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

Episode Date: December 22, 2019

A Jordan B. Peterson lecture from San Diego. Recorded January 25 2019. Thanks to our sponsor! https://www.uber.com

Welcome to season 2, episode 40 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator. Today's episode is a 12 rules for life lecture recorded in San Diego on January 25, 2019, named Beyond Order, another 12 rules for life. This podcast gives you rules that have not been discussed before. Update this week, we're celebrating the holidays at home. My grandparents came down from Northern Alberta and are staying with mom and dad, which is really nice.

We're taking a break from the podcast next week, by the way. So I'll tell you Merry Christmas and the Happy Holidays now. I know Christmas can be an incredibly stressful time of year, so I hope people are holding it together, or perhaps even enjoying the holidays. I'm really excited to mention I've started a group for people who want help starting the lion diet, the diet, dad and I are on, or just optimizing health. I've been working with about 40 people in the group so far, and most people have seen great improvements in health problems they've been trying to overcome. Some of their intro videos have literally made me cry. It's amazing how much suffering is out there and what people are able to get through. I know for me when I was trying to climb my way out of having a mood in autoimmune disorder,

it was incredibly scary and isolating. Not to mention I got a lot of hell about trying to change my diet and actually get better. From friends, family, and the media. I made this group as a place for people to go to have kind of an external family to grow with and talk to and complain at about their health struggles. Plus, people get early access to a course I'm producing and twice yearly meetups.

It's been a fun project, although a bit emotional, and I officially relaunched last Friday. You can check it out at liondietclub.com. I have memberships off at 15% off until New Year's. If you guys haven't checked out Dad's very first E-course discovering personality with Jordan B Peterson, it was released Wednesday and is available now for $140 for over five hours of university-level lecture material

on personality in the big five. Check it out at jordanbeepeterson.com slash personality. Enjoy the podcast. Beyond order, another 12 rules for life. A Jordan Beepeterson lecture. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. Much appreciated. It's very nice to be here in San Diego.

It's a lovely city. And a very nice time working on Coronado Beach. Is that right today? That was very good. It's a lot better than 25 below, which is what it is in Toronto right now. So, you know what they say? Canada is the world's largest uninhabitable country. And coming down here, sure, makes it seem that way.

So as Dave said, this is the last American show of the 12 rules for life tour, I think, by all appearances. And so it's being quite the trip. It's about 115 cities, about 250,000 people. Usually in venues of approximately the size, sometimes in Europe a little bit smaller. Some of them were bigger, the biggest auditorium, the biggest stadium, I guess, was with Sam Harris, and that was in Dublin. We had about 8,500 people to that, so that was quite unfathomable, I would say. And yeah, very difficult to believe that people were so

interested in what ended up being approximately an eight-hour discussion on the relationship between facts and value. You know, the relationship between religion and science. It's really something to see that there's a massive public hunger, let's say, or massive public audience for complicated discourse. Who would have guessed that that was the case? But it's really been something to see.

So I thought, I do two things tonight. I thought I would walk through 12 rules for life. And sort of, it would give me a chance to sort of sum up what I think about each of the chapters and what I've come to think about them across time as I've continued to talk about them. But I also thought I might tell you about the next book that I'm writing, which I'm well into now. I haven't really talked about it publicly at all yet.

So I thought I'd let you in on it. It's called Beyond Order, another 12 rules for life. I had derived the first 12 from a list of rules that I'd put on Kora, which is a site where anyone can post questions and anyone can post answers. There originally there were 42 rules.

I wrote them all very rapidly, and just the fact that there were 42 was, well, that's just how it worked out, wasn't planned that way exactly. And that series of rules became very popular on Quora, which was part of the impetus for the book, for 12 rules for life. And I thought I would write about all 42 to begin with, but as I started to write, the essays became longer than I thought they would be.

And so I took 12 of them and crafted them into a book that I felt had standalone chapters, but that also integrated itself into something that was also a book. So I'm doing the same thing with the next 12. And I thought maybe I'd start by telling you what those next 12 rules are. You might be interested in that. Yeah, so, okay sketched out the whole book, and I've really written, thoroughly written six rules and edited them. The editing is quite painstaking.

I should tell you a little bit about that. I mean, some of you might be interested in the technique of writing. Those of you that are interested in writing might find it useful, the discussion of the technique, and those of you who aren't necessarily interested in writing might still be interested in how that comes about. So the first thing I do, and I think this is a good way of approaching something that you're writing. It's is a good way of approaching something that you're

writing. It's a very good way of approaching anything that you're thinking about, is I write out what I'm thinking about without a lot of self-editing. You know, one of the things I've noticed when undergraduates write essays, which they can't do, by the way. If writing's quite hard and people don't really learn it, and it's not easy to teach, and so I have taught a lot of undergraduates how to write, and you can actually teach people to write quite quickly, but you have to know how to do it, and most of the people who teach kids how to write don't know how to write, and so they can't teach it, or they

don't know how to teach it, they can't teach it or they don't know how to teach it but it doesn't matter really Which of those it is I Have on my website at Jordan B Peterson dot com you can download a guideline for writing that I used for my students And it's very very practical document if you have to write many of you do have to write because generally you know very practical document if you have to write. Many of you do have to write because generally, you have to produce documents at work or you have to produce arguments of one form or another. So it turns out that it's very important to write.

And so the first step is to have a problem that you're trying to address that's useful and interesting. It has to be something that grips you because otherwise, why would you bother writing about it? It has to be something important. It's has to be a problem that you're really trying to solve. And I would say, you generally want to write about something that you don't know the answer to.

Because one of the things you want to do when you're writing is you want to take the reader on the journey of deriving the conclusion rather than just presenting it sort of as a fate to complete. If the writing is exciting, and this is the same if you're delivering a talk, if the writing is exciting then there's a journey of discovery that characterizes it. And genuine literature is really like that. You see that, this is one of the reasons I really love Dostoevsky, for example, is that it's pretty obvious if you read

it, Dostoevsky, novel, that he didn't know where he was going from the beginning. It unfolded. The characters had their life, and their ideas unfolded as he wrote about them, and he was discovering something he didn't understand along the way. That's sort of what distinguishes great literature from propaganda. If you're a propaganda, you know exactly what you're trying to accomplish right off the bat and you craft all your characters to make sure that the message that you already know is the one

that's delivered. You see that propaganda, literary propaganda, you see that in visual propaganda at all as well. But if you're genuinely creative, that isn't what you do. Is you have a problem, whatever the problem might be, and then you try to explore it and you attempt, that's what essay means, you attempt to formulate the problem more clearly, you try to formulate the answer. So the first thing you do is you have your problem and then you do your background

research, your reading, so that you have some knowledge about the domain, at least, or you do some thinking, and then you write, and you write without too much self-criticism. You know, if you're not a good writer, or if you don't know what you're doing, what you try to do is you try to write each sentence So that the sentence is perfect when you write it. So you don't have to add it And that won't work because you're not capable of doing that. There is no bloody way in the world that you can come up with a sentence That is high quality in content and properly formulated in an elegant manner all at once. That's not happening. No one can do that.

So, you know, if you're making a movie, you produce way more footage than you're ever going to use in the movie. And that's actually quite convenient because then you have an excess of material and you can choose the best from it. And that's what you want to do when you write. So you write to begin with,

you just write down everything you think, and if you get stuck, you write, I'm stuck here, and you just keep going. You know, seriously, you don't want to stop, and you don't want to criticize yourself, you don't want to worry about how the sentences are formulated and all of that. And then you have a bad first draft, which is a wonderful thing to have, because it's way better to have a terrible first draft than to have nothing at all. And then you can edit it, and you have to assume that what you're going to do

when you edit is throw away like 80% of it. And if you know that to begin with, when you're writing, then it loosens you up because who cares if what you're writing is perfect if you're gonna throw 80% of it away, right? So you can afford to take some risks and to write down some things that you're not going to keep, that you might not even think are reasonable because you're exploring.

You can take chances because you're going to throw 80% of it away anyways. And then it turns out that if you're willing to throw 80% of it away, it's sort of analogous to be willing to throw 80% of yourself away as you learn through life, I would say. Then it's much, much easier to produce. It's actually the case that neurologically you have the systems that produce language and the systems that edit are different. One of the ways that manifests itself, it's quite interesting.

Sometimes people who have temple, what's the dementia? I don't remember the kind. It's frontal temporal dementia. Sometimes it's a variant of Alzheimer's, but sometimes people with frontal temporal dementia get more creative as their dementia progresses. Right? It doesn't make any sense at all, you think, well, as your brain deteriorates, you get more creative.

How can that possibly be the case? And the answer is that the editor, the part of the brain that does the editing, the inhibition, just deteriorates first and leaves the part that can do the creation outside of that critical realm. And so people can experience bursts of creativity that they never had before in their life. You know, it's still a degenerating game across time.

