst of anger. It's like, that's not the truth, that's just a more sophisticated form of lie. But if you find yourself in a situation where your workplace or your life has been rendered intolerable because of ideological pressure to silence you, then you have to start thinking about what the consequences of living like that are going to be. You know what happened in the Soviet Union was that it actually became illegal to suffer. And I'm really serious about that because, you know, if the system's working, then everything's

okay with you. And if everything's not okay with you, well, is that your fault or the system's fault? Well, if it's not the God damn system's fault, then it's your fault. Then you don't get to suffer. That's what happened in the Soviet Union. It's like if you're in a situation where you've been rendered hopeless or desperate or resentful or silent and disenchanted with your workplace and your career, then, and you can't even say anything about that,

it's like you're already in a pretty goddamn bad place. It isn't so obvious that trying to figure out how to escape from that would, in the final analysis, make it worse. You have to be canny, though, you know, it's not a simple matter to organize yourself so that you can say what you think. And maybe you start in small ways. Maybe you just write down what you think. At least you bloody well know what it is then. I often recommend to my clients. One of the things I do with

my clients is especially if they're agreeable types and don't like conflict. And there's lots of people like that, but they're bubbling up with resentment because they've got some things to say, you know, and they haven't said them, and they've got some people to say them too, who they haven't said them to. Say, well, write the person a letter. You can email them. Don't send it. Don't send it. Write it down. Wait a week. Edit it. Get rid of what you don't have to say. Get it at least so you can articulate, at least so you know what the hell you think. That's something. Then maybe you can start

paying attention and see if there's some other people around that you can talk to. You know, one of the things you'll find, like here's an example. So I mentioned this at the beginning of tonight, that the artists in Calgary, 600 of them signed a petition demanding that I get tossed out of the theater, which didn't work, by the way. So that's a good thing. But one of the things, it was such a pack of lies. It was just appalling. I mean, first of all, they said a bunch of things about me that just weren't true, but that's part for the course. There's about ten insults. You know, there's canonical insults now that you don't fit the politically correct narrative then you get to be labeled with all 10 canonical insults.

I think racist was the first one, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic. I need to make a little song out of this. Yeah. Yeah. And so, there were some other ones too, but those are the big ones, let's say. And then they said that it wasn't that they disagreed with my ideas exactly or my right

to express them, but what was what I was doing by bringing all new types to the auditorium was making it unsafe for people who worked there. And that's actually what they were concerned about, despite the fact that 200,000 people have now come out over the last four months to listen to a talk like this. And nothing has gone wrong at all. But you can't be too safe as we all know. We are going to sacrifice one of you tonight, just FYI. So, but this is the point of this story, is that the Calgary sun ran a little pole asking people if I should be allowed to speak in Calgary. And 95% of people said yes, and 2% of the people who didn't, so half

of the remaining ones, 2 more percent, thought I could talk, but not at that place. So I think they just misunderstood the question. So it was like 2% of people were opposed to me coming to speak, but they're really noisy, that 2%. And it's like the rest of the 95% are not saying anything. It's like, so if you do decide to say something at work, you'll find that there's a lot more people, assuming you're not completely unreasonable, and you're trying to be careful, at least to some degree,

you'll find that there's a lot of people out there who are reasonable, who think like you think, and who are having exactly the same problems you have, and that if you said something, at least they'd come by your office later and say, you know, I actually think that what you're doing is right. Well, it's something, you know, and it might take a while before those people had enough courage to actually come out of the woodwork. You know, you choose between, look, it's the same thing, I don't think

you have a better ally than the truth. I don't see how it can be any other way. Not that the truth is that's a great ally. It's pretty damn painful, you know, and maybe it won't rescue you, you'll get snapped up by the jaws of the beast and the truth won't save you, but it's still your best bloody bet. It's the best you've got, and if you abandon it, you're done. I mean, this is one thing I've absolutely learned as a clinical psychologist, two things. One, you don't get away with anything.

