The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 258. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

In this compilation, we are showcasing clips from Dr. Peterson being interviewed about his latest book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Ranging from Tim Ferriss to Theo Von, this media tour served as a great platform to speak with public figures from all over the internet. Please enjoy!

Hi, everyone. I'm pleased to announce the release of my new book, Beyond Order, 12 more rules for life. I've been thinking for quite a while about what I would do to announce this book and what popped into my mind constantly was that I should start the announcement with a thank you to all my viewers, listeners and readers for the tremendous support that you've shown to my work in all of its forms and for the multitude of kind and thoughtful and often air you diet and moving letters that you've sent to me and to my family and comments that you've left on YouTube and other forms of social media I've been constantly amazed and I mean

constantly and I mean amazed by the volume of correspondence that has come my way and by the continual support I've received from so many people. And so I'm pleased to have been of use. I'm pleased that people found my last book, 12 Rules for Life, helpful and engaging, and I hope very much that the same thing will prove true of this new book. I'm going to read the 12 rules from this book,

and then I'm going to read some excerpts from it, so that you can get a sense of the book. These 12 rules, like the 12 rules in the previous book, were drawn from a longer list of 42 that I published on Quora. Rule one, do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. Rule two, imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that. Rule three, do not hide unwanted things in the fog. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog. Rule four, notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. Rule five, do not do what you hate.

Rule six, Abandon ideology. Rule 7, work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens. Rule 8, perhaps my favorite, try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible. as beautiful as possible. Rule 9. If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely. Rule 10. Plan and work diligently to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant. And rule 12. Be grateful in spite of your suffering. Each of these rules is accompanied by an illustration. As in the case of my previous book, this time, the illustrator is Yulia Fogra and she's done, I think, a lovely job. We held a competition for the illustrations and her work was at least in my opinion the best of the bunch and she's produced these lovely artworks that have a classical fairy tale appeal. And so I think they add a bit of beauty to the book. Why beyond order? What is the genesis of that title? How did you

arrive at that title? As far as I can tell in the world of value. So let's think about value for a minute. If you move towards something, you value it. Otherwise, you wouldn't move towards it. There's an old joke about the chicken is, why did the chicken cross the road? And the answer to that is, well, he thought the other side was better. Well, that's, that's the case, you know, and in order, we need a gradient of value to organize our action. And what you have to prioritize, because you can't do everything at once. And so you do the thing that's most important right now now. And that means you're in a world of importance. And that's a value, that's

a value world. And the value world, as far as I can tell, has two broad components. The Taoists talked about it as Yen and Yang, and broadly speaking, its order and chaos. And order tends to be represented with masculine symbols, and chaos tends to be represented for feminine symbols. That doesn't mean order is male and chaos is female. And, you know, I've been pilloried for this even though it's hardly my proposition, but the idea of the patriarchy is a symbolic, it's a use of masculine symbolism to represent order. So anyways, order is where what happens, order is, you're in order when what you want to happen happens, when you act. And so that's reassuring because not only do you get what you want, but the fact that you get what you want indicates that your theory about how to get what you want is true.

And every time you fail, you don't get what you want, but you also undermine the validity of the theory that you're using to organize your perceptions and your actions. That's partly why people don't like to fail because you don't know how far back that can Echo how far down your hierarch of presuppositions that can echo if you're clinically depressed every minor failure means you're worthless human being And you never know when a failure is going to demonstrate that, you know what it can in any case There's chaos in order. They're the two great domains and you have to contend with chaos because too much of it overwhelms you, you drown in it, it's the flood.

And that happens when your life gets beyond you and you're somewhere where no matter what you do, nothing you want happens. It's a domain of terror and pain. Now, it's also a domain of unlimited possibility because outside of what you know is everything you don't know. And there's untold riches to be gathered from the domain of everything you don't know. But that doesn't mean it still needs to be managed. It's dangerous.

Now, the domain of order is the same way. It's like, if order becomes too extreme, then everything becomes cramped. It becomes totalitarian. And then that starts to pathologize. That's the dying king. The king who's dying for lack of the water of life is the old tyrant who can no longer see beyond his own presuppositions. And so my first book concentrated more on pathologies of chaos. And the second book more on pathologies of order.

And they're a matched set in that regarding so far as I was successful at doing that. And the liberal types, they're very sensitive to pathologies of order. And the conservative types are very sensitive to pathologies of chaos, but they're both right. It's just, there's no final solution to that problem. You're stuck with it. It's an eternal existential concern.