But it's fascinating that that can be the case. And so one of the things you really want to know if you're trying to think something through, something important is don't edit while you're producing. It's a bad idea. And it's greedy in some sense because what it means is that you're trying to do, like just creating is really hard and just editing is really hard. But to do both of them at the same time, it's like that's just impossible. There's just

no way you can do that. And so anyway, so I lay out all the ideas and I'm assuming I'm going to throw away, oh God, at least 80%, it might be 90%, because with my first book, Maps of Meaning, I think I re-wrote every sentence at least 50 times. And that's literally the truth. And so it wasn't quite that intense with 12 rules, but it would have been a dozen times at least, or maybe more than that, and multiple people also editing

and commenting to make sure that everything was set out properly. So then the way I manage it technically is I usually use a split screen, so I have two screens. And I have the rough draft on the left hand side, then I'll cut a piece of it out, you know, two or three pages long that makes a sake section, usually add a section title so that I can pull out a piece that I can kind of grasp intellectually, because it's hard to edit a whole 30-page

document because you can't keep the whole thing in your head. So you have to kind of chunk it down to something that you can manage, then I'll throw it in the right-hand monitor and then start organizing it. Go through it sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph. You think if you're editing properly, and I'm telling you this because this is actually how you think. If you really want to think something through, this is how to do it. So then you have to edit.

So what's the conceptual framework for editing? Well, the words that you use should be the right words. So you want to attend to every word and make sure that each word is the exact, is exactly the right word for that position in the sentence. And then you want to make sure that your words fit together properly in phrases, sentence. And then you want to make sure that your words fit together properly in phrases, proper phrases, and that the phrases are strung together properly within each sentence. And then you want to make sure that each sentence has its proper place in the paragraph. And then you want to make sure that each paragraph is sequenced appropriately within the context of all the other paragraphs. And then finally, you want to make sure that the collection of

paragraphs that makes up this section, or perhaps the chapter, tells a coherent story. And so you can fail or succeed at every single one of those levels of analysis. One of the things that's really painful about reading or grading badly written undergraduate essays is that they fail at every single level. So it's just unbelievably painful. It's like, no, those are the wrong words. And that's frequently the case. People will use words that they don't really understand that are two,

usually large and rare words. And that they don't really understand them. They couldn't use them in day-to-day discourse, so they don't understand the connotations. They sort of got the technical meaning approximately right, but it's very awkwardly placed within the sentence. It's like a speed bump. And so that's a bad idea, because if you use a word you don't understand very well and you're writing for someone who's dimmer than you, that might work. But if you're writing for someone who actually understands that word, they just think that, well, they think the obvious, which is that you're trying to look more intelligent than you are and you're not noticing that it's not working. And so, you have to get the word right and you have to get the phrase right and you have

to get the sentence right and you have to sequence the sentence properly and you have to sequence the paragraphs properly. And then the whole thing has to cohere. And as I said, a bad essay can be wrong at every single one of those levels of analysis. So that the word choice is bad, the phrasing is awkward, the sentences aren't sentences. They're not strung together in a coherent paragraph because a paragraph should be a coherent unit of meaning. They just, they're just happens to be a paragraph break every ten lines randomly. And then there are ideas on page one

that's completely contradict ideas on page three. And so trying to grade that is impossible, trying to edit it, it's easier just to burn it and rewrite it. And so anyway, so I pulled the material onto the other page. And then I'll start with a preliminary reorganization, and just try to make a better draft. And then put that back, and then I pull out one paragraph at a time, or pull out a paragraph, break it up into the sentences.

So you put the sentence out, you put a couple of spaces between the next sentence, so you unpack the paragraph. And then you can rewrite each sentence. And I mean that literally. See, like you have a sentence, so then you rewrite it. And then you rewrite it again, and you rewrite it again. Now you have four of the same sentences, and now you can figure out which of those sentences is better. And you get rid of the three that are worse. And so now the first sentence is improved, and then you do the same thing for all the other sentences. And then you see, okay, well, are those sentences in the right order? And you reorder them until you get them in the right order.

Maybe you throw a few away. And I often keep the things I throw away. I have a little, what would you call it? Document called calls, and I just throw things in there. And sometimes I find a place for them somewhere else. But then, no, the sentences are written much more elegantly and they're in the right order. Then I look at the paragraph and that's rewritten and then I look at the old paragraph and if the new paragraph is better than the old paragraph, then I replace it.

Then I go and do the same thing with the next paragraph. Maybe I do that like ten times. I can tell when I'm done because when I'm done it's not that it's finished because it's something like that's never finished in some sense. But I know when I'm done editing because I'll write it and I'll do that, you know, I'll take a paragraph, take it apart, and make a new paragraph. And then I can't tell which paragraph is better. And so once I've got to the point where I can't make the paragraph any better, that's it. I'm finished. I can't make it any, you know, that doesn't

mean it's good. It just means that I can't make it any better, right? And it actually gets dangerous near the end because if you're, let's say you're feeling pretty bright one day and you're kind of alert and clear hit and you and you improve a Paragraph and you have a better paragraph Maybe the next day you're kind of muddleheaded and stupid and so you take a paragraph and you edit it This is near the end of the editing process and you make a worse paragraph But you're too dim to notice and then you replace the Perfectly good paragraph with the worst one then you've gone gone too far. And so a good editor can help with that. And then, you know, during the process,

if you're fortunate, you have an editor who's, who you're submitting the work to, who then tells you, you know, where things don't flow and where you're being arrogant, or ego-tistical or, or unclear, or you've got your facts wrong, or the sentences don't flow. And then if you have any sense, you listen to the editor because the editor, at least in principle, reflects the audience. And so if an editor makes a comment on something I've written and I was kind of happy about it, I'll usually rewrite it until I get something that deals with what the editor said, that I like just as well as what I had written to begin with and then I'll substitute it.

That also keeps the editor happy because you don't want to ignore your editor because they're working hard trying to make the thing better. What good is it to ignore it? It's useful to be criticized. I've had some very good editors. So, anyways, that's basically how that works. Those are useful things to know, technically. You think, well, you can make a bad first draft.

If any of you have to write complex documents, that's a perfect way to approach. It's like, write a really bad draft as fast as you can. Then you've got something. And then you can do the editing. The other thing I do, too, is I read all the sentences aloud. Because if a sentence, that helps with the poetic element of it. If a sentence is crafted optimally,

not only does it say what you want it to say, but when you read it, it has a rhythm. And that actually turned out to be very helpful. Even maps of meaning was like that, because although it's a much more difficult book, that was my first book, and has, five or six line sentences in it. But they have a rhythm. And so when I did the audio book, it was much easier than it would have otherwise been,

because there was a rhythm in the sentences, and it was much easier to read aloud. And so that's nice. And if you read a book that has been written, that has been read allowed by the author, then it sort of sings, and it makes it much easier to read. And then you can also play with the music of the sentences, the words and the sentences, and that's a lovely thing too. And it's a wonderful thing to be able to concentrate on something like that, because it really cleans up your thinking.

This is one of the things that I've strived to talk to my undergraduate students about. My graduate students as well is like, well, why would you bother writing an essay? Why bother? Well, because you need the grade. It's like, well, why would you prepare documents? Like, well, you know, it's a requirement for work. It's like, no, that's not the reason. The reason is, you pick something that's worth thinking about, and you think about it because then you've thought about it and it's

useful to have thought about things. You know, assuming that we think so that we don't do foolish things in our lives, the better you get at thinking, the clearer apprehension you have about the nature of the world and your place in it. And to pay attention to each word and each phrase in each sentence when you're dealing with a complicated problem, it pays off massively. You know it, it clears you up. There's good evidence for that. You know, if you have people right about their past, then they tend to shed the baggage that they're carrying. If you have them right about their futures,

they're much more likely to put those plans into action and be successful. And so, I mean, it shouldn't be that surprising if you think about it, because it shouldn't surprise you that thinking is useful. But it might surprise you, even though people don't do it that often, because it's difficult. But it is somewhat of a surprise to think of writing as what would you call it, technically

sophisticated thinking. The huge advantage to writing, and it's a massive advantage with a word processor because editing is cheap with a word processor, right? I mean, 40 years ago when you were writing by hand or typing, if you made a mistake in a sentence, you had to retype the whole damn page, you know, it was really annoying. Now if you write a bad sentence, you can rewrite it 10 times and the cost of that is virtually zero. And so what it means is you can continually edit and improve what you think, and you can

make that more elegant and more powerful. And that has unbelievable practical utility. You know, as you progress through life, one of the things you realize, especially if you're dealing with people in relatively sophisticated situations, but it doesn't really matter, is that those who formulate the best arguments win. They win everything, right?

They negotiate more effectively at work. People are more likely to Listen to and abide by the plans that they formulate. They formulate better plans. They can negotiate better with their spouse and their children because they're articulate And it's such a funny thing because it's so seldomly the case, you know, what's the utility of a liberal arts degree? Well right now, damn little, I would say, but previously the whole idea was, well, it would teach you to communicate, it would teach you to write, and why is that useful? Well, because if you could communicate effectively,

then you always do better at everything. You know, and it doesn't matter what, endeavor you're pursuing. You know, if you're a housing contractor and you have to negotiate with your clients If you can formulate your plans and your arguments in an articulate way your way ahead of the game and It sharpens you up in such a remarkable way So anyways, it's one of the wonderful things about being able to write is that it does give you that chance to really sit and think things through. And so it's something I would highly recommend. It's a hard thing to do. But you can do a little bit of it every day.

That's another thing. If you're ever interested in writing, here's something else that's practical. I learned this partly from Hemingway because Hemingway wrote a little bit about writing. He was very good at it. He did a lot of throwing away. You know, one of his rules was if you took a sentence and you're trying good at it. He did a lot of throwing away. One of his rules was if you took a sentence and you're trying to fix it, one of the first things you do is throw it all. Every word you can possibly get rid of in that sentence and still have the sentence make sense.