No one ever gets away with anything. I've never, it terrifies me, because there's things, that I'm not too happy about, that I've done. And so I think, well, one day the shoe is going to drop. But in any case, I don't think you get away with anything. And the second is, is that every lie comes back to haunt you. And so if you're not speaking, when you have something, that's a sin, man, to not speak when you have something to say.

Because if you have something to say. You, because if you have something to say, look, here, one more thing, here's an idea that's at the bottom of our culture. And this is the idea, is that we partake in the process of creation. We partake in the process of the creation of habitable order from chaos by speaking the truth. That's actually what we do. That's associated with this meaningful mode of being that I was describing. That's the image of God in which we're made. We transform the chaos of potential into the order that is good with truth. And I believe that's the case.

I truly believe that's an accurate statement. It sums up the nature of our relationship with reality. And so if you have unexpressed truth, then there's habitable order that you're not bringing into being. You're corrupting the structure of the world by remaining silent. And that's on you.

It's not a good idea because things need to be straightened out. And if you can see where they're crooked and you don't straighten them out, then they stay crooked. And then people suffer. You too, like you too, but everyone else. You have this ethical obligation that's fundamental, paramount. That's this responsibility issue. You have this ethical obligation that's fundamental to use the truth that you can see to set the world straight. And if you don't do that, then the consequences will visit you. And I wouldn't recommend that, that's a bad thing. It won't be pretty.

And you'll know that you could have avoided it. You'll know that it's not only on you, but it's your fault. And Jesus, that's a particular form of hell. It's one thing to have something terrible happen to you. That's bad enough, but to know that you brought it on, man, and you could have avoided it. And you knew you could have avoided it. And you still didn't do it. That's hell, man. That's not a place you want to visit. know if I'm trying hard enough? How do I know if I'm living up to my human potential?

Well, I think there's lots of different ways you know. I mean, you don't wake up in the morning at three in the morning and torture yourself to death for your inadequacies. I mean, people do that, and I know people can get depressed, and that mechanism can go astray. But you might be able to go to sleep with something resembling a relatively clean conscience. That'd be something. Other people, though, are good at telling you that, too. It's like, are you taking care of yourself? Are you taking care of your family?

Are you, do you have a little leftover to make the community a better place? Other people that you know that? And, and like, they're not infallible, but they're another good source of information. So, there's your own judgment about yourself, and then you calibrate that against the judgment of others. Are you engaged in something that you regard as meaningful? You know, do you have something noble in what you're doing to set against the catastrophe of your life? You know when you're doing something worthwhile and when you're not, when you're caring for people

in an incredible manner, when you're carrying the burden properly, you have some sense of that. I mean, you can strive too hard to and wear yourself down. It has to be sustainable. So it's tricky. It's a constant. You have to constantly engage in dialogue with your conscience to determine whether you're sufficiently on the path.

But you can certainly talk to other people about it too. That's why you want to surround yourself with people that care for you. That's what rule three. Make friends with people who want the best for you. You know, because if you surround yourself with people like that, you can talk to them. It's like, you know, what do you think of what I'm doing? Is it working out okay? They'll tell you if they're on your side. So use your judgment, you use the judgment of others. That's a pretty good calibration mechanism. When did you become a male-fashion icon? You have stepped it up in the wardrobe game.

Well, I figured if I was going to go talk to 200,000 people, I might as well buy a good suit. Look, it's more than that, I guess, to some degree. I talked to my publishers when this book first came out. And I told them that I was all in on this. You know, when I started doing these tours, that I'm doing everything I possibly can, as far as I can, to do this right.

So I'm trying to attend to the details. And like, I'm very happy that all you people are here. I don't take it for granted. If I'm going to meet you, I'm going to meet about 150 of you afterwards. And I'm on this stage and in the media for a bit, thought, well, you know, that's another little detail that I might as well get right because I'm trying to get all the little details right because who knows what the important details are. And so it seemed like the thing to do, you know, because if this is important, and I think it is, then I'm going

to act like it's important. I'm going to act like it's important, I'm going to dress like it's important, and I'm going to try to speak like it's important, and I'm going to be grateful for what's happening, and try to do it properly. And so I thought I'd get a good suit. Thank you. Is social media a net good or a net negative? Twitter is definitely a net negative.