That's why mythological language is standard across people. It's no matter who you are, no matter when you live, you always have to deal with the fact that some things escape your competence. And no matter where you are, no matter who you are, you have to adapt to the fact of the existence of a value structure that's shared across a social group. It's the fundamental, so those are fundamental constituent elements of human experience. And we have symbols for them. And we all understand the symbols. So for example, in Pinocchio, I'm not going to go into this because it's too complicated, but no one

box at a puppet going to the bottom of the ocean and being swallowed by a whale. Why? It makes no sense. There's nothing about that that makes sense. Right? It's obviously not an empirical description of the objective world, but it's so clearly real that a four-year-old can follow it. It's a mystery. You know, the whale breeze fire in Pinocchio. It's a dragon. And why? Why is that? Well, we face dragons forever. That's what a human being is. It's a creature that faces the dragon. The dragon can burn you to a crisp, but it has, it has what you need. That's the world. It'll burn you up, but it has what you need. And so then the question is, how do you stop from getting burned up and get what you need? And the answer to that is that you mold yourself into the hero. And that's a religious story. And you must say, well, is it true?

And the answer to that is, it depends on what you mean by true. And, you know, that's a weasel answer in some ways, but it's not. Because it's such a deep question that it can't be put forth without discussing the definition of true. So it's as deep a question as what is true? Now it could be that I would say that part of the cultural war is a criticism of the motif of the hero. That's Derida's fellow-go-centrism.

Western culture is fellow-go-centric. I would say human culture is fellow-go-centric. I think Derida was wrong about that. It's human culture. It's man so to speak against nature. Although sometimes it's man against culture and sometimes it's man against man. It's man against nature. And we try and fess the hero. And maybe that story isn't true or isn't correct. But that's us. And if it isn't correct, well, then we're an evolutionary abortion because that's who we are.

And I would say, well, before you throw it aside, maybe you should try it. You don't have a better option anyways. And there are, what does it mean to try it? Mostly, I would say it means two things. It means to practice love. And that means assume that things are valuable and act according to that assumption. And it requires truth, which is don't say what you know to be untrue. And, you know, when I tried to unpack the first sentence of Genesis, in the context of the broader biblical narrative, what appears to be happening is that

there's a proposition that God is guided by love and uses truth to create. It's something like that. And maybe love is something like the wish that all being would flourish. There isn't a better story than that. What effect do you hope you're new book to have? I know that might seem like a lazy question, but I'm going to keep it broad. I just be interested to hear your thoughts, what would be successful effect for this book? Looking back 12 months from now, 24 months from now. Well, I would like, it would be lovely if it had the same effect on people as the last book appeared to have.

You know, I mean, it's comforting to me to read through my YouTube comments oddly enough because that isn't generally a place people would go for comfort. You know, untold numbers of people have said to me in person, but publicly in that way that they've put their lives together at least in some ways. They put their lives together, at least in some ways. You talked about Victor Frankl. When I wrote maps of meaning, I said, well, I was interested in malevolence. I was deeply affected by the accounts I'd read of what happened in the Second World War in Germany and what happened in Soviet Union and in China, these horror shows that characterized the 20th century.

Constrained malevolence. And so if you study malevolence, you start to understand what the opposite of that is. The opposite of malevolence is something like the hero's journey. You know, and it's easy to be cynical about that, but well, it's not that easy because if you're cynical about that, then you undermine your own life. And everyone knows this. This is the other thing that's so interesting. Everyone knows this.

You never teach someone you love to lie. You're always appalled if you have a son or daughter. You're always appalled if they don't tell the truth. You know in the deepest part of your heart that if you don't tell the truth, the world falls apart. And that's actually true. So the new book is beyond order. 12 more rules for life will flip that in the screen.

Not to be offensive. Thank you for sending it to me, but I personally like this one more than the first one. Are you hearing that a lot? I'm hearing that more than I expected, and I'm happy about that. I mean, you hope that each thing you do is somewhat better than the last thing you did

if you're fortunate. And it wasn't obvious to me that I couldn't tell if it was the same quality worse, better. I tried to make it better. And I would say that's the general response so far. Yay, it's like Michael Jackson putting out thriller and then putting out thriller too and thriller too is somehow better.

So yay for you, I love it. Okay, what we're going to do today is 12 questions with Jordan Peterson to celebrate 12 more rules. Are you ready? Everybody always celebrates more rules. Everybody always celebrates more rules. I love rules because then I get to break those rules just like you talked about with the Harry Potter characters. What are going to get into? In my last book, in Beyond Order, I talked a fair bit about Harry Potter. And a lot of the people who like to take pot shots at me took pot shots at that because,

I don't know, they think Harry Potter is beneath their notice or something. But I kind of noticed that JK were only made several billion dollars building the biggest entertainment enterprise of the decade. And Rose herself from single mother status, unemployed single mother status to richer than the queen, and then occupied every movie screen for like 10 years. Maybe something's going on there. While these complex characters, they play out mythology. So if religion disappears in the culture in general, it pops up in our stories instantly. And that's exactly what's happened in the Marvel universe.

And what happened with Harry? I mean, you can have Thor for God's sake. Thor is a god. Yeah, yeah. It's not even subtle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't get rid of these stories. They come back no matter what you do.

These stories come back. So what was what was JK Rowling doing with the with Harry Potter? Well, it's the battle between good and evil. I mean, Voldemort is Satan for all intents and purposes. Yeah. So it's it's the battle between good and evil. I mean, the second volume in particular is St. George in the dragon.

