The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Be precise in your speech

Episode Date: September 8, 2019

Jordan's 12 Rules for Life tour continues from Regina SK. Recorded August 14, 2018. Dr. Peterson focuses on Rule 10.

Welcome to season 2, episode 25 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator. I just finished a week long fast, salt and water, only. The reason my voice sounds like this is because I was on a plane for 8 hours, so I'm a tad jet lag. Anyway, the fast was pretty easy. It was pretty easy going from an all-meat diet and eating once a day to that. As long as I kept my salt intake up, I was fine.

I broke my fast with some bone broth and a bit of steak, and as soon as I had my first bite of steak, which tasted absolutely incredible after not eating for a week. Dad goes, When I did my 10 day fast, I was like, excuse me, a 10 day fast. Now is when you mention that. Wait to tell me after I just took a bite of steak. Probably because he knows I'd go 11 days just to say I'd done one longer than him. Mom's most recent scan came back clean again. Still cancer-free. She's gaining weight and looking better and better.

Things are looking bright. Please enjoy this podcast, a 12 Rules for Life lecture from Regina Saskatchewan, recorded on August 14, 2018. This podcast is titled Be Precise in Your Speech. When we return, a 12 rules for life lecture by Jordan Peterson. Please welcome my father, Dr. Jordan Peterson. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm very fond of this province having spent much time here. I lived here when I was a little kid. I lived in Nippon for a good while. There we go. It's a very enthusiastic place, Nippon. And my parents and have a cabin up at

Little Bear Lake, which is north of Prince Albert. So I'm going up there for about a week to hide as much as I can and think for a while, which would be a good thing. If you're talking to people a lot, you should think some. That's a good strategy. So it's a pleasure to be here and thank you all very much for coming. So I'm going to briefly run through the rules in 12 rules for life. I think mostly to warm myself up and maybe to summarize them a little bit. And then there's one I want to concentrate on tonight at Rule 10, which is be precise in your speech. And I've been thinking about that a lot.

I started writing my next book while I've started that a while back, but I I got back into it this week and I'm elaborating on some of the ideas in that chapter and so I'm going to discuss those with you because I think it's it's important. I like to use these lectures as an opportunity to think. Now, I think maybe that's why people enjoy them, at least in part, because there's actually something to be said for participating in the process of thinking, you know, even if you're doing that as an audience.

It's still part of the process to see how concepts can be formulated and communicated and maybe to some degree on the fly. So I'll tell you about the rules first in 12 rules for life, but I'll start with a bit of a preamble. So if you make a set of rules, guidelines, let's say, there's some rules for the rules. If you offer someone a set of rules, one of the rules for the rules is that the rules can't contradict one another, right? Because what good are they if one rule contradicts the other rule, then you can't follow both.

It's actually one of the pitfalls of making rules, is that it's very difficult to come up with rules that don't contradict one another at least in some circumstances. And when I was writing 12 rules for life, while it was originally a list of 42 rules, which I had posted on a website called Quora, and if you want to see all 42 rules, you can go to Quora and see them. And I was going to write short essays on all 42, and then I started working on them, and it turned out that they weren't particularly short the essays, because I had more to say, or more needed to be said, I suppose, than I had originally presumed. So I think I called them down to a set of 25 and then 16 and then 12.

called them down to a set of 25 and then 16 and then 12. And there was a reason for selecting the 12 because, of course, I put them in a book. And a book should be an integral unit, right? It shouldn't be, it shouldn't just consist of, well, it can consist of unrelated essays, but that isn't what I wanted. I wanted a book that had an underlying theme, let's say. And so what that implies is that there's a, I have to stay back on this stage here. What it implies is that there has to be some underlying unity or tendency towards unity that's manifesting itself in all the rules. Because otherwise you couldn't make something approximating a coherent narrative across

all of them. You couldn't string them together into a collection that made sense. And so you could say that if you have a diverse array of rules or principles, and they're not contradictory, and they fit together somehow then they're pointing towards some kind of underlying unity. And the rules are an expression of that underlying unity or that underlying perhaps moral principle. That might be another way of thinking about it. Obviously, rules for life are moral principles, moral principles being guidelines to both perception and action, how to look at the world

properly, let's say, and how to act in the world properly. And so the 12 rules are a pointer to something that's more singular, but much more complicated and sophisticated, something that isn't easy to encapsulate in words. And so I'll list the 12 rules first and maybe make a few comments on how they're linked. And then I want to talk to you about rule 10. Rule 10 is be precise in your speech. And we're going to focus on that one tonight because I've got some things to think about in relationship to that rule. So rule one, that's stand-up straight with your shoulders back and it's a simple rule in some sense, it talks about how to hold yourself. And you could say that the injunction

to stand up straight with your shoulders back is, well, it's a way of looking presentable in the world. My wife is a massage therapist and she's very very attuned to people's posture And she's really taught me a lot about watching people in their posture And you know if you walk down the street and now maybe you won't be able to stop yourself from doing this And it's probably a good thing you see all sorts of people who are really hunched over and and they're looking at the ground and and they're often sometimes attractive people but their posture is so contorted, I would say, that it speaks badly of them, I suppose, or it speaks worse of them than could be spoken

of them. The injunction to stand up straight with your shoulders back is it's a description of how to present yourself properly in the world physically sort of to maximize to maximize what you've been given let's say but it's also an injunction to a certain kind of courage because you know human beings were very strange animals because of course we walk on two legs and that means the most vulnerable surfaces of our body are actually exposed, unlike animals that go on four legs, which to that. Of course, we all wear clothes and clothing is essentially a human universal. It's very rare to find a culture extraordinarily rare to find a culture

that doesn't use clothing. It's very old invention. And these strange creatures that are also aware that we're naked, strangely enough, which doesn't seem to occur to other animals. Of course, most of them have fur, but not all of them. They're not aware of their own nakedness. They're not aware of their own vulnerability. That's the way to think about that. And so, but we are. And so for us to stand up straight with our shoulders back is to present our vulnerability to the world. And that's actually an act of courage, right? Because walk to crouch defensively or to shy away, let's say, from manifesting that

vulnerability in the world, that's a shrink away from life. And I mean, it's not surprising that you might want to shrink away from life. Life can be unbelievably brutal and is, Life can be unbelievably brutal and is, in fact, unbelievably brutal. And the fact that you might not want to confront that full body, let's say, is not surprising, but it's not helpful. That's the thing. And there's a paradoxical, there's a paradox in that. It's a deep paradox, and it's something I would say that all the 12 rules point to is that the willingness to confront the catastrophe of life voluntarily is simultaneously the, what would you call it? The secret to dealing with that vulnerability and transcending it at the same time. And that's a very deep truth. Life is tragic. And we make things worse because we're often malevolent. But the best way to

deal with that, both psychologically and practically, is to accept it and to expose yourself to it voluntarily. And that's a clinical truism, by the way. I'm not saying this lightly. One of the things that clinical psychologists of all different academic persuasions and schools of thought, one of the things they've all come to agree on is that you get stronger by voluntarily exposing yourself

to the obstacles in your path that frighten you. And so that's a very interesting concept, and it's a deep concept because you don't really know where it ends. If you can get stronger in small ways by exposing yourself to things that you're slightly afraid of, how strong could you get if you were willing to expose yourself to things that you were terrified of? And the answer to that is a lot stronger than you think, because it is the case that there is a potential that resides within us. And I don't think this is merely metaphoric language that responds to challenge

with the development of strength. That's our potential, let's say. And that's true, partly because you learn when you confront things that you don't understand and that you're afraid of. So you become more informed and more skillful, but also because you are characterized by a very deep biological potential, some of which is coded invisibly in some sense in your genetic structure. And that doesn't manifest itself until you, until you stress yourself voluntarily. So, you know, if you put yourself in new situations that are beyond you, to some degree, then your genes code for new proteins and make new structures in your brain and your nervous system. So, more of you that there's more of you that meets the eye

that can still be unlocked. And the way you unlock that is by requiring it to be unlocked, not by wishing that it would be unlocked. You have to put yourself in this situation because otherwise what's in you won't emerge. And so, well, that's rule one. Rule two is make friends with people who want the best for you. And that's another pointer, I would say. And it's an interesting rule, I think, because it requires you, if to follow that rule, requires you to determine what might be the best for you. And that's actually, well, that's actually a very, that's an extraordinarily difficult problem,

like what exactly is best for you. It's not what's easiest. I mean you think about if you have a child you have someone that you love and you want the best for them. You don't say to them, well you should just do what's easiest. You don't say that, you know. You encourage them instead to take on burdens that exceed their current capability. That's associated with rule one. And to surround yourself with people who want the best for you, so to make that a condition for friendship, then is to make the assumption that you have something of value toclivity for catastrophe and malevolence that's part and parcel of life.

I mean, it's certainly the case that you might doubt to what degree you're capable of making things better if you're doubting your own validity, but very few people doubt their ability to make things worse. And we can certainly make things really much worse. No matter how bad they are, there's some damn fool thing you can do and probably have to make a painful situation much more painful than it needs to be. You know, if you're laying in bed at night feeling guilty, which is a relatively common occurrence for people, you can generate a virtual litany of events in your life where you made a decision, maybe that you even knew to be wrong, that made a bad situation worse.