Otherwise, I haven't quit using it. Look, there is some literature on this. It doesn't look like people who use social media are in any more of a bubble than people who use social media are in any more of a bubble than people who use traditional media. So the whole social media produces a bubble idea. Looks like it's over exaggerated, or maybe just exaggerated. I don't know if social media, you know how

damn addictive these devices are. That's a problem. It seems to me to be a problem, but I don't know if you can blame that specifically on social media. I think that our technologies are so powerful that it's hard for us to figure out how to interact with them.

And then they change so incredibly quickly that even if you do figure out how to interact with them in two years, all that knowledge is obsolete anyway. So I don't think it's social media. I think it's that we're in our technological transformation is accelerating, right? We're up at the exponential end of the distribution and things are going quite haywire

and it's gonna be a hell of a ride. And so all of this being glued to our cell phones is just part of trying to master this new technology. And I don't know if we can do it, because it's going to be coming at us real fast. You know, the Chinese graduate more engineers every year than the US has engineers. Right?

So that's, you know, and they're held back to some degree in their creativity by the still totalitarian substructure of Chinese culture, but they're cruising along at a pretty damn good rate, and so all the evidence suggests that we ain't seen nothing yet. And so what I'm hoping is that we're, we develop enough wisdom and care so that we can master this our social media and all the other technology because it's certainly powerful and we can do a lot of good with it. So that's on the scary side, but on the upside, I follow this group on Twitter called humanprogress.org, which I like a lot, and they've been publicizing statistics

about how fast things have been getting better. Like since the turn of the millennium, particularly worldwide, things have been getting better so fast that it's absolutely beyond comprehension. So I think I read today that the rate, the number of people who were, who had insufficient nutrition fell 25% between 2005 and 2015. It's down to about one in ten. So, and that's just one of many things that have

been transforming in an unbelievably positive direction in the last 20 years. So, we have these challenges that are in front of us mastering this technology, staying on top of it, not allowing it to, not allowing it to drive us crazy or destabilize our social institutions too badly, but God, it's opening up all sorts of avenues for unbelievable improvement. So hopefully we'll be wise enough to use it for good and not for ill. And we'll see, but I don't think we can blame it on social media. It's worse than that. It's worse than that. What does a perfect day for Jordan Peterson look like? This was a pretty good day And you got you got bumped off a flight today. Yeah, well that that made me annoyed because I was well I was worried that I wouldn't get here and you know that bothered me so I was a little agitated about that but

It's hard to that, but it's hard to, I'm doing what I want to do, as far as I can tell. My wife is traveling with me, I don't know where she is, she's hidden in the audience here somewhere, but she's traveling with me and she's big help. We're not really looking to do anything different. I mean, it would be presumptuous in the extreme, not to be exceedingly grateful for everything that's happening. So I really like these talks. I think they're a great privilege. They give me a chance to think on my feet and to address crucial problems that I think are crucial anyways,

on an ongoing basis to test them out in front of a bunch of people, I have never done anything more positive than go on this tour. It's ridiculously positive. So we've been in 60 cities in the last three months, I think. I think that's right, something like that. It's very close anyways. And the, what would you call it? The sense from the audience is similar across all the different venues.

People, the people you people who are coming here are, as far as I can tell, trying to participate, you know, participating in a serious conversation about vitally important things, in an attempt to make your lives better and the people, and the lives of the people around you better as well. And so that, how could anything possibly be better than that?