It's Bilbo in the dragon. Harry fights a giant snake that's under the castle. It's the same story as the Lord of the Rings. And that's the same story as what's the original story. Hobbit. Yeah, but far before that, well, the oldest story we have of that sort is a mess of Taimian creation myth where a god named Mardak attacks a giant dragon named Tiamat.

And that's one of the oldest religious tracks that we have. It's symbolic of humanity, right? The human being goes out there and encounters the terrible unknown, often in reptilian form, and that terrible unknown, well, that's why, that terrible unknown is often evil itself. And so in Christianity, you get this weird intermingling, for example, of the snake in the Garden of Eden with Satan.

It's not obvious why there should be a connection. Yeah, you snake, Satan. It's like, well, what's the worst snake? Yeah. It's not a snake. It snakes as such. Well, it's not snakes as such. It's predators as such.

Reptilean predators. Wait a minute. It's not reptilean predators as such. It's enemies. It's human enemies. It's the enemy in our own soul. That's the progression of the thought. Well, unbelievably sophisticated. How does it go from safely sophisticated?

How does it go from enemies to the enemies in our own soul? Well, who's your worst enemy if it's not you? Who's your biggest obstacle if it's not you? And who do you contend with more than anyone else if it's not you? And to the Harry Potter thing, Harry Potter has a piece of Voldemort in him? Yes, but that's the original sin doctrine recreated So it's also the case that he can't understand evil without it It's also part of what makes him sophisticated right because he's being touched by it. Yeah

So is that what we got to do is just copy the Bible? Like, we don't have a choice. Wait, what do you mean by that? It happens whether we want it to or not. I mean, the Bible aggregated itself over centuries, right? I mean, no human being directly oriented that. It's not something that could happen over thousands and thousands of years.

This is just the greatest hits. That's one way of thinking about it, yes. And each one of these hits taps into something innate to us. Yes, otherwise we wouldn't remember it. We wouldn't have conserved it. It wouldn't stick in our memory. It wouldn't structure the way we think. Let's dive into the book because actually so many of the things that we're talking about now

are sort of part and parcel to all of the chapters here. So chapter one, and what I really liked about this also is the way you organized it. The new topics, because one of the questions we would get often in the Q&A that you would get is, was there a 13th rule that you couldn't get in the book? And you actually mentioned this in the book

that you had, you had what, about 46 other, was it 46? 42. 42. You had 42. Yeah, the same as Douglas Adams answer to the universe, life, the universe and everything, 42 rules, which was actually a coincidence, but I thought it was comical in the aftermath.

But there's 42 rules. So now I've written about 20, I've written essays about on 24 of them. How did, when you got to 42, how long did you give it before you said, okay, 42's enough? Because I know you, you're pretty botical. I just did it, I just did it in an afternoon, the original list of rules. I was playing on Quora. I wrote about 40 answers for Quora, something like that, and I really haven't partake in that forum

for a long time now. I was investigating it and some kid had asked, what do you need to know in order to lead a good life or what's most important to know, something like that? And I thought, well, I'll take a crack at answering this and I made this list of 42 rules and it got very popular on Quora, much more popular, typical pre-do distribution.

Like that one answer got more views than all of why other answers put together. So I thought that was interesting. I touched something for some reason. Out of that, when I was asked by an agent who contacted me, Sally Harding, of cook agency. She asked me if I was interested in writing something more popular, and I knew that those rules had found an audience.

So that seemed to me to be a place to dive in. So anyways, I've only written about 24 of them. In the two books, I have them both here. You can see how they're structured. Yeah, it's beautiful. One's white and the other's black. They make a match set. You can read each of them independently. And one concentrates the first one. An antidote to chaos, 12 rules for life. An antidote to chaos does concentrate on the consequences of excess uncertainty. And the second book concentrates more on an excessive order.

Both of those are fundamental existential dangers as far as I'm concerned. And in this universe of value, in the world of value, there are two major domains. And one domain is the domain of order. And you can technically define it. The domain of order. And you can technically define it. The domain of order is where you find yourself when what you're doing produces the results you want. And that's a really

tight formulation because it gives you a particular idea of what a place and time is. A place and time you occupy is at any given moment is the place and time that's defined by your current goal. And you have a map of value that guides you through the actions that are necessary in that domain. And if the result is what you want, which brings motivation and emotion into the picture, then while you get what you need or want,

but you also validate your theory of existence, because it's good enough to produce the results that you desire. And given that you're fallible and that you don't know everything, you have to use proximal truth. And so something is, it's a pragmatic. It's a form of philosophical pragmatism. If you make a bridge and it stands up, It's a pragmatic. It's a form of philosophical pragmatism. If you make a bridge and it stands up, then you know how to make a bridge.

Why? Because the bridge stood up. Now maybe you overbuilt it. You could have built it more elegantly. But it's sufficiently true so that the bridge functions. And we're like that. We're like engineers. We're cobbling together solutions all the time.