So to bring out the best in yourself is to at least to cease doing that, right, is to stop making things worse. And because we can make things so much worse than they could be, it's actually really important that you set yourself up so that you aren't inclined to make things worse. And partly what that means is to be around people who would just assume that the best in you was able to manifest itself and to make that a reasonable precondition for friendship. And as an obligation, as a moral obligation to yourself, and perhaps to your friends as well, Rule 3 is, Rule 2, sorry, Rule 2 is treat yourself as if you're someone, I got those two confused,

Rule 2 is treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. Rule three is make friends with the people who want the best for you. To treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping is a variant of the same idea. So it's pointing in the same direction. And it's predicated on the idea that, well, you know, if you know someone, if you have a family member, a sibling, a child, a parent, and you care for them, which hopefully you do, if you're fortunate, then they feel the same way about you, generally speaking. If you care for someone, you assume that there's something about them that's intrinsically

valuable. And generally that's a reciprocal relationship. You know, you certainly don't make your father, your mother happy. If you care for them but care nothing for yourself, they're not going to be the least bit. They're going to worry very much about you if that's the situation that you're in. And so there's a reciprocity in treatment

that implies that just as other people, especially the people you love, because that's where it's the most evident, just as those people have intrinsic value, then you have intrinsic value as well. And if you have intrinsic value, then it's incumbent on you, with regard to responsibility,

to treat yourself as if you're someone that's worthy of help. And that's a harder thing than you might think, I would say. You know, we hear a lot about how selfish people are. I don't really think that's true. I think many people, perhaps not most, treat other people better than they treat themselves. They certainly often treat their pets better than they treat themselves. Which is not a good thing, although it's good for the pets, I suppose. It's very useful to consider yourself in the same light that you would consider someone

that you cared for, and also to consider that a moral obligation. And so that's how all those three rules point, let's say in the same direction. Rule four, that's compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. And that's also a rule that involves the point of it all. You need to have an ambition because you need to act in the world and in order to act in the world you have to direct your action. In order to direct your action you have to act towards some end and in order to have an end you have to have an ambition unless you're trying to make things worse which we already dealt with that hypothetically. You're trying to make things better so

you have a point, you're aiming at something, you have an ambition. And there's danger in that because if you have an ambition, it's certainly possible that there are other people in the world that you might compare yourself to, that have gone farther in the attainment of that ambition than you. It's almost inevitably the case, no matter what dimension of value you determine to pursue, the probability that there's someone out there who's better at it than you are is extraordinarily high.

And so that can lead you to become jealous and envious and bitter, and that's just the start and that seems like a bad idea because if you're bitter and Envious and that's just a start then you have all the more reason to try to make things worse instead of better so You need to be able to Hold an ambition in mind to give some meaning to your life, to give your life a point. Let's say without falling prey to that terrible catastrophe of comparison that might emerge if you're matching your attainment to someone else, you might say, well, who then should you compare yourself to?

I think this is something that you really want to figure out once you especially once you are hitting your late 20s or or your older than that When you're young comparing yourself to other people although it can still be bitter is someone more justified because Young people are more the same Young people are more the same than older people are more the same than older people, or as you get older you differentiate from other people, you get more and more unlike other people, because you've accrued your own peculiar experience, and you have your own peculiar hang-ups and weaknesses, but also your own peculiar strengths, and so you become a more singular person.

And as you become a more singular person, because you're less comparable to other people, comparing yourself on some dimension of evaluation to someone else becomes less and less worthwhile and enterprise. Because, and you see this, you know, we often put certain people up in the spotlight, let's say, as exemplars of a certain kind of attainment, they might be sports stars or they might be movie stars or they might be people who are famous for other reasons. And we see there, there's stellar performance along that single dimension and we imagine well what would life be like if that good fortune or ability was ours and it's easy to

imagine that being nothing but positive, you know, someone who's very good at one thing has a life that's very good across all conceivable dimensions. And that's actually almost never true. You know, if you, it doesn't matter who the person is, regardless of their talents, you don't have to scratch very far beneath the surface to see the underlying tragedy and trouble in their life. And so even that kind of stellar performance is, well, something that we should all be appreciative of, let's say, but no final protection against the difficulties that are part and parcel of existence. So comparing yourself to someone else is not all that helpful because what the hell do you know about them fundamentally?

Not very much and it maybe could easily be the case that if you knew the whole story well there may still be elements of their life that you'd like to have for your own but you'd find that things were much more complex than they appear on first glance. Instead, it makes more sense to compare yourself to the only person that you really are comparable to, which is you. And it is very reasonable, I think, and also quite motivating, because it's a game you can actually win and

Make progress at the same time to take stock of yourself the way you are now and to assume that in the upcoming days and weeks and months or perhaps hours even You could be slightly better than you are right now And that's a fair game because you have all the advantages and disadvantages that you have And that's a fair game because you have all the advantages and disadvantages that you have. So you're a good comparison. And you can make real progress using yourself as a baseline. And that progress is actual. Like it is actually possible for you to be a better person than you are right now. And I would say, well, it's also possible to do that incrementally in movements that aren't overwhelming, that

you can in fact manage. I would also say, and this is a useful thing to know too, that part of the meaning that sustains people in life through the hard times in life is actually to be found in the meaning that manifests itself as a consequence of incremental ethical improvement, moral improvement. And I'll make a case for that. But I'm very interested in the phenomenon of meaning, you know, as something that people experience as a reality, because, you know, now and then you get engaged in something that's meaningful, and sometimes you're get engaged in something that's meaningful and sometimes you're not

engaged in something that's meaningful in which case life gets rather dull and dry. But you can be fully engaged in something that's meaningful. It's not really something of your choice, generally speaking. It's something that happens to you. So meaning is a kind of instinct. It's an instinct towards moral self-development as far as I can tell. And so if you're incrementally improving in a direction that's optimized for you, then you'll find the process of incremental improvement deeply meaningful.

And one of the things that's fascinating about that is that sense of engaged meaning that accompanies the movement towards a better you is actually a pretty good antidote for the suffering that's intrinsic to life. You know, because you're not going to get rid of the suffering, that's for sure, but you might be able to make it something that you could, well, perhaps celebrate that might be asking a bit much, but at least tolerate or at least face without bitterness and resentment. Nietzsche, the philosopher, the German philosopher, said, he who has a why can bear any how. And that's a very nice phrase. And the idea is that, well, if the goal is of sufficient worth and the pathway there of sufficient value, then the fact that it's difficult becomes acceptable.

And that's something that's very much worth knowing as well. So, compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today That's that's also an injunction to humility, I would say no because It to do that also requires that you take stock of yourself and you see where you fall short Which is a useful thing, you know You don't necessarily want to do that as a consequence of the judgment of other people That's really not what I'm talking about although that can be helpful because other people can point out your shortfalls and sometimes they're accurate.

That means they're actually doing you a favor because if you come up short in some manner, then you'll pay for that as you move through life, right? Because life is very difficult. If you're not everything that you could be, then there will come a time when there's so much pressure on you that the part of you that's missing is just what you would have needed to get through that situation. And so to compare yourself to who you were yesterday, and to take stock of yourself is to lay out your tools and your armament in some sense and to see if you're if you're ready to take on the world in its in its full difficulty and to see where you're not yet sufficient and then potentially to work on that and that's a very

useful thing to do. Rule five, don't let your children do anything that makes you just like them. I liked the way that that rule is phrased because it does make people laugh. Well, first of all, you're not really supposed to admit that children can be dislikable, although they certainly can. When you were children, there were children you disliked, and there's no reason to assume that your judgment was completely warped. And even as adults, you have, you know people who have children that, well, they you don't like and maybe they're your own children. It's possible.

That's more common than you might think as well. And it's unfortunate. You don't want to let your children be people that you dislike, because if you dislike them, then other people will dislike them. And it's actually your job, your moral obligation. The point of being a parent, let's say, to help your children determine how to manifest themselves in the world so that other people face them with a welcoming attitude.

There isn't anything that you can do that's better for your children than not. Let's say you teach them how to play properly, how to share, how to engage in reciprocal interactions. Why do you do that? Well, so that they have friends, right? And friends are the primary source of socialization, by the way, once your child is about four,

you're the primary source of socialization up to the age of four. But by the time your child is four, then it's their peers that become the primary agent of socialization. And so your job is to, at least in part, as a parent, is to help your child learn how to manifest themselves in the social world so that other children are lining up to be their friends. And then wherever they go, they have friends, and then the friends help socialize them, and that makes them sophisticated and socially capable, and all of that.

And that's a very good thing to have happen to your children. And then also if your children aren't dislikable, let's say by adult standards, well that's also helpful, partly because they're gonna have to deal with adults and adults hold all the cards. And so if your children know how to react to adults, so that adults react to them properly, positively.

And most adults will react to children positively if they're given a bit of a chance. Child has to go out of his way or her way to be obnoxious enough to turn off an adult, because almost everyone, no matter how beat up and tough and be dragged by the world and even resentful, it's very very very few people who don't have a soft spot in their heart for a child. And so if you can help your children determine how to maintain that intrinsic attractiveness because of their response to adults which would be engaging and open and with a certain amount of trust, then adults will also interact with them properly and open up the world to them.