And one of the things that I often tell my undergraduates when they're trying to fix their writing is go through and shorten every sentence by 25% and then do the same thing with the essay. Throw away 15% of it. Shorten the sentences, shorten the essay. It'll improve it by a factor of two. And then they try that and their writing quality goes way up. So that's a nice thing to know. And Hemingway also said that if you want to write, you should write a little bit every day. And there was some evidence of that. I read a book when I was a first university professor called The New Faculty Member. And there was some evidence of that. I read a book when I was a first university professor called the new faculty member, and it was an empirical study of why faculty members failed, and most of them do. Most people in most positions fail. I think the evidence

is something like 50% of middle managers had negative net value to their companies. It's something like that. Yeah, well, people operate and fail your mode frequently. And one of the mistakes that faculty members made, they made two. One was if they were teaching and they were doing badly at it, they prepared more, and that made their lectures worse. And the second was that if they weren't writing, then they would wait until they had large blocks of time where they could concentrate on writing.

Because people often think, well, I have a novel I'd like to write. One day I'll have enough time, and I'll sit down and do it. It's like, that will never happen. That will never, ever happen. You will never have enough That will never ever happen. You will never have enough time to write your novel because your time isn't your own. Your time is distributed among other people. And if you want to take some time for something that you want to do that's

personal like that and that's private, you have to steal that time away. And everyone's going to object to it. And so you can't steal that much. You have to steal it in a and everyone's going to object to it. And so you can't steal that much. You have to steal it in a sort of a sneaky way if to sneak off and have your own time. And so maybe you could write half an hour a day or maybe you could write 15 minutes a day or maybe you could write 45 minutes a day.

I spent some time in my life writing three hours a day, but I had to like, I had to viciously discipline my family before I could ever get to that point, you know, and something like a junkyard dog. So defending my time, but this is something that's really important to know. Like if you want to write, then you take a little time every day and do it.

And you know, if you write a page a day, that's 400 pages a year. All right, that's a whole novel in a year. So you can get a tremendous distance doing a little bit every day. That's a good thing to know about whatever it is that you want to pull into your life. You can still a little bit of time every day, but if you wait until the luxury of having a week to write or a month to write, or even a weekend to write or a month to write or even a weekend to write on a regular basis, that's never going to happen. Your time is valuable

and other people will use it up on also important but short term things. So anyways, that's a bit of a discussion of the technical process. So I'm back into that right now, writing this next book. And the idea is this. The first book was an antidote to chaos. And it was an attempt to explain that while we need a certain amount of order, what we need more than order, even though, is a balance between order and chaos. And so I'm trying to represent that in the juxtaposition

of the two books. The first one was published as a white cover. And this one will be published with a black cover. So that'll be a nice juxtaposition. And I hope at some point that they'll be available as a two volume set. And one is a bit of a discosition on the dangers of chaos and the other a discosition on the dangers of chaos and the other a disquisition on the dangers of order.

And so, and then necessity for balancing them. So here's some of the new rules. So the first one is, do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. I like that one because you're more prone to carelessly denigrate social institutions if you're liberal on the left side of the spectrum, let's say, because you're interested in lateral thinking and spontaneity

and novelty and leery of what would you say structures that constrain. And then if you're more on the center or the right, you're more likely to denigrate creative achievement because while the creative types, they're always moving laterally and breaking things apart. And I mean, they genuinely creative types. The ones who were on the avant-garde, and they're a bit of a threat to social institutions, but the truth of the matter is that you need

both. There's this line in Ellis in Wonderland when Ellis goes down the rabbit hole underneath the structure of things and she meets the red queen down there. Red queen is basically mother nature and she's red because Mother Nature is red in blood. That's why the red queen is always running around yelling off with their heads. She's the queen of mayhem and murder. One of the things she says is that in my kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. And that's the fundamental flaw of rigid conservatism, is that you cannot stay in the same place,

because everything around you shifts, and so you're forced to update. And so if you're a conservative person, you can't denigrate creative achievement, because a certain amount of it is necessary just to keep things stable. And if you're a conservative, you're interested in stability, you think, well, I wish things could stay the same. It's like, nope, not going to happen. You know what I mean? You don't even stay the same, right?

You sit there and you think, I'm just going to stay the same. And you don't, you get old. And it, right, right? I mean, it just happens. And because of that, you have to, you have to update. And it's the creative types that do the updating. Now, you know, that can get out of hand and things can, you know, you can get so many people,

creative people, destabilizing the current situation so that nothing is reliable. And that untrammeled creativity can be a destructive force. That's its danger. But it's necessary to respect cultural institutions and also to respect the process that updates them. And so that's what that chapter is about. And so imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that. See, I like that one.

The single-mindedly part is an interesting one. I learned this at least in part from Nietzsche's, you know, when you're a kid, in principle, you could be anything, which is kind of one of the wonderful things about being a kid. And then one of the painful things about growing up and being an adult is that, well, you can't just stay be in everything. That's the story of Peter Pan. Pan means everything. And Peter Pan is this magical child who can do anything.

But he's got a strange kingdom, right? He's king of the lost boys, which perhaps isn't the kingdom that you want to rule over. And so, and he doesn't grow up. And so, he falls in love with Wendy. And Wendy grows up and she has a family. She gets old. She stops being a child. But she has a family.

She has a husband. She has a family. She has a life. And Peter Pan just stays in Neverland, which is also a hint on the part of the reader. And he stays magical and contents himself with Tinkerbell, who I always think of her as the porn fairy. And all that.

Yeah. It's got all the advantages of femininity except she's not real. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, Peter Pan, he doesn't want to grow up partly because his role model is Captain Hook. And Captain Hook, well, he's a pirate, so he's kind of a tyrant. And he's also a coward,

and he's a coward because he's afraid, at least, because he's being chased by a crocodile with a clock in his stomach. You think, what the hell does that mean? He's being chased by a crocodile. What does that mean? It's like, well, and it's already got a piece of him, right?

It's bitten off his hand, it's like the taste. Well, it's time. That's why the clock is there, you know? It's time. And the crocodile is the terrible force that lies underneath everything that waits to pull you down, like it's mortality itself, and the threat of mortality. And the reason that Captain Hook is a tyrant

is because he's afraid of death. And so that makes him a tyrant, and a cowardly tyrant. And Peter Pan looks at the cowardly tyrant and he thinks, well, I don't want to grow up to be that. And it's like, well, fair enough, you know? But what are you going to do? Not grow up? Well, then you stay king of the lost boys,

and you have tinkerbell, and life goes on. And that's not a good outcome. And so, you have to make a sacrifice when you grow up. You have to become something. And to become something means to not become a whole bunch of other things. Like, it's a sacrifice. It's the same sacrifice that you undertake when you decide to get married. You know, it's like, well, you forego everyone else to have one person.

And it is a real sacrifice. And it's a sacrifice that prays on people's minds because they think, well, you know, maybe I could have picked someone better. It's like, because you always suffer from the delusion that someone better would have agreed to have you. And while it's funny, I just read this great article. I tweeted a couple of nights ago. I read this great article about how people select potential mates on dating sites and people generally go for those who are about 25% more attractive than they are.

So which is, you know, ambitious and pointless. But that is what people do, you know, they hope that, by the way, they hope the person won't notice. I'll just slip myself in here and maybe you won't notice. Well, so there's a sacrifice. But the thing about the sacrifice is that you end up with something rather than nothing at all. And I've seen lots of people in my clinical practice who didn't grow up when they should have. And who are 30 or which isn't too bad, although it's not that good.

But 40, they're still drifting. They still haven't catalyzed an identity of any sort. And that starts to get ugly. 30, it starts to get ugly around 30. If you're 23 or 24 and you haven't catalyzed an identity, it's okay, people think, well, you're mostly Peter Pan, you're full of potential, man, we'll gamble on the potential and take a chance at you.

But then if you're 30 and you have the same non-existent resume, people think, well, you just failed. It's not potential. It's just, you're just not there. And if that's the case at 40, that's getting really rough. Like it's not completely hopeless if you're in that situation at 40, but man, you got a lot of catching up to do. And so, how do you get out of that?

Well, partly, and this is one of the things you also have to let young people know is, pick something. You don't know what to do. Well, take your best, damn shot at it. Don't wait around, man. Make a plan. Aim at something.

Move in that direction. Adopt a disciplinary routine of some sort, because that will form you. Now it limits you too, but it forms you. And then, you know, the thing about adopting a disciplinary structure, which limits you, and which is a sacrifice, is that it also increases the probability that you're going to do something useful over the long run. You know, when I was starting out as a researcher, my area of research was somewhat narrow. I was looking at the hereditary, I was looking at factors that influenced the inheritability of alcoholism, because alcoholism is heritable to a large degree.

And it's partly because the manner in which you respond to a drug of abuse is determined in part by biological factors, and that the variance in those biological factors is biologically determined to a fair degree. So I'll give you an example. I had this friend, his name was Frank Irvin. He was a very cool guy.