And as long as those solutions work, we assume that we're right. Well, that's the domain of order. The domain of chaos emerges when you lay out a plan and into action and something other than what you wanted emerges. And sometimes that can be a catastrophe, an absolute catastrophe.

And your brain, our psychophysiological, our psychophysiology is actually adapted to those two domains. When something unexpected happens, all sorts of emotions and motivations break loose, fight and flight among them, anger among them, it gets disinhibited because when you don't know what's happening, you have to prepare for everything. So you get anxious and then you hyper-prepare which is extremely stressful. And so the domain of chaos is extremely stressful. In small doses it's exhilarating. And that's because, well, when you're where you don't know what's happening, you have the opportunity to learn and to expand your map. And so there's always an interplay between the domain of chaos and the domain of order,

but they can each pathologize. And the pathologies of uncertainty are more associated with anxiety and nihilism and depression. And where's the pathologies of order or more totalitarian? And then I would say as well, the liberal types, the more left-leaning types, are quite sensitive to pathologies of order. They don't like them.

That's the patriarchy. The patriarchy is the pathology of order. And it's symbolically masculine, something I've been, you know, taken to task for claiming, but the patriarchy itself, the idea of the patriarchy itself, is a symbol. The patriarchy is a symbol. That's why it has such power. And it's a symbol that refers to the domain of order. Now, the domain of order is protective as well as oppressive, but when it degenerates, it becomes oppressive. And I but when it degenerates it becomes oppressive.

And I would say it degenerates when it's based on power rather than competence, but it can be based on competence. The Marxist critics and the politically correct types, they insist that every element of the patriarchy is only a consequence of the imposition of order, a forceful imposition of order, it's all power. Well, no, no, it's not. When it degenerates, that's true. Because you can tell that because the thing is the domain of order will be upheld by those who inhabit it. If it's functional, if you have to use force, that's already an indication that it's become pathological, because people aren't playing voluntarily.

So would you say we're in a degenerative cycle right now, that the cycle seems more degenerative than say a building cycle, or you think that that's just the play that's always going on and you have to figure out your role in it. Well, I think the play is always going on. And I don't think the antidote to chaos isn't order. And the antidote to order isn't chaos. The antidote to both is the balancing of them, the active balancing of them.

And I do, you used to do this a lot. You would say the balance, the struggle between liberal and conservative. So people see me doing this all the time. I always credible. Jordan was talking about, he was talking about this. But so you think that's it. Well, it's really important. It's really important to understand that the antidote to chaos in the final analysis can't

just be ordered because order itself can degenerate. And so I believe that the antidote is active engagement with the world, honest, active engagement with the world, truth. And I think it's also truth motivated by love, which is a motif that runs through this second book in particular. And love is the desire for all things to flourish. You know, in Christ says that you should love your enemies. And that's an, what does that mean?

And it's really worth thinking about. You shouldn't wish your enemies harm. And it's like, and what I mean by that is that it would be better for everyone if they would conduct themselves so that they would flourish. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't defend yourself. It doesn't mean that soldiers aren't necessary or the police. It doesn't mean any of that. It's not a weak need statement. It means that if you have your self-pointed in the right direction, you don't wish an excess of

harmoned on the world. You wanted to flourish. That's love. So you weren't yourself that way. And I do believe that that requires a certain courage because the world is so flawed and so painful. There's so much suffering in it. It's very difficult to fall in love with it. You keep getting bounced off. You think this is so terrible that maybe it shouldn't even be, but that takes you down a very bad road. So, it's love first, and then truth serves that. And I do think that's the motif that runs through the old and new testaments, the combination of those two things. Love is love is the desire that being flourish. And I do believe that truth serves that.

Well, that's a... So, no, please finish your thought. Well, I also think that people find meaning in that. And everyone can answer this for themselves. It's like, you have to watch and you have to see where it is that you find the meaning that sustains your life. And I would say it's certainly not being my experience that people find that in deceit or hatred. I mean, they may be tempted by that. They may have the reasons for it, but everyone is ashamed of that and wishes it could be otherwise, Everyone is ashamed of that and wishes it could be otherwise, even if they don't know what to do about that. As you pointed out, I'm going to hold up these books. So this is the new book, Beyond Order, and it does concentrate on pathologies of structure and the previous book, which is 12 rules for life and antidote to chaos. And the underlying presupposition there is that

in our phenomenological landscape, so that's the world as we experience it, complete with emotions and motivations and dreams. And so the full range of human experience, including the subjective and the objective, let's say, can broadly be broken into two domains. And one is the domain of things that are beyond our grasp and reach. And that's the unknown. The unknown emerges when the unknown emerges, you tend to experience anxiety.