And so that's a very, and that means that you're trying to teach your child a way of being in the world that's of maximal value to the people around them. And there's lots of people who are going to be around your child and every one of those people is broadcasting a message to your child about how to act in the world for optimal return, let's say all things considered and

If you can help your child figure out how to be a good sport, let's say which is a good way of thinking about it to play the game properly Then you do them a great favor and you help point them in the right direction in the world rule six that's get your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And that's an injunction against bitterness. Again, I would say one of the things I've spent a lot of time studying people who do terrible things, some of them authoritarians, some of them, the more casual sort of, of what would you say, vengeful, arrogant, deceitful, criminal who performs actions like shooting up a high school or an elementary school in the more rep, in the even more reprehensible category. And those are people who have decided

that there's something fundamentally corrupt about the structure of the world itself and are out for nothing but revenge. And they have their reasons, generally speaking, as do most people. I read a famous psychologist once, I think, who said, everyone has a reason for suicide, and it perhaps that's slightly pessimistic. But I don't really think it is, because people's

lives are very difficult, and you see this when people become depressed, they can think about times in their lives where the difficulty was almost insuperable, and that that was enough to make them doubt the validity of continuing with their own life. You can go to far darker places than that if you're inclined and unlucky, let's say I think perhaps you have to be both, and to not only doubt the value of your own life, but to doubt the value of life itself or maybe even of existence itself, and to become hateful and vengeful in relationship to the structure of being itself, and really to aim your weaponry at God.

There isn't a better way of putting it, whether you're religious or not. There's depths of hatred that are so deep that that language is the only language that properly captures it. And it seems to me that instead of blaming the structure of the world for the seeming inadequacies of being that it's much more appropriate, as outlined, let's say in Rule 4, to take stock of your own inadequacies using your own judgment and to think and to just just ask yourself this question. This is a useful question. Before I judge everything that exists, is it genuine? Is it genuinely the case that I have taken full advantage of every opportunity that has been granted to me? Because that's really the fundamental question. You know, you have a field of possibility open in front of you, whatever you could do

with your life and whatever you could be with your limitations and your abilities. And it takes tremendous effort, of course, to take advantage of all those opportunities and also, let's say, a certain degree of good fortune, but it's certainly not the case that you're justified in criticizing the structure of existence itself, even social institutions for that matter, I would say, until you have done everything you possibly can to put yourself in order. And it's actually an optimistic doctrine, even though I think it carries with it a very heavy burden of responsibility, because it implies that what you do in the

confines of your personal life is far more important than you might think, and that it actually has the same rippling effect that a pebble in a lake, a pebble in a pond does, for you to either let things go in your own life and have them fall apart, or to put them together and try to structure yourself properly. So, rule seven, pursue what is meaningful and not what is expedient. I would say that's getting closer to the point of all 12 rules. I think maybe rule 7 and 8 are the ones that are most central. Rule 7 is do what is meaningful and not what is expedient.

And rule 8 is tell the truth or at least don't lie. I changed that. It was originally tell the truth that rule. But then I thought, well, that's asking a lot because like what the hell do you know? at least don't lie. I changed that. It was originally tell the truth that rule, but then I thought, well, that's asking a lot because like what the hell do you know? What do I know? It's very hard to tell the truth, but it's not so hard not to lie,

even though it's plenty hard, because now and then you're going to say something, and you know that it's false, and you say it anyways, and you could not do that and that would be something and we'll return to that. Rule 7, and do what is meaningful, not what is expedient. One of the experiences that I've had recently that's been quite common is talking to journalists who have an agenda right at the beginning. You've noticed that. So I'll tell you a little story.

I was in London, UK, about four weeks ago, and I went on this show called Hard Talk. And Hard Talk has been on BBC for a long time. And it's actually a rather rare TV show because it allows for relatively long-form dialogue instead of the 30-second soundbiter. You know, the couple of minutes that ideas are usually discussed, say, on something like broadcast news. It was 23 minutes, so half an hour with commercials. I sat in this little room, front of a glass table, around glass table. There are some monitors on the back with the logo of the show.

And the journalist started the program. And he looked into the monitor, and there's a teleprompter there and he read off the introduction which was a discussion about how controversial I apparently am. And that was all fine. And then he sat down and we had what purported to be a discussion. But I wasn't really a discussion because I wasn't talking to a person. I was talking to a corporate puppet. And I'm choosing those words very carefully or maybe a Mariana. So I was talking to someone whose strings were being pulled from behind the scenes. And he had, let's say, 20 questions already scripted out. And I'm not laying the responsibility for that precisely on him.

Broadcast television is a very expensive medium, and every minute has a tremendously high monetary value. And so it isn't generally the case that broadcast television stations are just willing to let their journalists wing it, right? Because something might go wrong, so they tend to script everything. But the problem with scripting everything when you're having a conversation is that why have the conversation if you already have the script? You know, so

have the script. You know, so part of what I'm trying to do when I come out and talk to all of you is to not have this scripted, you know, I sit in the back room there before the show and I think, okay, well, what issue am I going to address? What problem am I going to try to talk about? That's really the fundamental issue. So that's like the point of the talk, right? The fundamental issue. point of the talk, right, the fundamental issue. And then I think while I'm going to try to think about that and address it in the spontaneous manner and see if I can get a little farther with my thinking than I've got before. And then there's something about that,

at least in principle, is engaging. And it's engaging to me because I actually think that the problem of being precise in your speech, that's actually really interesting problem as far as I'm concerned. It's a very, very deep problem. And wandering around in the space where a solution to that problem might be generated is something that's very much worthwhile doing. And if I get into it and I can think about it, and I'm grappling with it properly, then

I can engage all of you in the same dialogue and we can have a conversation. You know, because I can tell when I'm talking whether or not you're along for the ride, you know, I can tell by whether or not you're rustling. You see everyone's quiet. And I listen for that, because if the audience is making noise, then I'm not in the right place. I'm not doing what's meaningful. I've wandered off the path and I've lost people. And so, and that's part of that instinct for meaning that I was talking about earlier, the fact that if you're sitting there and you're being quiet and we're all involved in pursuing the same point, then we're on this narrow pathway of meaning. I think that's the pathway between chaos and order. You know, it's order because you understand what's happening well enough

to follow it. And it's chaos because we're investigating something new and it's in the juxtaposition of that order and chaos that meaning manifests itself because being on that border between order and chaos is where you're secure, but also developing at the same time So that's very meaningful. So the journalist I kept trying to get under his Script and talk to him because we kind of had a bit of a conversation before the show started You know bantered back and forth a little bit and I could see who he was a little bit But there was no getting near him and so it was very frustrating and disjointed conversation because it wasn't a conversation.

It was actually a simulacrum or a facsimile of a conversation. And that's a very bad thing when you're trying to discuss things of import. Because what it meant was that if you and I are talking, and this is rule 9, assume that the person that you're listening to knows something you don't, if you and I are talking about something, there's an assumption that we need to be acting out in order for that to be a meaningful interaction, and the assumption has to be that it's worthwhile for that to be a meaningful interaction and the assumption has to be that it's worthwhile for us to both exchange our views. And the only time that it's worthwhile for both of us to exchange our views is if you have something to tell me and I have something to tell you, right? Something of value. And then what we both are going to do is struggle to see if we can hit that place

in our dialogue where something of value is actually being exchanged. And that can be very frustrating. You know, if you're talking to your wife or your husband about something that's difficult and contentious, you know, you may have to have, you may have a difficult conversation that has to be had. And, you know, you're out of sync, you're not in harmony and you're misunderstanding each other or maybe you're talking past each other, maybe one of you is trying to tyrannize the other. It's very difficult to get that balance right, but if you do, then you have a meaningful conversation, and if you have a meaningful conversation, then you come out of it better than you went into it.

That's the whole point of having a meaningful conversation is for both of the people who are engaged to come out of it wiser than they went into it. And if that is happening, then it's engaging. And that's the reason it's engaging is because you're actually quite wise in the fundamental in the fundamental structure of your psyche and your being, your psychophysiological being will tell you when you're situated in place where the information flow is maximized. And it does that by engaging you in the conversation.

And so what the BBC interviewer was doing was doing what was expedient. He had a plan already in mind. He knew how this was going to go. And however I reacted was more or less a secondary, it was secondary to the script that was already in place. Well, that's a tyranny, I would say, in a nutshell. It's a tyranny when you're acting out something that you have no part in. And when you're the target of views, I'm not complaining about this, by the way. I'm just observing it. When you're the target of views that your views have

no purchase on, there's no mutuality of dialogue. And what, but what the BBC interviewer did by imposing that script was what people do very frequently when they're communicating, because they treat other people like a means to an end. And they think, well, I've got something that I've got something that I need to establish or a point I have to make or something I want from the other person. That's even more common. Or I want to justify my own viewpoint. That's another one.

And I'm going to impose that structure on the conversation Come hell or high water and it doesn't really matter who I'm talking to and That's a big mistake because what you should be doing in conversation But I would also say in your life in general is to watch what you're doing instead and to see When it manifests itself as meaningful and engaging and then try to just do that a lot more. And it's a strange skill in some sense. It's allied with something else that I've recommended to people in my YouTube lectures. I learned this from Carl Rogers, a psychologist who's very interested in the relationship between the mind and the

body, especially in the relationship between bodily reactions, physiological reactions, and conceptual truths. Rodgers said that when he was practicing as a psychotherapist, that he essentially, this is slight oversimplification, let's say, but Rogers attempted to say things that made him feel congruent with himself, strange terminology. But you know how you all had this experience where you say something and you can't say it without a hint of shame creeping into your voice because you know that what you're saying is something that you're only saying to look a particular way to the people that you're talking to.