He looked like Ernest Hemingway. And it was a big beard. He was a cool character. And he had this ranch in St. Kits. It was a monkey ranch. I know, I know, a monkey ranch. And he was raising alcoholic monkeys. And because he was a researcher,

and he would take these wild monkeys, green monkeys, and bring them into an enclosure, and then he would give them rum and coke. And 5% of the monkeys would drink to coma on first exposure. And he had videotapes of that, which were really hilarious. They looked like, they looked like frat party, fundamentally. And most of the monkeys would have a few sips and discuss their monkey business in a civilized way in a corner

and then go home when it was time to call it a night, but there was five percent of them and they were like hanging off the trees by their tail and their arms by the end of the evening and passed out completely. Anyways, one of his discoveries was that in a wild population of primates who were relatively naïve tail call

that if you exposed a certain proportion of them, 5% of them had no control whatsoever over their drinking. They just drink right to coma. And that's about the same with people who start to experiment with alcohol. So anyways, that's one of the examples that there was a biological influence. Anyways, this area of inquiry was somewhat narrower

than I had hoped for. I hadn't really planned on studying the psychobiology of response to alcohol. I was interested in drug abuse and drug abuse motivation. I was interested in wider issues. But what was so cool was that the deeper I got into that, so the more I disciplined myself with regards to that particular domain of study,

the more I learned about all sorts of other things, it was like going through a keyhole and then out the other side. And most disciplinary processes are like that. And so one of the things you have to do is you take the pluripotentiality of childhood and you discipline that. So that might be a meta rule.

Like you couldn't say, well, here's the disciplinary structure everyone should undertake. That's two specific rule. Everybody should go into the military. It's like, no, not necessarily. Who knows what your disciplinary strategy should be? But you can make a more abstract rule, which is something like, I don't care

what your disciplinary strategy is, but you need to impose one on yourself, and for some reasonable amount of time, because you integrate yourself as a consequence of doing that, as well as making yourself vaguely socially useful and appropriate, which is also an on trivial thing. And then once you have yourself disciplined, then you can take that discipline stealth and you can start expanding it outward again. And so that's a really useful thing to know. So this is Nietzsche, who is a great critic of Christianity, was an admirer of Catholicism, interestingly enough,

because one of the things he believed was that the attempt over several thousands of years to force every phenomenon into a framework that could be explained by the axioms of Catholic belief disciplined the European mind. It made it capable of producing rigorous and coherent theories. Independent of whether the theory was correct, that wasn't the issue. It was like, well, once you learn how to write, you can write SAA, but you could also write SAB. If you don't know how to write, you can't write either.

And maybe you learn to write by writing SAA, but then you can write SAA B and C. And the same issue applies here is, once you get yourself disciplined, then you can take the discipline self and you can go do a bunch of different things with it. And so maybe it doesn't matter how you discipline yourself, but it really matters that you do. And so that's an important thing.

I think it's an important thing for everyone to know, but I think it's really an important thing for young people to know. It's like, well, I don't know what to do for everyone to know, but I think it's really an important thing for young people to know. It's like, well, I don't know what to do with myself. Well, don't sit around and get old. That's a bad idea. And spin around doing nothing. It's like, pick something.

Make a mistake, right? Pick something that you're not sure about and go and pursue it. You get a quarter of the way there, a half way there, you're a lot smarter because you've had to undertake a fair bit of learning just to get that far. Maybe at that point you find out it's not for you and you decide to make a left hand turn, you know, you make a 90 degree turn somewhere else, at least you fleshed yourself out in the pursuit of the discipline and don't wait around. You know, and I think that's, well, so that's what that chapter is about. And so... Yeah. Applause.

Yeah, and then, Rule Three is analogous to that. Work as hard as you can, as you possibly can, on at least one thing, and see what happens. Well, it is a corollary to that. It's like, well, one of the things you want to discover when you're young or one of the things you want to discover at some point in your life, it's better to discover when you're in your 20s, I think, is just how hard can you work on something?

You know, like if you pick something, I don't care what it is again, you think, I'm going to go flat out on this and see what happens. And that's also useful too, because there's no other way of really discovering your limits. Right? And you kind of want to know what your limits are. I think one of the things you need to do in your life at some point is push yourself farther than you can go.

You know, so you kind of push yourself past the point of exhaustion. You think, oh, that's good. There past the point of exhaustion. Think, oh, that's good. There's the point of exhaustion. Well, you can't stay there because if you stay at the point of exhaustion for any length of time, well, then you'll degenerate, right? Because that's just too much. But you can find that point and then you can pull back and you can think, okay, well, I can't go farther than that.

I kind of know where my limit is now. I can pull back and I can operate within that limit, but then at least you know where your limit is. And that's an unbelievably useful thing to do. The other thing too is, is like, well, how are you ever going to discover if you could possibly be successful at whatever you want to be successful at,

unless you push yourself in at least one direction right to your bloody limit. And it's another thing, you know, it's another thing we don't teach young people and it's quite striking to me because it seems kind of obvious. It's like, well, who are you? You're 19, you're 20. Who are you? Well, you don't bloody know? How do you know? It's like six years ago you were 13. You don't know anything. So, well, so what are you capable of? Well, you do you know? It's like six years ago you were 13. You don't know anything. So, well, so what are you capable of? Well, you don't know. Well, how are you going to find out? Well, you're going to push yourself at something farther than you can go when then

you have some sense of where your limits are. And you know, your limits are going to be, they're not going to be where you think they are and all probability, well, some of them will be a little closer than you want them to be, but a lot of them, you'll be able to push yourself way farther than you think. And so that's an unbelievably useful thing to do. And so that's... And then maybe, you know, if you really wanted to get ambitious about it, you could push yourself as far as you could go in five or six different directions,

and just find out, like, well, where are your contours? What exactly are the limitations of this form that you're inhabiting? And you get some sense of who you are and what you're good for. You know, and that's a lot. This is part of the reason why I'm not happy with this continual injunction in our society to have more self-esteem or to be happy.

It's like, well, first of all, good luck with being happy. And, well, it's just not going to work out when you're not happy. You know, and things are going to come along that are going to make you not happy. And then if the whole purpose of being is to be happy and you're not happy, then as soon as you're suffering, you're done because you got nothing. You certainly don't have happiness, and that's all there was... That was the whole point, and it's gone because you're done because you got nothing. You certainly don't have happiness and that's all there was that was the whole point and it's gone because you're suffering. You got nothing. That's not a use, that's not useful but you know that's not to say that I have anything against happiness if it happens to come along you know well you know you got to be grateful if it does come along but

you can't rely on it that's for sure. That's foolish. But you could inform young people that they have to figure out just exactly how capable and resilient they are, and the way they do that is by testing themselves against severe challenges voluntarily. We know that from clinical practice, from clinical science, is, well, how do you make people resilient? It's, well, that's easy. You identify a set of challenges

that they need to undertake, and you know, you kind of match the challenge to the person like you would for a child that you care for, and you say, well, why don't you, you know, see if you can withstand this challenge, go and take it on. And the person goes and gives it a shot and finds out, well, yeah, I can do it. It's like great. You're tougher than you thought you were.

So here's a slightly larger challenge. Why don't you go check out that and see if you can do it too. And, you know, your ability expands as you take on the challenges. That's how you make people resilient. You know, bloody well put them in safe spaces and what shield them from microaggressions, you know. I think you only do that if you want to make people weak enough so that you can make them weak enough so that you're ideological, what would you call it?

The ideological formulation of victimization and oppression can find a ready target. So you take university students, yeah, that's it. You make them as weak as possible and as frightened and timid as they can be, and then there are hungry consumers of your pathological ideology. That's a hell of a thing to do to young people, man.

And it's so interesting, because it's interesting, because it is exactly the opposite of what you will do with people if you're a clinician who's properly trained and you want to help people become stronger. And, you know, there's like ten different variants of clinical psychologies, behaviorism, and phenomenology, and existentialism, and humanism, and psychoanalysis. There's lots of different schools of psychotherapy, but all the well-developed schools of psychotherapy do share at least one thing in common, and that is that you help people confront things they're afraid of, and that they're avoiding, and that makes them stronger. That's the fundamental essence of successful psychotherapy, and the reason for that is because

that's the fundamental essence of learning. So actually what you're trying to do, if you're, it's not like psychotherapists invented how to make people resilient, obviously not. What they did was observe what made people resilient and formalize it. What makes people resilient is for them to push themselves up against challenges and become stronger as a consequence of it. And so it's so interesting to see that this has been inverted in the universities. It's actually been turned upside down

and equally interesting to see that the clinical bodies like the American Psychological Association cursed be their name and the American Psychological Association, cursed be their name, and the American Psychiatric Association, haven't come out on Mars and said, look, you couldn't do anything more malevolent to young people if you planned it than to shield them from all voluntary contact with things that challenge their beliefs. It's the worst thing you could do.

So I can't believe that they organize, it's hard for me to believe that the organizations have been that cowardly. But there it is. They are. So that's life. Rule four, do not hide unwanted things in the fog. Yeah, that's a good one. You know how it is when something's up and you don't want to think about it? Christ, that's probably, you know, sometimes that's your whole life. It's like, God, something's up, I don't want to think about it. I don't want to think about it. Well, that whole, that's interesting that you cannot want to think about something. Because this is what tangled Freud up, a segment Freud up in the idea of repression.