And then there's the known. And I define the known very specifically. And very carefully, the known is the place you are when what you're doing produces the results you want. And I say want, because that brings motivation and emotion into the game. So you're motivated to pursue something. You pursue it and what you want happens, not only do you get what you want, but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions. Now, if you, you know, imagine that you're, you know, you're lonely and you approach a young woman in a, in a social situation,

attempting to make some contact with her, you, you want to alleviate your loneliness. And so, you hope you make a good impression and you tell a joke, let's say in a relatively awkward manner and you get rebuffed, then you feel you're no longer where you control. You're no longer where you exercise control. That brings up all sorts of spectres immediately. It's like, well, why were you rebuffed? Well, maybe all women are to be despised. That's one theory. Maybe there's something deeply wrong with you. Maybe you're having an off day.

Maybe it wasn't a very good joke. And so when you don't get what you want, then a landscape of questions emerge. Questions emerge. And those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity. From the trivial, or I told the joke wrong,

to the profound, there's nothing desirable about me and I'll be alone for the rest of my life. Now, you asked about identity, and I used the example of a child's game, but I could go through an identity, and so I do this particularly in maps of meaning. And so, for example, let's say I'm sitting typing. Okay, we could decompose my identity.

So, at the highest level of resolution, I'm sitting typing. Okay, we could decompose my identity. So at the highest level of resolution, I'm moving my fingers. And so that could be my identity. I'm the thing that moves its fingers. And then slightly at a slightly broader level than that, I'm typing words. And at a broader level, I'm typing phrases and thinking them up and then sentences

and then paragraphs and then paragraphs and then chapters and then let's say full papers or books that's a productive unit. So I'm the author of a book or the author of a paper. That's an identity. But then that's nested inside for me. It would be nested inside being a clinical psychologist, being a professor, being a good citizen. And then that's nested inside something that's even broader than that.

And I would say that that's nested inside a cultural heroism. And I don't mean that specific to me. I mean that for everyone. That's the outermost level, whether you're playing out the role of a hero or adversary, say, that's the highest possible level of identity. That's the level at which fundamental morality is adjudicated. There isn't really anything beyond, outside that is, it's beyond us. It's the transcendent itself.

You're all of those at any one time. You're all of those levels of identity. Those are all practical. Those are the roles that you're playing in the world. All of those are a consequence of who you are, but in interplay, like in this situation with the child, all of that's negotiated with other people. And so if you have a functional identity,

you see if you have a functional identity, when you act it out in the world, then you get what you want and need. And if an identity doesn't do that, well, then you should either retool or your identity, or you retool the world. Your conception of the world? Well, if you're retooling your conception of the world, then you're retooling yourself. No, you can actually mean what a revolutionary does is try to bring the world into alignment

with their theory. A literary changeable. Yes, literally. Well, and we all do that to some degree because we are practical engineers, you know. I mean, not only do we perceive the world, but we also interact with it so that it does manifest itself in accordance with our desires. There's limits, obviously, to how far you can go or how far you should go with that. You know, and what are the limits? Well, there's practical limits. Nature won't do what you want it to unless you're very sophisticated in your application of your

knowledge and other people will object. So now you might say, well, you should forge forward regardless of their objection. You know, there are circumstances under which that's true. But generally speaking, that's not a very good idea. It certainly doesn't make you popular as a child And so that brings up one other issue. I would also say and this I developed this idea quite a bit in the new book You go from ego centrist as a child you have to go through this period where you're socialized as

a child and adolescent and that really means that you as a child and adolescent. And that really means that you allow your identity to be molded and shaped by the group. And you know, you think about how important peers, friends and peers are to children and adolescents. You know, your mother will say, when you're a teenager, well, if Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you too?

And you say, well, no, but the real answer is, well, probably if all your friends are there taunting you, you would in fact jump off the bridge. And not only that, generally speaking, you should, because it's your duty, it's your developmental duty as a child and a teenager to take your, your isolated self and turn it into a functioning social unit. Now, you could say, well, Peterson wants everybody to be a functional social unit, a robot, you know, a cog in the wheel. And I would say, well, that isn't where development stops.

It has to go through that period before you can emerge as a genuine individual, which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them. But not being able to abide by the rules is not anything like being a genuine creative individual. Those are not the same thing. And there's plenty of attempt to confuse the two things because it's much better if you can't follow the rules to view yourself as an avant-garde revolutionary than as a failure. And it's not like I don't know that social molding crushes, obviously it crushes. And everyone feels that. These are existential problems. Everyone deals with the tyranny

of culture and the fact that it does want you to be a certain way and not other ways and those ways might not be in keeping with your the deepest elements of your nature. Well tough luck for you. Because you're also the beneficiary of culture and so you have to offer it your pound of flesh. Now you shouldn't do that at the expense of your soul, but you shouldn't stay an immature child, either. And so this notion of identity that we're being fed is very, very, it's very thin. What are we being fed? Be very specific.

Well, there is the idea, for example, that your identity is whatever you say it is and that everyone else has to go along with that. No. That isn't how it works, partly because no one even knows how to go along with it. Like, let's say, just for example, that you're gender non-binary. Okay. What am I supposed to do about that? Man, I don't know. I hardly know what to do if the rules are already there. So let's say I grew up, I want to be heterosexual male. I want to find a woman, fall in love with her, raise a family, have children, have grandchildren. That's a game.