It's an attempt to impress them, let's say, or maybe it's an attempt to impress yourself, but you know you're being false to yourself while you do it, and makes you embarrassed. Well, that'll, sometimes that manifests itself very fully, and you'll turn red, right? And people will notice, thus also demonstrating, by the way, that you're not a psychopath, as that's one of the characteristics of psychopaths, is they don't get embarrassed. And that doesn't mean if you never get embarrassed that you're a psychopath, by the way.

I don't want you to walk out of here with that impression. But you want to engage in a spontaneous way with the people that you're communicating with, and you want to learn not to say things that make you weak. And this is something that Rogers was very emphatic about when he was talking about how to train psychotherapists, is that you can learn to watch what you say or listen to what you say, and then to feel it out and to think, well, it's, again, it's a sense of, it's almost a sense of location in the same way that there's a location between chaos and order.

You can learn to pay attention to what it is that you're saying and you can see if weather what you're saying makes you stand up straight, let's say, with your shoulders back and makes you feel like you're grounded in standing on a rock instead of sand, or you can feel yourself coming apart at the seams. And it's actually a rather uncanny skill to develop, I would say, because to begin with, and I certainly had this experience, but so have a number of my students who've related this to me, that if you first start doing that,

you may find that almost everything you say makes you feel weak, which likely means that almost nothing that you say is either meaningful or true. And that's enough of a shock, I would say, just to comprehend that that might be the case. That's enough of a shock to stop people from looking any farther down that road. So that's... So there's a proposition in that rule, do what is meaningful and not what is expedient, and the proposition is that all things considered the best guide that you have in life is to note what you're doing that's

deeply meaningful and to do as much of that as you possibly can. I would say even neurologically, although this is a lot of this speculation because there's so much about the brain that we don't understand. You have untold depths, thoughts come rise out of you in some sense and manifest themselves in your imagination. You don't really know where they come from. And there's parts of you that are very, very old from an evolutionary perspective, let's say, and they're capable of great wisdom, some of that manifests itself in dreams. And that sense of meaning that occurs when you say the things that are the right things to say

is an indication that this is very hard to explain, but that you structured yourself properly so that the words that are coming to you are coming out of a great depth and manifesting themselves in a manner that has power and you can align yourself with that. It's not for nothing and this is something that's relevant as well. in a manner that has power, and you can align yourself with that. It's not for nothing, and this is something that's relevant as well. One of the central doctrines of our civilization, Western civilization, is that there's something divine about the word. If you look at that from a Christian perspective, from a Christian symbolic perspective,

for example, the Christians assigned divinity to the word made flesh, and that actually means something psychologically, right? It means that there's something divine about proper speech. It means that it aligns you with the structure of being itself, and I do believe that that's the case, and I also think that people believe this, and I'll tell you why. You know, again, if you thought about advice that you'd give to someone that you cared about, you wouldn't say, it's very unlikely, unless you're bitter, unless you're twisted, I would say, you would not tell someone you loved that the best way to make their way through the world was to lie about everything they possibly could.

Now, you think, well, all right, so right, I mean, that seems slight, that seems reasonable. You might say to someone, well, now, and then you have to tell a white lie, and you might be willing to forgive someone if they do lie, but the probability that you would regard lying as an admirable mode of being is very, very slight. So you don't. So what that means instead is that you You presume the truth is the proper Motive being and the question is well, why do you think that? And and to what degree do you think that and perhaps it's actually true that truth is the proper mode of being and Then if it is if that is the case and that is how you act especially if that's how you act in relationship to people that you care about

Then that's actually we're thinking about because it's conceivable that the proper way of manifesting yourself in the world is to ensure that every word you utter is as truthful and meaningful as you can possibly make it. And that that's actually the way that everything in the world could be said as right as it could be. I'll tell you something about that. It's a bit of background. You might be interested in.

Last year, I did a series of 15 lectures on Genesis, which became quite popular strangely enough. And I was very interested, especially in the oldest stories in Genesis, and those are the ones right at the beginning. We have no idea how old those stories are, but there's certainly some thousands of years old, three thousand years old, five thousand years old, in their written form, and perhaps their 25 thousand years old in their spoken form, and maybe older than that. In fact, I think they have the roots and processes that are far older than that.

But there's this idea in Genesis, which is, and the reason I stress this is because we have a fairly, we have a functional culture, and that culture is embedded in a narrative structure, and the fundamental narrative of that, the fundamental body of stories that brings that narrative together is the purpose of biblical stories for better or worse. And so you have to take those sorts of things seriously. If you take your culture seriously and there's a

proposition in Genesis, this is the proposition that whatever God is, uses whatever the word is, logos, the word to generate order out of chaos. Chaos is something like potential. It's something like you face when you wake up in the morning. And you think, well, there's this expanse of the day in front of me, and I could do what I would with it within my range of power. So it's not like you're driven exactly like a clock is driven by its internal mechanisms in a deterministic way

It's more like you face a field of potential and possibility and you can make choices about what elements of the Potential are going to manifest themselves in the real world Not something that's really much worth considering, you know because what it means is that What you confront is what could be and what your actions determine is what is. And so it's you that's using the point that you make to write the story of the world. And maybe you're doing that in your own particular idiosyncratic and relatively isolated way, but that doesn't make it trivial because you can bring things into being for better or for worse.

And it might be better to bring them into being for better rather than for worse. So there's this idea. The idea in Genesis is that whatever God is engaged in is something like that. He uses the logos to confront potential chaos and to generate order out of it. And the locals is also something that's truthful speech, which is very, very important. So it's the word that's true. And so when God uses the word that's true to generate habitable order out of chaos, He says repeatedly, and it was good,

and there's a proposition there, which is a deep ethical proposition. And the proposition is that if you confront the potential that's in front of you and you do that with truthful speech, then what you produce will be good. And that's something, I'll tell you, man, you can think about that for about 10 years, and you'll never exhaust its possibilities because it's a really deep proposition. You'll never exhaust its possibilities because it's a really deep proposition. And the proposition is, well, we already established the fact that there's no doubt that life is right with suffering and contaminated by a certain amount of malevolence. And the question is, well, what might you do in the face of that?

And the answer seems to be, use your words truthfully. And the consequence of that will be the construction, the continued construction of being, let's say the continued co-creation of being, in as beneficial a manner as it can be conducted. And you think, well, do you believe that? It's like, well, let's go back to the counter position. You're not going to tell someone that you care about, to lie about everything all the time.

You don't think that's a good way of Proceeding in the world. Well, then we can take the opposite of that. Well, then the best way to proceed in the world is to tell the truth Well, how deep a truth is that? Well, it might be the deepest of truth if it's actually the case that the ethical decisions that you make are precisely that Which transform the potential of the future into the actuality of the present in the past. And I do think that's what we do. And I do think that we treat each other as if that's what we do.

Because we do hold each other responsible for our decisions. You hold yourself, I mean not fully, because you know, you're constrained. And if someone does something terrible, perhaps the first thing you do, we even do this in our courts, is to say, well, what were the situ perhaps the first thing you do, we even do this in our courts, is to say, well, what were the situational determinants? You know, maybe the person was manic or, you know, or maybe they were brain damaged or, you know, who knows? We're looking for limitations on that ethical responsibility so that we can take them into account, but we still fundamentally assume that

and hold ourselves accountable as well, we still fundamentally assume that, well, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, which we'll be willing to consider, you are in fact responsible for the decisions that you make. And you know, it isn't only that we do hold each other responsible in that way. We actually want to be held responsible in that way because there's nothing more annoying than dealing with someone who doesn't treat you that way. Even though it places a heavy responsibility on you to behave in that way, you can't tolerate it if someone isn't willing to grant you that value.

You know, if I treated you like you're a completely deterministic creature and that you're not responsible for anything that you do, be impossible for us to have a relationship. So if you had any sense at least it would be impossible. Unless you were looking for a complete abdication of responsibility. And then the rule eight, that's to tell the truth

or at least don't lie. I thought about this a lot because I thought, well, what would be, what would, what if it was the case that the way you decided to live your life was to use your instinct for truth and meaning to guide your actions and your perceptions? Let's say that you, and I think, by the way, I think that's the fundamental manifestation of faith.

I believe that. And you have to have faith because you don't know everything, and so you have to take a chance all the time. You're always leaping into the unknown in some sense, and you have to do that with some, with some, what would you call it, with some theory of how things work in mind, and one theory might be, well, we could try telling the truth and see what happens, which is a very adventurous way of living by the way because you don't know what the hell is going to happen if you try that, but it certainly won't be what you expect, but it might be far better than you think even though it isn't

necessarily what you want. So, well if you're going to use meaning, let's say, and your sense of truth to guide you in the world, which I think is the most courageous way to act in the world, then you have to be sure that you're not any more warped than you should be, because you need to rely on your instincts. And you tell children, well, it's best not to lie. And maybe they ask why, and then you have trouble explaining it, like you might have trouble explaining to your child why it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it only matters how you play the game it sounds preposterous on

the face of it but it's certainly something that's true you say don't lie and and if you're pushed you might not be able to come up with an explanation of why you shouldn't lie but but here's one. You become what you practice. And that's actually true physiologically. So when you start to develop a new skill, when you first develop it and you're not very good at it, you're sort of all over the place. Huge parts of your brain are involved in guiding your action while you practice that skill.