Because he kind of thought that you knew what it was that you didn't think about, and then you decided that you weren't going to think about it. Which is very paradoxical, because then you have to know and not know at the same time. And that isn't actually how it works. It's more complicated than that. You know, let's say that you come home from work

and you're in a bad mood. And that happens, right? And you know, your wife or your husband or your child or your dog does something that's minor league annoying and you get all upset about it. And while your dog doesn't ask you, it still likes you. But your wife or your kid might say,

well, what's up with you, particularly your wife is likely to say that or your husband. What's up with you? Like you're overreacting. I'm not overreacting. It's like, well, you're crabby about something. I'm not crabby about anything. It's like, yeah, you are. Well, what. I'm not crabby about anything. It's like, yeah, you are.

Well, what are you crabby about? Well, you don't know. Well, this is an interesting thing, you know, that something can upset you, and you actually don't know what it is. And then, you know, if you're fortunate, the person that you're with will torture you a bunch, and make you figure out what you're crabby about.

And you won't be happy about that. You know, and sometimes that'll actually result in tears even when you realize what it is that that's upsetting you and who the hell wants to go through that. Nobody. And so, you know, you just avoid that. But, but it's not a good idea. What you want to do is you want to take what you're upset about. This is partly what you do in psychotherapy. So people come to you as a therapist and they're upset.

And you want to figure out what they're upset about. And so you say, well, what might you be upset about? And then they guess. And I like to think about it as laying cards. Maybe the person's got to deck two decks of cards in their hand. And they're laying all the cards out on the table. You know that's a metaphor. You lay your cards out on the table and so that's what you do with someone. You see person comes to therapy because things aren't going for them the way

that they would like them to go because otherwise why would they be there and but it isn't necessarily obvious why and so what you have to do is listen a bunch just like well what's your problem? What do you think your problem is? Well, I don't really know, but I'm not happy. Well, what might your problem be? Let's guess at it, stupidly, wander around a bit. It's like doing a bad first draft. It's the same thing.

Well, maybe it's this. I might be upset about this, or I might be upset about this, or I might be upset about what happened to me when I was a kid, or I'm upset at work, or I'm not happy with my kids know or I'm upset at work or you know I I'm not happy with my kids or I'm not happy with my wife or I'm not happy with myself or like you know there's all sorts of reasons you might be upset and what what you find if you do that with people you let them wander through the domain of being upset is that they come out with 30 things they might be upset about, but almost right away

they can figure out that 15 of those things are 20 of those things are irrelevant. They can take them off the table, but they can't take them off the table till they've laid them on the table, till they've walked through it. You know, and that's part of the process by which emotion becomes articulated, because your emotions will signal to you that something's wrong, but they won't tell you why because emotions aren't very high resolution. It's your crabby, you know, because maybe your boss makes an offhand comment, made an offhand comment two weeks ago, and some party you think that maybe a promotion that you deserved is now

not in the works. But you didn't even re-notice that. It got you. It wasn't the response you wanted from your boss. And so God only knows what it signifies and it sets your mood sideways and then it makes you susceptible to outbursts at home. And it's very difficult to dig down into that. And you might have to admit to yourself that you really want the promotion. And maybe might have to admit to yourself that you really want the promotion and maybe

you have to admit that what you haven't done everything you possibly could to deserve it and maybe you'd have to dig into the fact that your relationship with your boss isn't everything it could be and then you'd have to figure out that you're not working as hard at work as you might because you're resentful, it's like Jesus, it's just a bloody morass down there, you know? It's like Jesus, it's just a bloody morass down there. And you see this with couples who are on the verge of divorce. They can't talk because everything they say is a minefield. And it's a minefield, so every topic is associated with the same discussion that's occurred repeatedly for the last 20 years and never being sorted out.

And so every single sentence is a minefield. And then you dig into that, you find that there's like, underneath each contentious sentence, that's when you have people sitting there, you know, in your office with their arms crossed, and every time one of them says something the other one rolls their eyes and By the way, that's a good predictor of divorce I'm dead serious if you want a predictor of divorce It's like your your husband your wife talks you roll your eyes. It's like you guys you're done That's that's contempt You know and once the contempt settles in is very very difficult to reverse. And the contempt doesn't settle in if there hasn't been 10,000 hours of non-communicative fights.

And that's partly that wish that people can hide things in the fog. It's like, I'm upset and I bloody well don't know, want to know why. And it's no wonder. And so the Freudian repression idea is wrong. It's because you don't know what it is that's upsetting you and then you refuse to face it. It's more subtle than that is that your emotions hint at you that something isn't the way it should be.

And then you can remain unconscious merely by not attending to that. I don't want to think about that. It's like, yeah, well, no wonder. But what are you going to do? You're going to wait. You're going to collect all these errors around you, right? An immense number of unsolved errors. You do that long enough, and your whole life is just a morass of unsolved errors. And then you really won't want to think about it. And then you're really done. And so, well, what's the rule? Don't hide unwanted things in the fog.

Well, you know, imagine that you're wandering through the fog and there's pits that you could fall into and that there's knives that you could impale yourself on. There's sharp edges everywhere. It's like, well, that's terrible. The world's, it's terrible that the world's full of pits and sharp edges and knives, hidden in the fog. It's like, well, yeah, but what if you disperse the fog? Well, then the pits are still there, and so are the sharp edges and the knives, but you don't have to fall into them because you can

just walk around them. You know, and that's another reason why it's so useful to face things. It's like, well, if you become articulate about what it is that's disturbing you, then you sharpen up your representations of the catastrophe, let's say. And then you can, it turns out that it's much more probable that you can deal with it. And you can't be sure because sometimes you're just screwed. Well, that's why you end up dying. It's like, well, I'm dead serious about this. I don't want to be stupidly optimistic.

Sometimes you can be backed into a corner and there's no escape. That happens. But most of the time, it's not the case. Most of the time if you're willing to make the situation clear, right, which is a matter of facing it and then clarifying it. It's a courageous thing to do. That's to beard the dragon in its den. If you do that, then you find that the situation resolves into a set of problems that are smaller than you originally assumed they would be, and there's a much higher probability that you can decompose the problems and then start to address them. And it doesn't matter because it's your best bet.

Like, even if it doesn't work and it might not, it's like you don't have a better strategy. There is not a better strategy. There's not a better strategy than to seek out the dragon in its death, even though there's some possibility that you'll get burnt to a crisp and that you won't get the gold. It's much better than waiting at home in your bed quivering while the thing grows and comes in and eats you. Because then for sure you lose, and that's pretty much how life works. So that's what that's chapters about I'm gonna read the rest of these because I'm not going to get through all them, but I could at least let you know what they are

Rule five abandoned ideology Rule 5, abandon ideology. Rule 6, this is the one I've just been working on. This one just about killed me. It's very, very difficult. It was very difficult to write this. This is a cool one. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. I'm going to return to that one.

Because that's such a strange thing to learn. Do not do things that you hate. That's a variant, and I wrote a rule in the first book, which was, tell the truth, or at least don't lie. And I formulated it that way because, well, you don't know how to tell the truth, because what the hell do you know? But you can maybe not lie, because sometimes,

you know, you're going to say something, and you know it's a lie, and you can maybe not lie because sometimes you know you're going to say something and you know it's a lie and you could just not lie and sometimes you just don't know and well then you know you're ignorant and that's irreducible in some sense but so maybe you can't tell the truth because you don't know the truth but you can not lie and this is the behavior of equivalent of this, because you shouldn't do things that you hate. It's the same as lying. It's just, it's the acting out of a lie.

Think, well, I have to do things that I hate. It's like, well, don't be so sure about that. Or maybe you have an ethical, maybe that's not a good enough reason. Maybe you have an ethical obligation to not that's not a good enough reason. Maybe you have an ethical obligation to not do things you hate the same way that you have an ethical obligation not to lie. And the excuse, while I had to do it,

it might even be valid in some sense, because you can find yourself in situations where you're terribly constrained. The problem is it's not helpful. Lies will come back to haunt you. And the same thing happens when you do things that you hate. It's the behavior equivalent of a lie. It will absolutely come back to haunt you. And if you're in a situation where you're required to do that for whatever reason, well, that's terrible for you. And maybe there's no way out of it or no simple way out of it, but you're

going to, you're going to be punished for it, not least by yourself, not least by the degeneration of your character, which is a terrible thing because you actually need your character in order to survive. Your character is the strength that you have to bring to bear in the world, and if you compromise that, well then you will absolutely pay for that. So... Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible. That's a fun one because it's very beauty. There's a bit of a meditation on beauty. Beauty is a mysterious thing.

It isn't obvious what it is or why it's valuable. It's kind of an intimidating thing, you know, because we're all flawed. And so if we encounter something beautiful, then it's in some sense to encounter something beautiful, is also to become aware of all the ways that you're not that. And so it's to dare to encounter an ideal that shames you, I would say. And it's partly why people are afraid of beauty, but beauty is also a window into,

I don't know exactly, it's a window into something transcendent. You know, I think most people experience this directly when they listen to music. Because most people like music, and we might differ in what music we consider beautiful. But virtually everyone has a genre that speaks to them of something that's beautiful, and there's something intensely meaningful and sustaining about that. So this rule is about while attempting to do something

like that in your own life. You can take a little corner if it's not a whole room because the first suggestion I had, I didn't write this as a rule, but it's become a rather popular meme is to, you know, to clean up your room, put your room in order. Maybe before you try to put the world in order, that would be a good thing. Put your room in order. But maybe after you put your room in order, you try to make it beautiful, because that's the next step of elevation is,

could you take something that's merely organized and functional and elevated to the next level? Could you dare to interact with something that's beautiful? Could you reach that high? That transforms your life. That's why art transforms people's lives, because a great piece of art is like a portal through which beauty pours and it can pour over everything.