I know the rules to it, not well, because everyone's a failure at that. You know, it's very difficult, but at least you kind of know what the goal is, and so does the person you're with. Well, you leap out of that, which is already terribly difficult, you leap out of that into completely unknown territory, saying that I'm presenting yourself as something other than those categories, leaves everyone around you, and you completely bereft of direction. Let me put it in words that I get from your material. So, what I heard you just say, tell me if I'm wrong, is part of the negotiation that we do from the time we are little kids and figuring out that play

we're up on the bridge. We jump maybe because we want to, you know, fit in with our peer group. It, there is a sense of order to that. Now you've been very careful and it will drive me crazy if people respond to this interview as if you have not already illustrated that it is the balance between two opposing forces. But so we need enough order so that somebody can find their way through the world. And that many, I think a big part of the reason that your work has resonated so profoundly with people is there.

Excuse me, they are left in a world where they don't know how to move forward in a way that serves them spiritually, practically as well for sure. And so hey everybody. Both of those, both of those practically shades into spiritually as you move up into the broader reaches of identity. You know, and look, this, this, see, one of the things I really laid this out in maps of meaning, it took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion. So what happens is that if you act out your identity, if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn't happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action.

And the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire, and now you're in the forest, and maybe you're naked. And so what do you do then? And the answer is what you don't know what to do. So what do you do when you don't want? Know what to do. And the answer is you prepare to do everything. And the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining

psychophysiologically. Like it hurts you. And there's an immense physiological literature detailing the cost of exactly that kind of response. And so people need people and animals. People stay where what they do has the results they want. That's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions is because you know that, for example, even in small ways, let's say you're a country music officiagnato and you're hanging around with your cowboy-hatted buddies and you throw on a tape and everyone says, great tunes, man. bodies and you throw on a tape and everyone says great tunes man and you you know you're happy about that but you know you throw on a piece by Chakowski and you're you're in a different subculture and who the hell are you and people

the people in your group will say man who listens to music like that and like that's a trivial example in some sense, but I believe it's one that everyone can resonate to. We like, it's very hard on us not to be where we know what, we know that what we want is going to happen. We hate that, we hate that and no wonder. So, and then, you know, there are varying degrees of that, obviously, you can really be where you don't know what's going to happen, or you can only be there to some degree.

But by and large, by and large, we're conservative creatures, even if we're liberal in temperament. There is not, we can't tolerate that much uncertainty. And you might ask, well, why in the answer is, well, because you can be hurt, pain, you can be damaged, you can become intolerably anxious and you can die. So it's no wonder you're sensitive or very sensitive to negative emotion. And so our identities, right, functional identity regulates your emotion, but you do that in concert with other people. Doing things for other people is actually more rewarding than virtually anything else you can do.

You know, when you hear you should be of service to other people. Well, if you actually watch yourself, you pay attention to yourself, and you do something that helps someone else and it genuinely helps them. I defy you to find another experience that is that satisfying. It's actually quite stunning how satisfying that is. And so that's a very useful thing to realize. And why is helping another person the most satisfying thing for probably most people when they're if they're you know out of their Ego of like I want to buy more things to make me happy in this moment. Why is that such a satisfying thing for human beings? There's no better strategy for there's no better life strategy. I mean imagine I could give you a quick sort of technical example.

So imagine I take two people and I say, okay, I'm going to give you $100 and you have to give some of it to the person right beside you. And they can either agree or disagree with the split, but if they disagree, you don't get anything. Okay, so a classical economist would say that the person should take the hundred, offer the person next to them a dollar, and the person should accept it, because why not they get a dollar instead of nothing? And that's the solution.

But what happens is that if you don't offer that other person something close to 50-50, they're likely to tell you to go to hell. Yes, very... You think you get nothing. You get nothing too. You think, well, why would people do that? Because they just reject 50 dollars and who cares? And the answer is, well, we don't just play one game with other people. We play a repeating game. And so, imagine we did this. So imagine it's a crowd, and they're all watching you. And so imagine we did this. Imagine it's a crowd and they're all watching you. And I offer you $100 and you have to share it with the person next to you. And you say, would you like to take $70? And the person says, well, I'm not sure that's fair to you, but if it's okay, yes. But then everyone else sees that. And now they all have an opportunity

to pick who they're gonna play with next. Well, you're not gonna get picked last, are you? Remember what you told me? You didn't wanna get picked last, right? I did not. Okay, so what you did was you turned yourself into an athlete. A machine.

Okay. I always get perverse. Okay, great. So, but imagine we expand that game. Yes. And we say, you wanna be the person that everyone wants to play with. Yep.

Well, then all you have in your whole life is invitations to play. Well, how, and how are you going to be that person? Be productive, straight forward, generous. Make everyone else better around you. I'm not gonna wanna play with you. Absolutely. So, there you go. And then to want to play with you. Absolutely. So there you go.