But as you practice it more and more and more, the parts of your brain that are involved change. So it moves from the right hemisphere and the left to the left only, and then from the entire left to the back of the left and to a smaller and smaller place. As you practice something and you get better and better at it so that you can do it automatically, a smaller and smaller part of your brain is involved till you build a little machine that's

specialized for that. And then that's part of you and it's permanent. And so you become what you practice. And so then you might say, well what do you become if you practice to deceive? And the answer to that is someone that you can't rely on. And that's a major catastrophe. First of all, here's the first part, and I alluded to this before, there will come a time, or multiple times in your life where you have to choose A or B and it's life or death, or it's health or sickness, or it's divorce or the stability of your marriage. Who knows, but something major is resting on it,

and you won't know which way to turn, because it's extraordinarily complex. And the only thing that you'll have to rely on in that situation is your integral moral virtue. That's all you've got. And to the degree that you've contaminated your own psychophysiological structure with automated acts of deception you won't

be able to rely on your judgment and you will pay for that like you can't possibly imagine. And so part of the reason that the deep reason that lies behind say rule eight tell the truth or at least don't lie is that if you will need to rely on yourself like it's as if you're out at the ocean and you're captaining a ship, and you have the rudder, and there's a terrible storm, and whether or not you make it through, it is dependent entirely on your skill as a sailor, and you're billed, indeed, to orient yourself by the stars. And if you've compromised that in any way, then the waves will drown you, and that'll be the end. And so part of the reason that you try not to lie is so that you don't corrupt the

instinct that you have for truth and meaning because when push comes to shove you would have anything else in the world that can defend you against catastrophe except that. And you know that because you know how it is when you when you have to make a difficult decision and you have to rely on yourself, you know that you can make a terrible mistake, and then if you're not up to the decision that you'll pay for it. And so, I mean, one of the things that I wanted to do when I wrote 12 rules for life

and also maps of meaning, which was my first book, was to take some of the more profound truths that we've, what would you say, that lie at the base of our cultural construct, like the story in Genesis, for example, and to make the link between that and what happens to you in your day-to-day life.

You know, something else that's worth considering, you can think about this as well. In our society, in the West, we decided, along while back, first of all, in the context of our religious structures, that there was something divine about the individual. Now that's associated with ideas of the immortality of the soul, and that's something that I'm not going to discuss, because I don't know anything about that.

But it is associated as well with the idea in Genesis that every person has a spark of the divine within them, and that's a reflection of the idea that when God made human beings he made them in his own image. The question is what does that mean? But the answer is well if what God is is that which uses communicative intent truthfully to generate habitable order from chaotic potential then that's what you are. And I do believe that that's what you are. And you might think, well, I don't believe that. Well, perhaps you're not a religious sort, but that's a complicated issue,

whether or not you're a religious sort. It's a lot more complicated than it looks on the surface. Because here's one thing I realized about our culture a long while back is that we all act as if that proposition is true. And here's why, you know, we decided and this took a long time for people to figure out. This was like a 10,000 year enterprise to figure out where sovereignty properly resided, So sovereignty is political power, let's say, but it's not only that, it's political authority and its competence. We shouldn't use just the word power because that's a misapprehension about the structure

of the world because our political structures are not fundamentally structures of power. They're fundamentally structures of competence, and you can tell that because our societies work, and if they were fundamentally constructs of power, then they wouldn't work because they would be nothing but tyrannies and tyrannies don't work. Now, our societies work. Now, they don't work perfectly. You can tell that they work because everybody in this audience, first of all, could come here and participate in this discussion freely, and we're all sitting here peacefully, and no one's afraid for their life.

And the power is on, and everything's peaceful. And most of you will go home tonight to decent places and have functional families. And that's really quite the miracle. And so you can't assume that what we live in is a tyranny of power, even though every society tilts towards a certain amount of corruption. Our societies are very functional, and they're

predicated on a certain view of the individual human being. And that view is that you hold sovereign political power, authority, responsibility. Well, why in the world would we assume that? Who the hell are you? You're just one dust mode among 7 billion. Maybe you're not even very good at what you do. But, well, you know, and all of us could be better at what we do than we are. And we all are deeply flawed. There's no doubt about that. But we've made this decision, and it was not made lightly.

That's for sure, that regardless of our personal inadequ inadequacies that each of us bears the responsibility and the ability to be the cornerstone of an entire civilization, sovereignty and hairs in each person, sovereignty and hairs in the people, but at the individual level. You think, well, you do believe that, well, to the degree that you're a functional participant in this society and perhaps someone of an adherent of its principles, although I would say that was secondary, to the degree that you act out the body of laws that's a direct consequence of that initial presupposition, then you certainly act as if you believe it and

that's something, I would say that's something even more telling than what you might say about what you believe because that's more detached from who you are as it has to be. So we act out the proposition that each person has sufficient value to be the cornerstone of sovereignty itself. And that's something because you presume what sovereign is of the highest value. It's virtually the definition of what constitutes sovereign. And it looks like the consequence of that is the production of the freest and most productive societies that have ever existed. And so that seems to be some sort of proof for the validity of the initial presupposition.

It's partly the reason that I'm so opposed to identity politics, which I think is an appalling game, regardless of whether it's played on the left or the right, to reintroduce tribal identity into our functional society and to presume that you should be identified by your sex or your sexuality, your gender, let's say, hated word, your gender or your sexuality or your race or your ethnicity, instead of being viewed as a locus of divine sovereignty to me is a step, it's a step thousands of years into the past and one that's, that will do nothing but produce catastrophe as it always has whenever we've taken that particular route. So

We will now and that's assumed that the person you're listening to knows something you don't. Well, that's the sigh. What is it? Signed, quann on. I think that's the right phrase. Have a decent conversation. We alluded to this already. You know, I'm here talking to you as if what we're doing matters,

because I assume that we can have a conversation about important things, and without that initial, and maybe deeply important things, and not only that we can have that conversation, but that we could, that we should have it, and that it would be productive, that we would get somewhere if we had that conversation would be productive, that we would get somewhere if we had that conversation. And then, lo and behold, as a consequence of making that initial hypothesis, which again is a form of act of faith, then that's exactly what happens.

And so, and one thing I learned as a psychotherapist too, was that, you know, I always listened to my clients. That was something, again, I learned from Karl Rogers. If you want to learn to listen, Karl Rogers, a very good person to read. If you listen to people, they'll tell you very interesting things. They'll tell you the truth, too, if you actually listen.

You know, when Roger said, well, you should listen in a non-judgmental way and that you should listen, what would we call with unconditional, positive regard. I never really liked that idea. I don't think it's accurate enough. You know, when I listen to my clients and this is what I try to do and I'm listening to people in general or audiences is I'm not... I'm not...

My attitude towards my... Participant in the conversation isn't one of unconditional positive regard. It's that I'm trying to set the situation up so the best in me is talking to the best in you. Knowing full well that there's a part of me that's not the best and also a part of you that's not the best. It's very important in the therapeutic conversation because often when people come into therapy there's parts of them that are not working for their own interest, right? Because well they wouldn't be in therapy, often, otherwise, although sometimes people come merely

because terrible things have happened to them, through no fault of their own, let's say. But often, they're coming because parts of them are working at cross-purposes to themselves. And so you don't want to have unconditional positive regard for the part of a person that's working at cross-purposes to themselves. You want to have unconditional positive regard

for the part of the person that's striving towards the point, right, that's striving towards the light, and then you can have a conversation with that part, and you can bring the part of you that's doing that as well into the conversation, and then that's associated as well with that sense of engagement meaning that I was talking about earlier. And I think that's a real phenomenon, you know, I think it might be, I actually believe this. I think it might be the most real thing there is. You know, figuring out what's real and what isn't. That's a very tricky business.

It's a very difficult thing to define. You know, we tend to think about material reality as the most fundamental reality, although we don't act that way. We act like pain is the most fundamental reality. And that's also worth thinking about, because I think that you can make a very strong case that suffering is, if not the most fundamental reality,

it's way down there at the bottom. And then whatever it is that can address that suffering is obviously of equal reality. And one of the things that can address suffering is two things that can address suffering is meaning two of two things that can address suffering and meaning and truth and if suffering is a fundamental truth then whatever can overcome it has to be at least as fundamental and it certainly seems to be the case that truth and meaning are good contenders for those things that might overcome suffering. If you assume the

person that you're you're talking to knows something you don't, well, you can have a conversation with them, you know, you can find out what peculiar things they've learned in their life has taught them something you don't know. And you can have that conversation with almost anyone, you know, it doesn't matter what they do. If you can get beyond the expedient and you can make contact with the part of the person that's moving upward, they can tell you all sorts of things that will enlighten you. And that's useful because life is very difficult. And if you could be a little

smarter than you are, then there'd be a little less suffering to be had for you and your family and for perhaps for your community as well. And so you should treat any opportunity for a conversation to the degree that you can manage as a play as an opportunity to sift a little bit of gold out of the sand and see if you can take that and add it to your collection. And if you enter the conversation with that attitude in mind, the probability that some of that will glisten for you during the conversation is exceptionally high. And, you know, it's a skill that you have to develop. It's not an easy thing to do. It also requires that actually what you want from the conversation is something meaningful

and true, you know, and the truth, the meaningful truth tends to strip away everything about you that isn't worthy, let's say, and that can be very painful. So it's not self-evident that it's something you'd want. Do you really want people to tell you the truth? The answer to that should be yes, but you have any number of reasons to be lary of that, you know, especially if your life is characterized by a tremendous number of falsehoods. Rule 10, which I broke tonight, by the way, is be precise in your speech. Well, I said that all of these 12 rules

rotated around a point, and so I'll see if I can shed a little bit of light on that. So my daughter, my granddaughter is one years old, just one year old now, and it's been interesting to watch her. And she's just learned to point. And it's really quite cute. So she sits on the ground and she holds up her finger.