It's a terrifying thing. I had an artist for a day, he said, well that's why we put frames around paintings. And to keep the beauty stuck in the painting, because you don't want it leaking out all over the house and causing trouble, you know, it's bad enough that it's right there in front of you, telling you how things could be but aren't, stating to you that there's much more work to do that you're not doing,

and that everything is far more worth attending to than you have the time to attend to. And the great painting does that, you know. Maybe you think of an impressionist who goes out and paints a haystack, I think that was Monet, painted all the haystacks. Never remember if it's Monet or Monet. It doesn't matter. He painted these, it might have mattered to him, but it doesn't matter to this story. He painted all these haystacks under different conditions of light, you know, and they're very different in color.

You think, well, you might think, if you're not very sophisticated, why would someone paint the same haystack over and over? And the answer that was, if you think it's the same haystack, you're not paying any attention because it's unbelievably different. You know, and most of the time, we only have a chance to glance at something, but an artist will look at something that you'd only glance at and look at it and look at it and work on it and represent it. And then that reminds you, when you look at it, it reminds you that everything is worth

looking at deeply, even though you don't have the time to do it. And it's a window into the realm of reality that's outside of your casual glance and it connects you with that And so if you dare to engage with beauty then it serves as a reminder that you're connected to something that's beyond your Comprehension all the time and that's a good thing to know. It's in some sense It's like in some sense. it's like, in some sense, it's like letting God into your life. And that's why beauty is a window into the divine. And I think that's literally true.

Well, maybe you have a better explanation for beauty. It's not an easy thing to explain. It's not an easy thing to explain the fact that it beckons and that it's attractive than it's terrifying and challenging all at the same time. It's like, what is it that's lurking in there that has that effect? It's definitely something that's beyond the mundane by definition. And it's something to set up something in your house that's beyond the mundane that beckons to you. It's a daring thing to do and people are terrified of it and so they won't do it.

And it's no wonder. But it's a daring thing to do and people are terrified of it and so they won't do it and it's no wonder. But it's a great thing to dare. Plan and work diligently. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship. That's a good one. It's a funny one, though, eh? Because the first part of that sentence is a lot different than the second part, plan and work diligently.

Okay, that's sort of one conception, that's for sure, one conceptual realm, to maintain the romance in your relationship. It's like, no, those things don't go together, you know, but they do. They do. As a clinical psychologist, I often encouraged my clients to date their wife or husband. Have a date. We're not getting along. It's like, well, when was the last time you did anything romantic together?

It was like a year ago. It's like, really? Really? That might be one of the reasons you're not getting along. Or maybe it's a symptom of the fact that you're not getting along. Well, do you go out with each other? Well, we don't have the time. Well, fair enough, you know. You know, life gets in the way. You know, if you're, you both have a job and you have little kids, it's, you know, maybe you have some other responsibilities. It's very easy for the romantic part

of your relationship to fall to priority 11 on a list of one to 10 and you never get to it, you know? And so then I would tell my clients, well, what are you going to date? You know, and they're one sitting there and one sitting there, they won't have anything to do with each other. And the first thing they think is,

I wish we would have gone and seen a different therapist. And then the next thing they think is, okay, we'll do it. But we'll do it gradually and we're not going to enjoy it. And that'll show you that you're wrong. And so then they come back and you know maybe they went to a movie and say, well how did it go? They said, well we had a terrible time. We had a terrible time. We couldn't agree on the movie. And then we went to the movie and we just fought afterwards. And we went to a lousy little restaurant. And it was a wretched, we had a wretched time. And we're never doing that again. And then they look at me like they're victorious. You know, and I think, I think, well, I see that's your theory. You're never going to do that again. That's your

solution to the lack of romance in your relationship. It's like, well, of see that's your theory, yeah, you're never gonna do that again. That's your solution to the lack of romance in your relationship. It's like, well, of course, you're not very good at it. You're stuck with this person. So it's like, maybe you go on 10 dates and like the first one is 100% wretched and the next one is only 95% wretched and so that's a really good trajectory.

You know, because by the time you get to the 15th date, maybe you can sort of tolerate each other again. And if you did it 30 times, well, maybe you'd be half ways good at it. And if you're going to be married for 50 years, you might as well put the effort into it, have 30 wretched married dates so that you can get good at it. You know? You know? You know? You don't think about it. Because people are sort of naive and arrogant at the same time. Well, we should be able to just go out and have a romantic time. It's like, really, you should just be able to do this.

Like, what makes you think that you're good at that? You know, it's like, if you're think that you're good at that? You know, it's like if you're 16 and you know, and your hormones are raging, and you have absolutely no experience whatsoever, and you go out on a date, like maybe it'll be, probably it won't, probably it'll be just bloody wretched and horrible, but it might be romantic and wonderful,

and then maybe you'll remember that for the rest of your life, but I mean, that's a very strange concatenation of ignorance, naivety, and overwhelming hormonal influence. It's like, it's not you, it's just something that happened to you. And the romance in a relationship that's long term is an art. It has to be fostered, it has to be invested in. And people don't like to think that because you think,

well, sex should be spontaneous. It's like, yeah, good luck with that. It's like, maybe, no, it's forget it. It's not over the long run. You have to make time. And when you're first trying to You know, and when you're first trying to What impress someone that you might want to sleep with or have a relationship with you're willing to put the time and effort into it You know, so why wouldn't you do the same thing with the person that you're gonna live with for the rest of your life? So why wouldn't you think of that as something that's a necessary investment? The rule of of thumb that I've discovered, just two of them, is you want to have a successful long-term relationship. One is you got to talk to each other for 90 minutes a week.

That's really painful. That whole conversation is like, well, what have you been up to and what have I been up to and what am I worried about and what am I thinking about? It's like I've got a narrative of my life and you've got one and we have to string them together. Now it takes about 90 minutes a week of just some of that's just practical communication too about what has to happen in the household, what has to happen with the kids and what's going on with the career and why the car needs to be fixed. You know just the mundane realities of the domestic economy that has to be discussed and you need 90 minutes of that, or you fall behind, and you get separated.

And then you need the same amount of time devoted to something approximating intimacy in romance. And that should be made into an art. And it requires effort and work. It's not spontaneous. Like maybe if you get really good at it, you know, if you watch great ballroom dancers, or their actions look spontaneous,

it's like, yeah, well, they practiced 10,000 hours before they got to be expert at it. And why would you assume that you were a law ethereal without putting in the effort, you know? It's not an easy thing to keep that spark alive and vital across decades. You have to be awake and careful and you have to make it a priority.

And so there is that planning and diligent work. And it's worthwhile thinking. It's like, what do you want? You want a life without romance? It's like, how much pleasure is there in life? You know, there's a handful of pleasures. That's all. And they're easily foregone.

And then they're gone, better to plan and work diligently to maintain them. I'll read you the other. Rule 9 is if old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely. That's a good one. If something's bothering you from the past and you think about it still makes you upset, part of you stuck back there. There's part of your soul that's stuck back there, and you need it in the present. You're lesser than you should be.

And the fact that those memories still contain emotion is an indication that that part of your experience has not been sufficiently articulated and that you have not been freed from the past. So that's a useful thing to know. 18 months is about a good rule of thumb, and there's actually neurological reasons for that. So if something's plaguing you, those will be often memories that recur, sometimes they're nightmares that recur.

If it's plaguing you, if it comes back up, this still bothers me. Well, then you're stuck in the past. There's part of you. There's no better way of putting it that way. There's part of your soul that's stuck in the past, and you need to rescue it. You need to bring it up to the present

because life is demanding enough so that it takes all of you here and now to deal with it properly. And if you're stuck in the past, then you're weaker than you have to be, and you'll pay for that. But if you write them down, if you write the memories down, if you thoroughly assess them and analyze them, try to understand what went wrong, and how that might not be duplicated in the future. Then you can... I'll tell you a story. Then maybe I'll stop with this. I'd like to read the rest of these rules.

All right. Rule 11. Be grateful in spite of your suffering. And rule 12. Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant. I'll tell you a story about being stuck in the past that's quite interesting. I know this man who was very badly abused when he was a child, really in a horrific manner. And he told me at one point that he's about 50. He said he hadn't looked in the mirror for 35 years. Because he couldn't stand looking at himself. And so, 35 years. And then he was having these dreams about the abuse,

and in the dreams, he was still five years old, and being abused. And so I told him, you got to look in the mirror, because you don't know how old you are. You have to look. So he's hiding things in the fog and it's no bloody wonder. I'll tell you if you went through what he went through you would hide them in the fog too but it doesn't matter because it happened. It has to be dealt with.

And so he looked in the mirror for an hour. I said, look in the mirror for an hour and he said, he did that. It made him cry. He didn't know he was old. It was a shock to him, you know, but he said it was really useful and it made him sad, but it also made him happy at the same time. He experienced all sorts of emotions. And then I also told him, okay, so you're having these terrible dreams about being abused, so you have to look in the mirror because you don't know how old you are. There's a party that doesn't know how old you are, and so in the dream you're still five and you're still victim. You're still five year old victim. But you're not five, man. You're 50. It's like that needs to be updated. That's not happening to you anymore because you're a different person.