That's good, you know, and so that's an exciting opportunity, and very heartwarming, let's say, and positive. And then the other thing that happens now all the time is that people stop me and in airports and in cafes and on the street. And they usually, they tell me that they've been watching my lectures or reading this book, which has been insanely successful. Like, and they say, by being watching your lectures, sometimes hundreds of hours of them reading your book,

my life is a lot better than it was. Thank you, I think. Great. Why? How could you possibly want anything more than to go places that you've never been and have people that you don't know come up and tell you that things are better for them because they've

been interacting with what you're doing? That's it. Doesn't get any better than doing. That's it. Doesn't get any better than that. That's a perfect day. So... Alright, we've got time for two more. What do you miss most about your clinical practice?

Well, I really liked my clinical practice. I had a fair number of clients who were long-term clients, some I had seen for years. And so I got kind of twined in with their lives and was an ongoing adventure to listen to how they were laying themselves out in the world and to talk with them seriously about how things could be just made continually better. how things could be just made continually better. And so I had about 20 clients.

Some of them were shorter term clients, and so I didn't know them as well. But I was very deeply involved in their lives. And so pulling away from that was, well, there was a certain amount of sorrow associated with it. There was no choice because I got some rules as a therapist and one was if you came and see Swami for an hour, then I didn't think about anything else except what we were talking about during that hour. You know, what I've tried to do, same thing I'm trying to do in these talks is

my presumption was that if I started thinking about something else, that either meant that my own life wasn't in order, and that wasn't good, or I wasn't having an interesting enough conversation with the person that I was interacting with, and so I wasn't doing an interesting enough conversation with the person that I was interacting with and so I wasn't doing my job properly. If you do your job properly, probably whenever you have a conversation with someone, it's so interesting that you don't think of anything else. If you're thinking of something else, then you're not really engaged in the conversation.

then you're not really engaged in the conversation. And so, but what happened because my life got so complicated was that my mind was wandering. And that wasn't good because you make a mistake. If you're a clinician and people are, they're talking to you about things they can't figure out. They're hard problems. And there's a lot on the line. And you can't be inattentive because you make a mistake,

and then it'll be a mistake. Like it'll be pain associated with it. And then the other thing was, is I got so busy that I couldn't be available. Like most of my clients, if you're a good psychologist, you have fairly tight boundaries around your time. Everybody understands the rules. My clients weren't phoning me all the time, but now and then they would.

And I'd have to be, I'd have to have some in reserve so that I could have an intelligent conversation. And I had nothing in reserve, so I had to stop. And so, you know, because I had been involved in all of these people's lives, I don't know what I'm missing the story. I don't know what's happening, you know. And some of them email me and keep me updated. But I'm not complaining about it because you have to let things go when you have to let them go. And it was time to let it go because there was no way of continuing it properly.

And so I'm on to this, whatever this is, and it seems to be working out quite well. But I do, you know, I like being a clinician and maybe I'll return to it at some point. Seems somewhat unlikely. But it was very good job. So. All right, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, why do you sound so much like Kermit the Frog? Well, if you have to be cursed by sounding like a Muppet, which one would you pick? If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 rules for life, and antidote to chaos.

Both of these work stelves much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast. See JordanBeePeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Next week, do we have a treat for you guys? Joe Rogan. That's right. Next week we're releasing a conversation between Joe Rogan and dad. I thought I'd like started at the beginning so I don't know that much about you so where did you grow up? I grew up in a lot of places. I was born in New Jersey. We moved to California. We lived in San Francisco. I lived in Florida, then we moved to Boston, and I lived in Boston for 10 years.

When I think of where I come from, I think of Boston. It's also the place where I started doing stand-up comedy, which means a lot to me. It's also where I started fighting, where I started doing martial arts, all the significant things that happened in my life happened in Boston.

The conversation was recorded on April 24th, 2019. Joe Rogan is an American stand-up comedian, MMA commentator, podcast host, I was on his podcast last year, which was insanely cool, businessman and former television host and actor. He doesn't really need much of an introduction. Talk to you guys next week. Hope you enjoyed this episode

and you will definitely enjoy next week's episode. 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.b. Peterson. 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, JordanB 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.