And she points to things, you know? And that's such a miracle, that ability to point. It's way deeper thing than you think. Because here's what happens when you point to something. You know how complicated the world, way more complicated than you can possibly imagine, just has layers and layers and layers of complexity. And when you point, you reduce all that complexity to one thing. And that's what she's doing. She's figured this out. It's a proto-linguistic behavior, right? You cannot speak before you can point.

Because a word is a pointer to something. A word is a pointer to something of value. But even more importantly, it's a pointer to a way of being that's valuable, because while you might want to, you might want to accrue valuable things, let's say. So you can imagine that as a motivation, but what a better motivation is, is that you could exist in a manner so that the probability of accruing valuable things was increased. And that's fundamentally the point. And we all engage in this, and now you can see this developing in her. She's learning to point, and she points at things that she finds interesting, but she's always looking at everyone else to see if they get the point.

And the reason she's doing that is because she needs to specify in the world things of value that everyone else thinks are valuable too. Because you're not going to have anything to communicate about or anything to trade with people or any way of making contact with people unless the things that you specify in the world of value are also the things that are of value to them. And so what we've done is we've taken the completely complex world, world that's complex beyond our imagining, and we've overlaid a structure on it that's a system of pointers. That's a way of thinking about it. And that's what she's introducing

herself to you now. She says, well, is it that? Like, there's a toy. There's mum. There's dad. Very short words, right? There's a cat, those are very short words. They're fundamental things of value, and once she gets the point, well then she can nail those things with words, and once she can use words, and the point, well then she can enter into the collaborative enterprise that we all engage in to specify the things of value in the world.

And so, when you look at the world, you don't really see the world. This is something I'm trying to outline more clearly in my next book. You don't really see the world because the world's too damn complex and it has too many levels. It's way beyond you. What you see instead is a structure of value that's placed on the world. And we determine that structure of value by collectively determining what constitutes the point. You know, and the point might be the toy, or the point might be some food, or the point might be her mom if she's in distress, but the fundamental point for her is not any of

those things. It's how she should be in the world. And so here's the thing that's so tricky. A very, very difficult thing to understand is you have the world itself, which you really can't make contact with, because it's so complicated and on top of that, you have a structure of value that everyone is participating in creating. And that structure of value is what helps you reduce the complex world to what the point is. And the point is, at least in part, things of value in the world, and that's very important. Those are the things that we naturally perceive when we're walking around in the world, and that's very important. Those are the things that we naturally perceive when we're walking around in the world, things

of value against a background of things that have no value, even though they still exist. But out of that, out of that whole background of things of value, you can extract out an ethic that's the manner in which you should conduct yourself in the world if you're going to engage most admirably with all the things of value. So there's three layers. There's the world as it is, which is incomprehensible. And then there's the world of value that we all participate in creating the value of each thing, let's say, or it's lack of value. And then above that is an ethic that emerges out of that, which is how you should act in the world. And we know this, too.

Maybe I can close with this. I've been very interested in sports as a protoethic. So our sports, almost all the sports that we watch, our exercises in precision. You think about virtually every sport involves aim and the target, soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey, team sports in particular. We're obsessed with this notion that you can specify a target and hit it accurately, but not only so archery, obviously using rifles But not only so archery, obviously using rifles is a manifestation of the same thing. Perhaps a reflection of our immense evolutionary involvement in such activities as throwing

at targets and hunting. It's a very deep part of us. We want to specify a target very precisely. We want to hit it very accurately with maximal skill. We want to arrange ourselves into groups to do that. And that's exactly what you do with the sports team, right? Is you specify a goal. It's an arbitrary goal.

Who the hell cares if you put a ball through a hoop? Well, it turns out that everyone cares because it's symbolic of hitting the target properly in your life and specifying the target, which is something you do with precise speech, is to specify the target. Then you think well What are you trying to do when you play basketball and you might think well? I'm trying to put the ball through the hoop and it's like well, yes, that is what you're trying to do but not really Not really because in the out of the game

So you have the world and then you play the basketball game in it's kind of arbitrary You think well, what are you doing when you play basketball? You're putting a ball through a hook. It's, well, what are you doing when you play basketball? You're putting a ball through a hoop. It's like, well, why would you bother with that? It seems rather pointless. Louis, not. It has a point. And the point isn't to get the damn ball through the hoop.

The point is to be the best possible player, right? And it's not even just the best possible basketball player. So you think, this goes back to something I mentioned earlier. It doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It matters how you play the game. That's something you tell children. And what you're saying is, well, of course you want to attain the aim.

You want to try and strive to win if you're playing the game, but winning, the real winning isn't whether or not you win or lose the game. The real winning is how you play while you're winning or losing the game. The real winning is how you play while you're winning or losing the game. And then you might ask, well, why is that the real winning when the putative point of the game is to put the ball through the hoop? More than the other team, to accrue more points. Well, and this is associated with rule five and the other points that I was making in the book. You're going to play a lot of games in your life. It's not just going to be one basketball game.

It's not just going to be a series of basketball games. It's not going to be a series of basketball and soccer and hockey games because it's going to be a lot more games than merely the games. And so what you're trying to do while well, you're playing those games and practicing hitting the precise target properly with your high level of skill, is to conduct yourself in the most admirable possible way while you're doing that. And the reason for that is that if you learn to conduct yourself in the most admirable possible way, well, you're pursuing that symbolic routine, say, trying to win the game.

And you'll turn yourself into the sort of person who's maximally prepared to play the best possible game across the broadest possible set of games. And that's how that ethic emerges from the value. You've got the world, there's games we play in it, and the game specify the value of things. And then you can pursue the valuable things, and then maybe you can acquire the valuable things, but there's something above that that's

even more important, which is the ethic that comes out of the proper way of conducting yourself while you're pursuing things of value. That's all tangled up, and this is something I haven't worked up yet, worked out completely yet. It's tied up with that concept of sovereignty. So the power of the state and society inheres in you. But then there's a responsibility that you have if you're going to fulfill that, if you're going to fulfill what the destiny that that responsibility places on you, and it has something to do with acting out this more complex ethic that I just described. If you take your place properly in society, then you do it as the person who plays properly. And to the degree that you are the person that plays properly, then the sovereignty that's

been granted to you or recognized as part of what you are, that that plays properly, then the sovereignty that's been granted to you or recognized as part of what you are, that's a better way of thinking about it, then that's manifested properly and you keep the world on its proper path. Now the reason, I'll close with this, the reason that I thought about all this for so long is that in such detail, let's say, is because I was very curious about how things go terribly wrong.

So I spent the last 30 years immersed in terrible things. I've spent a lot of time studying, well, the actions of reprehensible people, as I mentioned, the people who shoot up high schools and perform those, undertake those sorts of mass, catastrophic, cruel killings, especially of innocent people. But even more to the point, perhaps, interested in the psychology of totalitarian brutality. And one of the things that I have come to realize as a consequence of that is that the fundamental failure of the totalitarian state is not political. It's psychological and ethical. Societies degenerate into totalitarianism

when the individuals who compose that society refuse to bear the moral responsibility they have for acting as sovereign entity, the sovereign entity upon which the state is founded. And what that means is that the world goes to hell in a hand basket as a consequence of your ethical errors. And I don't think that there's anything that's more true than that. I tried to learn what the catastrophes of the 20th century hypothetically had to teach us.

Because the notion was that we went through all that, we went through Auschwitz and all of that, and everything that happened in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and then in principle we could derive from that experience the wisdom not to repeat that. And as far as I can tell the proper derivation is, it's on you. It's on you. It's on each of us. Thank you very much. So we have all these questions. so I'll read the ones that strike me as answerable and see if I can answer them. As a stay-at-home father, I've never been invited to a Tupperware party. Am I being alienated because I'm a dad? Or do I need to host a Tupperware party first? Okay, so that's a fun question actually. So let's take it apart.

As a stay-at-home father, okay, well now you've specified your identity, so that's quite interesting. That frames the rest of the question. I'm a stay-at-home father. Now hard to say how you feel about that, but it's interesting that you put that first. So that's worth thinking about. Second issue, I've never been invited to a Tupperware party. Okay, well, so you could imagine that in your 1950s way, that might Disturb you. But there's some, there's some, there's some, what would you call them? Cognitive, there's some Maxums of cognitive hygiene that apply to this question.