But party you doesn't know it. So you've got to look at yourself even though that's a horrifying thing to do. You have to look at yourself. They said, well, when you have the dream, it's terrible nightmare. You wake up, and then what you do is you think about that nightmare, you relive it. That's another therapeutic technique. If you're trying to help someone get over post-traumatic stress disorder, let's say they were

violently sexually assaulted, but it was a while back, and they're still having recurrent nightmares about that. It's still really, really disturbing them. One of the things you have them do is you have them imagine the assault in as much detail as they can manage. And the more detail they can imagine it in, and the more upset they get, well they imagine it, the faster they get better,

and the longer the recovery lasts. That's something that's really worth knowing. So I suggested to him that when he had a nightmare that in the day he remembered the nightmare voluntarily. So what does that mean? It's like, well, you know, if something frightens you and you avoid it, then what happens is that when you avoid it, you're telling yourself that that thing is so frightening that you have to avoid it. And so your brain thinks, well, that's a bigger monster than you are a warrior. But then if you think, no, I'm going to turn around and face it, whatever it is, then you send the reverse message. It's like, no matter how

terrible that is, and it can be pretty damn terrible. It's not so terrible that I can't look at it. And so then you get bigger and it gets smaller. And I explained that to him. And I said, you concentrate. Those dreams are terrible. And no one do they disturb you. You concentrate on bringing them to mind voluntarily. And so what happened was he started to age in his dreams. Took about three months. Last time I talked to him, he was up to 35. That happened over about a three month period. And even though he had been stuck that way for 45 years, to turn around and face that. Well, so that was an example of, let me just look here for a second.

A bold memory still make you cry. It's an example of facing things and banishing the ghosts from the shadows. I didn't really expect to talk to you only about that new book tonight, but I guess that's what happened. What do I close with? Well, I'll close with what I've observed, I guess, over the last year, what's been so cool about all of this, is that what have I been trying to do? I've been trying to bring what I learned about proper clinical practice in the deepest sense to as many people as I can possibly manage.

That's a reasonable goal for someone who's a professor and educator in a clinical psychologist. It seems like an appropriate thing to do. And the ethos that underlies 12 rules for life is, I say it's an ethical. It's ethical in the fundamental sense. I think it's true that it's better to tell the truth than it is to lie. It's better because it makes your life better. In every possible way and even more importantly,

it makes your life less horrible. So even if it doesn't bring heaven on earth to you, it might keep hell at bay, and that is really something. And it's really something to know that it's important to adopt responsibility. That's the one rule I wanted to return to. Opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. That's a very, very cool thing to know is that there's responsibility for setting the world right that lays all around you.

You can tell that because things bother you about the world. They pray on you and they might even undermine your faith and existence itself because things aren't set right. But then that's a voice inside of you that says, well, there is a right and things could be set that way. Why would you be bothered otherwise? It wouldn't disturb you, but it does disturb you, and it's because you've got an ethical core.

And when you're disturbed by the fact that things aren't set right, that's actually a call to you to set them right. It's a call to adventure. That's a call to opportunity. You know, I've been talking to people all over the world about that, and people respond very positively to that,

because I guess it isn't something that we've been very good at articulating. The world's a mess in all sorts of ways and it disturbs us deeply and it's easy for us to turn away from that and it's easy to become cynical and bitter and then worse. But it's not the right approach. The right approach is to think, oh look, I've noticed that things aren't right and it's bothering me, you know, enough to undermine me. It's like, well what should I do about that? Well, maybe I should do something about it. Maybe that's the fact that my conscience is bothered, my sense of propriety, my sense of functioning properly in the world is disturbed by my observation

that things aren't right. It's an indication that I have an ethical responsibility to do something about that. Why else would it bother me? Then you think, oh, well, you know, well, where's the meaning in life to be found? If there's a meaning in life, where is it to be found? Well, maybe that's where it's to be found. It's like it's to be found in the responsibility that manifests itself when you realize that things are out of kilter, out of order, and that it bothers you. It's like, what bothers you? That's what calls you forward into who you could be. That's what calls you forward

into participating in the process of setting the world right. And there's meaning in that. And it's not just psychological meaning, you know. It's not just a psychological phenomenon because it turns out that, you know, maybe you're not happy with the way that your family is constituted and the way everyone is not getting along and you decide you're going to do something about that. It makes you feel better because you're doing something about it. And great, you feel better. That's the psychological meaning. But it's also the case that you are genuinely a problem solver and it's possible that you could help your family communicate better. And then that wouldn't just be a psychological improvement. That would be an actual improvement. And it does seem to me that we're capable of actual improvements as well as psychological improvements. And if we took our distaste for the world seriously and noticed that that was a call from our conscience to action that we would start to act forth rightly in the world

and set things right. And then the question would be, well, how right could they be set? And I said, well, opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. Well, that's, I learned opportunity, that's the wind that blows you into a port. That's what opportunity means, that's the derivation. And responsibility is the wind that blows you into a port. That's what opportunity means. That's the derivation. And responsibility is the wind that blows you into a port. There's things that are crying out to be done. And you know it and it can make you bitter.

It's like, no, it's like, you could do them. You could start doing them. You could try to do them. That would be something. God only knows what you could accomplish if you did that. God only knows what you could transform yourself into if you did that. And then that seems to me to be the adventure of life. It's like, well, who are you exactly?

Well, how are you going to find it out? Well, take on the responsibility for making things better. And see how far you can go with that. And I've talked to thousands of people over the last year. And it's been so much fun. People after the talks, or maybe I meet them on the street, and they say, look, I've been trying this. I've been trying to tell the truth, or at least not to lie.

I've been trying to sort my family out. I've been trying to take on more responsibility, develop a bit of a vision for my life. A little bit of discipline. You know what? It's really working. I was in a terribly dark and black place. And I started to set things straight carefully and things are way better. It's like, well, you know, maybe that's true. That'd be so cool if it was true. You know, maybe

we have what is necessary within us to cope with life, no matter how terrible life is. And not only can we cope with it, but we can actually improve it, and improve it, substantively and continually. And we can find meaning in that, and we can make things better. And so, well, that's what I'm hoping will happen. And I think that that's why so many people are coming to listen to these talks, is because people have some sense that, you know, that's what I'm hoping will happen. And I think that that's why so many people are coming to listen to these talks is because people have some sense that, you know, that's a real possibility that they could participate in that,

and that there isn't anything better that they could possibly be doing. And so, and then I'm hoping that in this era of unparalleled possibility that sort of stretches itself out in front of us now, that if there's enough people who get their act together, you know, as individuals who are each at in front of us now, that if there's enough people who get their act together, as individuals who are each at the center of the world, if enough of us get our act together,

then maybe we can take that tremendous possibility that's come along with our technological potency, and we can make things so much better than they already that we can hardly even imagine it. And like, what the hell, that's worth pursuing, man, that's worth investing in. Like, why not do that? And so I hope that you do that. And I'm very thankful that I've had the opportunity to talk to you about it.

And it was a pleasure to talk to you about it. And it was a pleasure to speak with all of you. So good night. I'm so happy. You're working? Truly, and I wouldn't lie, we've done 100-some-odd shows. That honestly might have been the best ending of any of the shows that we've done. I mean, you guys feeling that right now? Like, by the way, I want to give a quick shout out. I don't know if you saw it.

There was a young lady doing sign language right here. That quite possibly might have been the most difficult hour and a half of sign language in the history of the world. So you guys saw multi levels of things right now. So yeah, give it up for her. All right, so we're going to do a Q&A you guys sent in a ton of questions. Before I do that, though, where's Julia who I was emailing with today? Julia, yep there somewhere. So Julia runs an IDW San Diego group and she's inviting all of you guys to the gas lamp tavern on fifth after the show Maybe I'll make a guest appearance. We'll see. We'll see. So I so check that out after the show and I should tell you guys

This is actually Jordan's computer And we've gotten close. I have the password. He's on Twitter right now. I Could end it all tonight. Not tonight. Jordan Peters and everybody. Man, you were ready to do the last U.S. show tonight, huh? Yeah, I got enough sleep today, I guess, and eight enough steak. He's 90% steak, people. You want to go to the gas lamp after the show?

Yes! With all three thousand of you, that should be fun. All right, we got some deep ones, we're going to go deep tonight. All right. Are there any topics you choose to avoid? Not really. I mean, one of the, I think one of my peculiarities, that's a very long list, by the way, is that I'm willing to have conversations that other people won't have. And some of that's really... One of the things I think I've learned,

partly from what I've studied, but also partly because of all the work I've done clinically, is that terrible as it is to have a hard conversation. The alternative is always worse. See because one of the things that I became convinced of in my clinical practice and in my personal life was that no one ever gets away with anything ever. People think they get away with things, but it's because they're blind, they blind themselves to the consequences of their actions. And so people will come to see me in the therapeutic setting, and they'll have a problem, and then we'll untangle it. And maybe we have to go

back 15 or 20 years to untangle it. And there's something back there that was an error. It wasn't always necessarily an error that they made. It might have been an error that someone else made, a moral error, but there's always something at the bottom of it. And what's even more horrible is that it's very frequently the case that what's at the bottom of it was something that the person knew was wrong

when they did it and then forgot. And you have to untangle it all and get right down to the bottom and it's ugly, terrible, terrible ugliness at the bottom. You know, it's like surgery in some sense and you can fix that and those are horrible conversations. And you really have to pursue the problem right to the bitter end to undo it. You have to do this in a marriage, which is a very difficult thing to do, to make peace. But I know that the consequence of not doing that is worse. And so even if the conversation is terribly difficult, it's easier than not having it as hard as it is. And I guess it's partly because I'm pessimistic. I'm pessimistic in that I don't believe that there's an easy out. You

either solve the dam problem or it never goes away. There's this line in the Old Testament that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons for seven generations. It's something like that. And tell you, you think, God, that's not very fair. What sort of, you know, who's that that up? It's like, but it's, the truth of the matter is, is that if you put a twist in the fabric of reality with deceit, you know, with an immoral action, that twist never't, never goes away until someone straightens it out. It stays there and it causes trouble. It generates

catastrophe. And so then you have to go in and sort it out. As deep, you have to go down as deep as you possibly can and set it right. And then maybe you get some peace. That's a good thing to pursue is peace, if you can do it. But peace doesn't occur as a consequence of avoiding. You don't get peace by pretending that you have peace. That doesn't work. You get peace by noticing that you don't have peace and then doing something about it.