And then you get to play. Yeah, exactly. Well, how is that not the best possible deal? It's clearly. See, so the reason, if the ethical argument is put properly, it is by far the most compelling argument. It's like, if you want wanna have everything you could possibly want and more than be a good person,

the better a person you are, the more likely that is to happen. That doesn't mean that you're completely protected against getting cut off at the knees, but there's no better strategy. That's it. And you can even think about it selfishly, and I talk about this to some degree and beyond order.

Let's say you, let's say that I, you want to be selfish. You think that's the best possible strategy. Why should I care about others? Okay, let's say you should only act in your own best interest. Well, then it's like, well, what's your best interest? Well, what does interest mean and what does you mean? What's in your best interest? Your best interest, three mysteries. What's your, what's best? What's interest? Okay. Well, there's you, but you aren't just you right now.

You're you and you tomorrow and you next week and you next month and you in five years and you in 10 years and you when you're a pensioner, you're a community of selves stretched across time. And so if you were enlightened and selfish, you would act in a manner that would benefit that entire community across time. And I don't think that's any different than acting on the best possible part for other people. I think they soon as human beings discovered the future, we were no longer singular individuals. We're instantly each a community.

And then the community ethic prevails. And the community ethic is, I want to win in a way that makes you win. That's the best possible victory. If I win, I can put else wins, and what's the point? Well, you think it's a zero sum game. It's either best possible victory. If I win, I get up on else wins and what's the point? Well, you think it's a zero sum game. It's either you or me, or maybe I want the comparative status. But I would say even if you want the comparative status, let's say you just be motivated by that. What would confer upon you even hypothetically more status than to be the most popular person

well-being chosen for games? I mean, you think about it, just think for a second about it, because it struck me that biographical piece, Alfred Adler, who is the psychologist that I talked you about earlier, he said one of his claims was that many people have a a stark memory that sets the course for their life. That's true. Right. Of the instance. Yeah.

And you have exactly that. So Adlerian psychology would be of great interest to you. I suspect. But partly you see what happened was you had a true revelation. You thought, if I'm being picked last, something is wrong. And that's absolutely right. It's unbelievably right. And you played it out first in the athletic domain, but you have to start somewhere. So that's a good place to start. Jockel was telling me when we talked this week,

he's this tough character, man. You know, and he could have, and I'm not telling tales out of school here. He could have been a criminal, no problem. And he knows that perfectly well. And I'm not saying that as a slur on his character, partly because I believe the Nietzschean dictum that a lot of morality is just cowardice. Whatever he might be, he's not a coward. And so, and just because you obey the laws doesn't mean you're moral, just might mean you're afraid. In any case, so the question is, well, what socialized this brute?

So the question is, well, what socialized this brute? Well, he was taught in the Navy SEALS. Take care of your team. That's your fundamental purpose. And he noted, and we had a long discussion about this, the successful guys, man, you know they've got your back. Right, you know that above all. Yeah, and if, and if, if, if you aspire to a leadership position among those brews, let's say, and you aren't someone they know to have your back, they're not going to make it. Yeah. You're not going to make it. And so this is why the discussions of power that are so prevalent in modern culture bothered me so much. It's like, you think male hierarchies are predicated on power?

You really think that? They are when they've gone rotten. But when they're not rotten, that's not what they're predicated on at all. The capacity to exercise power, that's really important. You need that. It has to be part of you for you to be admirable. It's like you could be a badass son of a bitch. Yes, I see that.

And that way I'm somewhat intimidated by you. And that's actually a testament to your moral virtue that you have enough force and power to be intimidating. But then if you can encapsulate that and take that potential for power and harness it to this broader good, well, that's unstoppable. And a real functional hierarchy. That's what it is. Yeah.

Your book strike a cool, strike a cool with me because I see them as a way, especially for a man as a guide to how to be successful, as a way to make the most of your life, to develop your life, to take responsibility and all these kind of things. And one of the things that I've seen with men of my age, I'm in my late 30s, I know I look younger, you don't have to say it, but you... But in my late 30s, I see a lot of men struggling with what does it mean to be successful? When we look at that word success, what does that mean to you and how would you inspire men of my age and younger? It's too late, really.

It's too late for me, but to actually become a success. Well, first of all, I think it's really worth thinking about what success means. And I tried to do that a lot in both the books. It's really fun to make other people successful. Like, this is one of the reasons capitalism, I would say, gets a really bad rap, and an unfair rap. Like the people I've known who have been successful in the capitalist enterprise, and a lot of them are entrepreneurs rather than managers, let's say, just, that's the population I've

been exposed to. And this was the same among the professoriate for that matter. One of the great pleasures, the people that I've seen who I respect, torque was in mentoring. And so, don't underestimate the radical satisfaction that's associated with helping other people develop. One of the reasons that good professors, well, and good businessmen love to be in the position they're in is because they can identify young people who are promising and open up doors of opportunity to them.