If you're feeling alienated because something bad is happening to you or something good isn't happening to you. The first thing you need to do is to analyze the situational variables. Now it's very much a cognitive error that people make that if something bad happens to you, that it's your fault. Now it might be your fault, right? But there is such a thing as presumption of innocence and That's worthwhile even applying to yourself even though it's rather difficult and I'm not saying that you shouldn't take responsibility I'm just saying that you shouldn't jump to conclusions. It may be that you've never been invited to a Tupperware party because no one has Tupperware parties anymore

no one has Tupperware parties anymore. Right. Now, but that's that's that's that's actuarial analysis. And it's actually a really you need to know something about baselines. So look, one of the things I often do is counsel people who are trying to either find a job because they're unemployed and terrified about that generally or trying to move to a new job, you know, because they would like to make more money or find something more fulfilling or whatever

their reasons, they have to move to a new town and that means they have to go through the often painful process of looking for a job and so then you kind of have to know what to expect. You might say, God, you know, I sent out 20 resumes and I didn't hear back from anybody. It's like, well, you know, you might just be an absolute loser as a consequence of that. But here's a different hypothesis. Maybe the baseline rejection rate for resumes is 98%. That's about right. So you have to send out, if you send out 50 resumes,

your fundamental assumption should be that you'll only get a response to one. Why is that? Well, resumes are a dime a dozen now, right? Because you can post them online to like a thousand places with the push of a button, and so most companies are drowning in resumes. And the fact that you didn't get called back might be because you're a reprehensible loser and the world is set against you, but it might just be that you have to put out a lot of resumes just from an actual aerial perspective before you're going to get a single hit. Now the upside of it is, you only need one hit. While assuming you get the job, maybe you need three

because if you're in the top three, well, maybe it'll take you three interviews before you get the job. But I've dealt with lots of people who are out looking for work and we put together a plan. It's like, okay, you want to improve your career. Well, assume that's going to be a two-year job. And it doesn't have to be full-time

because maybe you can't stand it being full-time, but maybe you have to put out like three resumes a day, every day for the next two years. It's possible. And maybe the consequence of that is you'll come up at the end of it, you'll have to, you'll make twice as much money. And I think every time I've tried that with a client, I think that's worked. And sometimes it worked a hell of a lot better than merely having them double their salary. But it's a real grind.

And you have to, you have to accustom yourself to the fact that the default is failure. And that's the truth with just about everything, right? Most new businesses go under in the first year. Hardly any books that people write get published, not to mention screenplays. I mean, you must have just give up on that except that now and then someone actually manages it miraculously enough. I mean almost everything that you do is destined to failure, but that doesn't have that much to do with you, something, but not that much.

So you have to know the actual area of statistics. So then I would say as a stay at home father, first thing to do to determine is, is there actually any Tupperware parties in your neighborhood? And if the answer is no, then it has nothing to do with you being a stay-at-home father. It just has to do with the fact that there aren't any Tupperware parties. Am I being alienated because I'm a dad? Don't play identity politics with the Tupperware parties. Or do I need to host the Tupperware party first? There you go. That would be a good plan. Then you'd know.

Ben Franklin said when you moved to a neighborhood, one of the first things you should do is ask someone who lives there for a favor. Not a big favor, but a little favor so that they can feel good granting it to you and so that now you owe them a favor because that's a good way to get the reciprocal social interactions engaged. It's a really smart idea because by asking someone for something small, then you enable them to manifest good will towards you.

And they're usually pretty happy about that. And then you get to return the favor. And then they can see that you're the sort of person who remembers favors and returns them. And that's a good way of facilitating trust. And so, yeah, hosting a Tupperware party sounds like a fine plan. So that's what I would recommend. So what are your thoughts on the hookup culture created by modern dating apps?

Well, I can tell you some facts. People in stable monogamous relationships report the highest levels of sexual satisfaction. So that's the first thing to know. The second thing to know, I don't think we've had an intelligent conversation about sexual morality in our culture probably since the invention of the birth control pill, so that's about 50 years. It's not that surprising because the birth control pill was such an absolutely staggering technological revolution that will probably never recover from it. You know, I've often thought that the 20th century will be remembered for three things.

Hydrogen bomb, birth control pill, transistor, there are three revolutions of incalculable magnitude. And so the fact of reliable birth control, or at least comparatively reliable birth control, or at least comparatively reliable birth control, has really permanently changed the relationships between men and women and our attitudes towards sexuality in general, and all of that. And it'll take God only knows how long till we adapt to that. In the immediate aftermath of the birth control pill, there was the idea that sex could now

be decontextualized, I would say. First of all, it could occur without, in the absence of permanent relationship, let's say, and that that would be an okay thing, and that it could also be something that could be done casually for recreation and without guilt. I don't think any of those things are true. I don't think there's any evidence that they're true. I think they're dangerous delusions, actually. I think, see, hook-up culture is predicated on the idea that you can detach sexuality from everything else.

Emotions, let's say, responsibility, consideration even, and that basically you can reduce what sexuality is to casual pleasure. And I don't think you can do that. I don't think you can reduce sexuality to casual pleasure without reducing the person that you're having sex with to nothing but the provider of casual pleasure. And I think that whatever you do to someone else, you do to yourself inevitably. Because when you're engaging with someone else, you're engaging with a human being and you're a human being. And so the manner in which you treat another human being expands to encompass your relationship to yourself. Now, it isn't obvious to me that the most compelling and meaningful and truthful story about what a person is is a source of casual sexual pleasure. And I think that if you engage in a string of relationships like that, that you inevitably come to see people like that. Because how could you not?

One of the truths that psychologists have uncovered, there aren't that many of them, but this is one of them. What's hard to uncover truths is that you tend to justify what you do. And that's something to be very wary of, because perhaps you have your ethical qualms about doing something, but you do it two or three dozen times, and you can be absolutely certain that as a consequence of doing it, that many number of times, that you will now formulate a story that you tell yourself and other people,

and will also come to believe about why doing that is not only okay but good. So let's say you have 50 casual sexual partners. I don't know if there's anything deeper or more profound that you can do with someone else, then engage in sex with them. And so if you're willing to take that most profound act and transform it into that most dispensable entity, then that's what you've done to yourself and other people. And I don't think that's a very good idea. I think that I believe that we can't fractionate any lower than the nuclear family without big trouble. I think that people are a lot better off, not necessarily happier, but I don't think happy is the right hallmark of evaluation anyways.

I think that people have deeper and more meaningful lives if they commit to a monogamous relationship. That's enforced monogamy, by the way, for those of you that we're wondering. A human moral universal, by the way, virtually every culture tends towards the promotion of monogamous social structures, even though that's become an unpopular view among people who who knows among who. Among people who are looking for, I don't even know what to say about that. It's so absolutely

clueless. It's much better for people to commit to something. It deepens their lives and enriches their lives and it means that you've taken on the responsibility of another person as if they're as much a part of you as you are. And that's actually good for you. It's hard, but it's good for you. You know, another thing is, and this is what's so surprising, it's also what people want. It's also what people want. You know, if you look at cheap entertainment, let's say, movies, cheap movies, and I'm not denigrating them. There's action movies, right?

That's it. Those are hero stories. It's one person against the malevolence in the world. That's an action story. And then there's a romance. And the romance is two people painfully isolated, find each other and make it work. And it's like that's like 90% of movies fall into those two categories. It's like everybody wants a deeply, not everyone, the vast majority of people want a stable, reliable, caring, permanent, monogamous relationship, that's their desire.

And if you act contrary to that, but that's what you want, then you act contrary to it, and then you won't get it. I think it's only 30% of people under 29 now are in a stable long-term monogamous relationship. I might be right wrong about that. I just read it the other day, but it was some dreadfully low number. I don't think that's good. It looks to me like it means that people aren't growing up as fast as they need to.

It means that they're missing out on life because it's really useful to commit yourself to someone and then to decide to build something stable economically and morally and practically and to have a platform established so that you can bring children into the world so that you have life in your life when you're 50 and older, let's say We're we're very foolish about such sort of things and I think training all that for hook-up culture is a big mistake. That's what it looks like to me So I guess that's the answer to that question. What advice do you have for parents of young adults attending Canadian universities to prevent their indoctrination by those biased left-wing institutions.

Concentrate on the sciences. the sciences. Now so my discipline is psychology and psychology sort of spans the gamut from sociology to biology and the closer it reaches towards biology the more reliable it is. So, the sciences so far have been relatively immune to postmodern undermining, although I'm not optimistic that that will last. But at the moment, that's if the discipline lacks grounding in science, then beware of it. And, you know, I don't say that with any pleasure. I found the most, I mean, what I loved about university when I was a student, I took a lot of science courses and my clinical PhD was very biologically based, very much based in neurobiology. I love the humanities courses, literature and social sciences like political science. I love them, humanities

in particular. And the fact that they've become corrupt is absolutely no, it's not something that brings me any pleasure at all. I mean, the purpose of the humanities is, in part, to teach you how to be humane, how to be a good person. And that's of crucial importance. It's not something that you can learn from a scientific education, although you can learn a certain respect for the truth and the ability to think critically, and those things are not trivial, and you can acquire useful skills, but it's the humanities that made citizens. And so the loss of the integrity of the humanities is an absolute catastrophe. But there we are. That's the situation at the moment. Does diversity have a value in competency hierarchies?

Depends on how you define it. Is it diversity by group identity? No. No. I mean... It's so, it's so deeply wrong that it's almost impossible to know where to start. Why would we presume that people, okay, the first question is, well, diversity along what dimensions?

Every person belongs to a very large number of potential groups. So, okay, which groups? Sex? All right, how many sexes? How many are there? Are there two? Are there three? Are there seventy?

It's like the people who are telling us to value diversity aren't helping us out with that particular conundrum. So how do you know when your workplace is sufficiently diverse from the perspective of gender? Well, when it matches the population distribution, well, who calculates that exactly? And where are you going to find the figures? And so, and that's just one dimension, whether sex, there's, and there's gender because those are, those are separate, apparently, even though they align in like 99.97% of cases, so they're not really separate. How about race? Well, what races? How are we going to define race exactly? Is that Caucasian, Asian, and Black?

Are those the races? You know there's more genetic diversity in Africa than there is in the rest of the world? It's like, are all those Black people the same? Or do we fragment them? And what about the Asians? And what about the Caucasians? Are they all the same?

Or do we need to fragment them into their different identity groups? Are the Irish and the Italians the same? I think what at the beginning of the 20th century, the Irish and the Italians, neither of them were even white. You know, it's a rude thing to say, but my point is quite straightforward, and that is that the definitions of those racial divides change dramatically across time. And so who decides what the canonical group identities are?

And then we, and then, well, what about ethnicity and culture? And then what about social class, economic class? What about attractiveness? I mean, there's an endless number of ways to subdivide people into groups. So where are you going to stop? And the answer is, well, if you're an activist, you're never going to stop, because if you stop, then there would be any career for you as an activist. So you're never going to stop.

And you're especially not going to stop when there was no logical place to start or to stop to begin with. It's like, look, if you have a hierarchy, and the hierarchy is a tool aimed at an end, which a competency hierarchy is, right? I mean, if you have a plumbing business, it's a hierarchy in all likelihood, and it's aimed at sustaining the plumbing business, generating some profit, and doing some plumbing, right? Those are the fundamental tasks of the plumbing business, generating some profit, and doing some plumbing.

Those are the fundamental tasks of the plumbing hierarchy. And then what you want to do is you want to hire people who can do some plumbing, make some profit, and aim at maintaining the plumbing business. And those are not identical in any way with these group identities. So the question, does diversity have a value in competence hierarchies? Well, what do you mean by diversity? That's the question, you think, well, that's a minor part of the question. It's like, no, it's not.

It's the entire part of the question. I think that at the bottom of this diversity, inclusivity, equity, nonsense is a true hatred for competence. That's what I think is driving. We can undermine the idea of competence by making the fashionable postmodern assumption that everything is about power and that power is arbitrary, so that everyone who has attained any stature above the lowest position in any dimension whatsoever is immediately suspect for their tyranny, and that's the game, and it's a sickening game in my estimation. Your perspectives have obviously struck a nerve that resonates far and wide. Why you, why now? What void in our society has your messaging been able to address? Okay, your

perspectives have obviously struck a nerve that resonates far and wide. Yes, that certainly seems to be the case. Why me? Well, I tried to do that situational analysis that I talked to you guys about a little earlier, you know, when you're trying to ask question about why something is happening to you, you know, you want to depersonalize it to begin with. And so I thought a lot about that. And a big part of what's happened to me is a consequence of a technological revolution. So, online video and podcasts are a technological revolution and not a trivial one. Because YouTube and podcasts have made the spoken word as permanent and accessible as

the written word, and that's never happened before in the entire course of human history. Right, exactly. The medium is the message. And it's really something to take seriously, because before, in order to speak to a very large number of people, you had to write. And even then, that was very limited, although much less limited than not writing, because most people don't read. Reading is a minority taste, and certainly even among the people who read very few people read serious things, and even a smaller fraction of them actually buy books. It's never been anything but a real minority taste, but lots of people can listen.

And so I'm an early adopter of a revolutionary technology. And so that's part of the reason that it's me. It's because I happen to be an early adopter of a revolutionary technology. So then the other thing is, as far as I can tell, the other element that's relevant in terms of content rather than form is that I've been able to make a compelling case for the relationship between responsibility and meaning. And that's both of those things are important. First, we've had a conversation about rights for way

too long. And you can't have a conversation about rights without opening up a void on the responsibility side because your rights are my responsibility. And so whenever we have a discussion about rights and we don't have a discussion about responsibility, then we leave half of the issue unaddressed. And that sort of hangs there as a form of psychic emptiness or pain. And so to talk to people about responsibility is addressing that void. And then to make the case, which I think in some sense

is self-evident, once it's made, that most of the meaning that you experience in your life, most of the necessary meaning to keep you away from the abyss and the totalitarians, is actually to be found in the voluntary adoption of responsibility. It's like, I tell people that. And as I said, I've spoken to about 200,000 people, and everybody goes, oh, yeah, that's definitely right. And it's like, well, it's right, but it hasn't been part of our damn dialogue for, I don't know how long. I guess maybe it was because before we took everything apart in this postmodern way, everyone just took for granted that the meaning in life

was to be found in the adoption of responsibility. It was just part of the normal course of affairs. No one had to articulate it because it was so self-evident that it didn't need articulation. But now it seems to require articulation. And as far as I've been able to tell, it's been really useful to people because they keep telling me, well, you know, I was pretty lost and aimless and nihilistic and maybe attracted by the blandishments of the alt-right or perhaps the left because of that emptiness. And I decided to develop a vision for my life and to try to adopt some responsibility and tell the truth and things are a lot better for me now. And, you know, what most of the people that I talk to who want to talk to me

have that story to tell. So that's an important story. And so I think that's the void. And the void is the right word because without knowledge of that relationship between responsibility and meaning, then you live in a void. And that's not good because the baseline conditions of life, the baseline condition of life is suffering and if you're suffering in a void it's not tolerable. You torture yourself to death and murderousness. It's not acceptable. You need that meaning. It's not optional. So I think that's the void. All right. What are my thoughts on the removal of historical monuments within Canada and the US? EG, the removal of a John A. McDonald statue this week in Victoria. You know, I mentioned earlier tonight that here's something that's worth knowing, I suppose, you know, the Marxists

that criticize the West basically as a consequence of the inequality that the West is produced. Now, capital of Cruz tends to accrue in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people. That's Karl Marx's observation of genius. It's like that actually happens to be true, but it's true in a more complex way than Marx knew or was willing to admit. And it's also sort of true. It's sort of true. It's sort of true in that at any given time, most of the world's money is owned, is in the hands of a disproportionately small number of people. It's not true in that who those people are tends to transform pretty rapidly. So like a Fortune 500 company tends to last for about 30 years and a familial fortune tends to disintegrate within three generations. So although there is a permanent, so although there is one percent, it's sort of like, you know, how you get that spiral in your sink when the water goes out, the spiral stays, but the water is always different.

And that's sort of the case with the 1% is the 1% is always there, but it's not always the same people. And that's actually really important. I think your probability of being in the top 1% for at least a year in your life is something like 10%. So there's a fair bit of mobility. But even more importantly, every society produces inequality.

And the problem with the damn Marxists is that the damned Marxists, to be more precise, is that they lay inequality at the feet of the West in capitalism, and that's seriously wrong. And it's wrong in an absolutely fundamental way, which is something I tried to lay out in chapter 1, when I was talking about how old hierarchies are. Hierarchies are at least a third of a billion years old. They're so old that your nervous system has adapted to them as a primary reality. They're older than trees. And the inequality that goes along with hierarchies is at least that old.

And so to attribute that to the West and capitalism is wrong. Now capitalist countries do produce inequality, but every single society that human beings have ever produced, and the vast majority of social animal societies are hierarchical in producing equality. We don't know how to eliminate it. One thing you can say about the West, though,

is that we've produced a fair bit of wealth and well-being along with the inequality, and that actually turns out to be really rare. So you might say, well, there's no shortage of reprehensible behavior in the history of Western civilization. It's like, hey, fair enough. And maybe you can lay some of that at the feet of the people who founded our country. But for fallible human beings operating within our constraints, acting out our necessarily flawed

systems, we've done pretty bloody well, and we should remember that. And so along with the historical criticism, there should be a fair leaven of gratitude for everything that we have and everything that the people who came before us created. And what one of the things that I find I would say contemptible about the modern university is its lack of gratitude. And I think a lot of that's a consequence of profound historical ignorance.

Human history is one bloody nightmare. There are very, very few shining pockets of illumination. And one of them, I would say, something that really shines is the English common law tradition. That's a bloody miracle, that, and where it's beneficiaries, and we should have a little gratitude for it. So... So That's all thank you very much for coming Much appreciated 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 stealth much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See JordanBeePetersin.com for audio, ebook, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast lecture. If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, comment to review, or share this episode with a friend.

Next week's episode is another 12 rules for life lecture, from Rochester, New York, recorded on September 5, 2018. If you've listened to the previous podcasts, you'll see how many lectures he did in 2018. I didn't see him for months. He was insane. He was like the world's stole my parents. My mom was on tour with him, but they're back for now. We'll be getting into discussions in a couple of months. When Dad has time to do interviews, he's busy writing his next book at this point. Talk to you next week. Thanks for listening. 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.p 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 past, 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.