It's really intrinsically motivating. And so, you know, when you think of capitalism, for example, or success as only a competitive enterprise, that's a real mistake because there's that aspect of it that's there everywhere in every enterprise I've ever seen. So real success means you're successful in a way that makes other people around you successful. You need both of those. That's also really good for your conscience because then you're not working at the expense

of anyone else, quite the contrary, right? You're lifting the tide that lifts all boats, and maybe you're simultaneously elevating your own relative status, but it's really, it's not unreasonable to put that in as a constraining requirement. It has to help other people, well, it helps you. And I would say the way we're wired, now some people are more selfish than others, but I would still say human beings are unbelievably social and reciprocal. That's built into us at an incredibly deep level. And it can go wrong.

And we can get cynical and malevolent and bitter and work at counter purposes to it. But and work at counter purposes to it, but to be of service to your fellow man, your family members, your broader community, there are virtually no pleasures that compete with that. That's partly why it is useful to do a critique of mere materialism and materialistic satisfactions are pretty fleeting. They're not non-existent, but they don't have the deep and lasting satisfaction of successful mentoring, for example, in the relationships that build out of that. So I don't think there is any success at all without moral success. In fact, I think that success without moral success is actually a form of torture. You know, if you don't, let's say you don't feel you deserve anything,

because you know that you're being, you're not being a good person. And that's your own judgment. And let's assume that you're accurate. You're not, because some people will judge themselves far too harshly. But let's just say, you know, you have reasons to have your conscience bothering you. And you're not successful. Well, at least you don't feel that continual injustice

of that. You think, well, I'm a son of a bitch, but I don't have anything. But then let's say you're successful. Well, you know that's all you'll gotten. How can that do any? And then maybe you have to rationalize constantly to live with it.

Everything you collect around you is nothing but a source of torment and a constant reminder that you're criminal in your fundamental orientation that you've ruined people on your mad scramble to the top. Jesus, you don't want that. You seriously don't want that.

And no amount of relative material status is going to even come close to rectifying that. You want your conscience to be clean, clear. You want your interpersonal relationships to be honest. You want to be clean, clear. You want your interpersonal relationships to be honest. You want to be reliable, independent. And if you can add exciting and adventurous to that, so much the better. But success means to be successful means to be good. And you say that success will mean to be good. Isn't that a problem whereby in society, particularly our society,

where people judge success, they judge it on the requirement of property, material goods and possessions. And therefore, there's that imbalance where someone can be morally good and a fantastic person, but in a materialistic society seem to be a failure because they haven't acquired a great deal. Well, that definitely is a problem when you have productive people. but in a materialistic society seem to be a failure because they haven't acquired a great deal. Well, that definitely is a problem when you have productive people. That's a problem in how the month, it's a measurement problem in some sense.

You know, economic success is generally associated with intelligence and conscientiousness. So there is a rough correlation between ability, let's say even moral ability and success. Now, I'm not making too much of that, but I do know. Look, if you're gonna be a successful businessman, especially across business person, across multiple dimensions, multiple enterprises,

you bloody well better be honest, because it's gonna catch up with you, man. And the probability that you're going to be a successful crook multiple times is very, very low. You can do that, but you have to move constantly. Right? So your reputation doesn't keep up with you. So there is some association between success and moral virtue, thank God. But it's a rough approximation, and there's plenty of exceptions. It's very hard for creative people to monetize their productivity, for example.

So you have unrewarded virtue, and that's a flaw of the monetary system. It means we haven't been able to, and you might say the same thing applies to such things as our inability to pay homemakers. Now why don't we pay homemakers? Well it's because what they produce isn't monetizable for 20 years. And our economic system isn't sophisticated enough to figure out how to pay people for returns that are that pushed off into the future. That doesn't make it right,

but we don't know how to fix it technically. Right? I mean, if you're a venture capitalist and you want to invest in something, you want a 10-fold return on your investment within a handful of years, you can't afford to invest over a 20-year period. And so that makes it really rough on homemakers

because we're not sophisticated enough to monetize it. So it's a measurement problem, but unless you can figure out a better way of doing it, you're stuck with what we've got. I got to ask you how many, how many more rules are there overall because it's starting to add up. Well, originally there was a list of 42. I published that on Quora. Mm-hmm, I've heard that. Yes, and so in principle, there's 18 more, but of course, you know, there's an infinite

number of necessary rules. I don't think I'll publish any more rule books, however. Yeah, I'm just letting you know, as someone who's trying to abide by the rules, we're doing our best out here, and we're glad that there's more, but it's also, it's a lot, it's a lot to do, you know, it's a lot. Yeah, yeah, well, and you can only beat the same horse so many times. Yeah, well. I don't think that's actually a saying, but now I've invented it.

Well, I've seen, so I grew up in Samaritan. It had a little bit of mild animal cruelty about us growing up, not them real heavy but you know, probably I'm glad some of it wasn't documented at the time actually.