I think that's why I said in the New Testament. I think that's why Christ said that he came to bring a sword. The sword is something that divides. It cuts. It judges. It discriminates. It differentiates. And that makes peace.

You cut away what isn't appropriate, and you dispense with it. And it's painful, but it leaves what's healthy behind. And so, no, there aren't topics that I avoid. That doesn't mean that I'm happy to undertake them. It's a pain, but it's not as bad as the alternative. Period. I like this one. What's your plan after you win this revolution?

No pressure. Well, the win idea is a funny one, you know, because win implies that you're... it implies the defeat of someone. And I got to think about that for a second. There's only one kind of victory, I think, that's real. And that's whatever victory is part, what it's whatever victory there is in attempting to maintain your integrity under trying conditions.

You know, one of the things that I decided a long time ago, I kind of noticed that there were two ways that you could conduct yourself in the world. I wrote about this in 12-virus for life in the chapter, do what is meaningful and not what is expedient. I learned that you can use your language to craft the outcomes that you desire. And so, if you're talking to someone, you could decide what you want from them. And then you can craft your language to get that. And then you can call that a victory.

And I think that's often why I think a lot of that pathologized your last presidential election. I think one of the fundamental faults of Hillary Clinton was that everything she did was crafted for a particular outcome. She wanted to be president. What do you do if you want to be president? You say everything that you should say if you want to be president. But then you can't, what you say can't be trusted because it isn't a representation of the world,

it's a tool to obtain something from the world. It's manipulative. And you might say, well, it's necessary if you want to be presidents. Like, well, first of all, I don't think it is necessary. Second of all, it's not obvious that if you become president under those circumstances, that there's anything left of you by the time you become president. Right. And I think people, I'm not trying to contrast her brutally with Trump. My sense with Trump was that people preferred the unscripted and impulsive lies of Donald Trump to the scripted and that way, and that's to just say what you think, is to say what you believe to be the case as carefully as you possibly can

and then to let the chips fall where they're going to. And I think that's the right way to live. I think that that's the essence of faith fundamentally is to believe that truth will prevail. And it's a strange thing to believe because when you say things that you believe to be true, the immediate consequence of that might not be good. It can get you in lots of trouble. Well, everyone knows that. Look, why do you lie? Because telling the truth will get you in trouble. Obviously, so you think, well, I'm not going to tell the truth.

It's going to get me in trouble. It's like, well, yeah. But you think the lie isn't going to get you in trouble. It's like, well, it's not going to get in trouble right now. But what about tomorrow and the next month and the next year? It's like which of those two things are you going to trust in the long run? Well, so I think that for whatever victory would be in this,

the victory that I would like to attain in this in my life would be that I would be able to say what I believe to be true and that I could maintain that. There's a great adventure in that because you don't know what's going to happen. You can't predict it exactly. And it's possible that it'll be worse than you think it will be, but it's also possible that it'll be much better. And it isn't necessarily obvious which of those is more terrifying, by the way, because

it might be way different, at least than what you are expecting. It's a very radical thing to say what you think and to tell the truth. It's an extraordinarily radical act. And it lays you open to watching how the world constructs itself in relationship to the truth, or at least the truth in so far as you can utter it, you think there's no, there's another way of finding meaning in life is there's no, you know, people think they want to have a meaningful life, but meaning is a terrifying thing, it's sort of like beauty, it can be absolutely overwhelming. If you allow yourself to say what you think, you try to tell the truth, you can't predict the outcome,

then all sorts of things are gonna aggregate and change around you. And that would be a great adventure. And in that adventure, that's where you'll discover the meaning of your life. Victory for me would be to be able to do that. Because I don't think about this as a, I suppose sometimes when I descend, so to speak, into the realm of the political, then things get polarized, you know.

I mean, I'm not happy with the postmodern types, and I don't like the radical leftists. They really disturb me with their collectivist viewpoint. But that's partly because that violates that principle of individual autonomy and sovereignty that's associated with individual truth. I don't think about it as political. I don't think it's political. I don't think of it as political. I think of it as an assault on this more fundamental way of being. You're an individual. You have your individual truth. You need to manifest that in the world. You need to take responsibility for that. And anything that threatens that, I think, is the deepest of threats. But victory, as far as I'm concerned, would be that I'm able to... I'm able to say what I... I'm able to continue to say what I think and not be dissuaded from that. That would be enough. And so, so far that seems to be, you know, knock on wood. Despite all my flaws, that seems to be working out okay. So, hopefully

that will continue and nothing too catastrophic will happen. Well, as long as you mentioned Trump and Clinton, this seems like a good segue, will you move to America and run for president? Let's put aside the legal issue for just a sec. Yeah, and the possibility of my Muslim birth. You know, I've thought about, I've been tempted, let's say, by the thought of a political career continually throughout my life. But I've never pursued it, and it seems to me rather unlikely that I will.

I've talked to my wife about it recently, again, not in the American context, obviously, because that's, well, that's obviously, there's, you don't think about things that aren't possible. It's not useful. And I also'm not sure that that's a job that anyone can do. I mean, it looks like an impossible job to me. I have a lot of sympathy for the people who hold the office because the responsibility of that office

is just, and the complexity is just beyond imagination. It's why they get people who take that job get old so fast. It's no wonder some of them start out old too. When push comes to shove, I've always been more interested in this psychological. I'm more interested in the individual. I am more psychologically oriented. I think my most effective strategy, personally and socially, is to operate at the level of the fortification of the individual.

And it's not political. There's political implications of that. The political implications are, they have been for me, is that whenever I see political occurrences that limit the degree to which the individual can be made more effective, then I feel morally compelled to object to them. That's why I objected to the legislation in Canada.

It's like, no, you don't get to tell me what I'm going to say. I don't care what your damn reasons are. That's on me, what I say. You don't get to decide that for me. I think that you're invading the territory of my soul at that point. And I don't care if your reasons are hypothetical compassion. First of all, why should I trust your bloody compassion? What makes you think you're a saint?

So, you know, that's the suggestion. You're so compassionate that you get to move my mouth with your hand. It's like, no. That's on me. And so that's political action, I guess, in some sense. But I don't really think it is fundamentally political, because I think that I undertook it,

because I believe that the political jumped its domain and started to transgress against things that it should have left alone. And this, whatever we're doing here together, whatever's manifested itself, let's say in these books that I've written, and the impact that they've had and the YouTube videos and all of that. That seems more effective than anything else I can do. I'm talking to lots of political types and that seems okay, but I think that it would be a step, what would you call it, would be a regressive step on my part to do that, given the opportunities that I have to enter the political realm. It's not right.

And I don't think I'm cut out for it either. You know, like, I don't like conflict. I know, I know. Well, it's true though. You know, it takes me three days to recover from one of those contentious interviews. I don't enjoy it at all. I said at the beginning of this Q&A that there aren't conversations I won't have, but it doesn't mean that I don't find them stressful. They're stressful. And like I much rather do this.

It's much way more pleasant to come and talk to 3,000 of you than to talk to one GQ journalist for 90 minutes. And so I don't think I don't think I can tolerate that that political stress you know that that I don't think I'm cut out for it. So... So what you're saying? Yeah. No kidding. He's gonna run for president, everybody. We all heard it. So I don't know how this one didn't come up in the 100-plus shows. What's your biggest regret in life? I think that I've dealt with most of my regrets.

I don't think that I'm carrying a lot of unresolved past along with me. You know, I never really think of the past. I have thought about it a lot. I've tried to, you know, there's this section in the Gula Garcopalago, where Solzhenitsyn describes the reconstruction of his spirit in the work camps. And he undergoes this process of repentance. He starts to understand that he's had this terrible sequence of catastrophes has befallen him

that could easily be laid at the feet of Hitler and Stalin. You know, and if you need villains, those are high quality, credible villains. If you need someone to blame, man, those are right at the top of the list of credible people to blame. And you know, he was on the Russian front in World War II and then thrown into the work camps by Stalin.

Had a very terrible time of it. But he came to understand that part of the reason that things had turned out so badly for him was that he had compromised his own integrity in all sorts of ways over the course of his life. And one of the things he did was to go over his life, he said with a fine-tuned comb, and to figure out and to try to remember

everything that he had done in the past that violated his own sense of moral virtue. So really interesting exercise, you know, think, well, you shouldn't do the things, you shouldn't do things that are wrong. It's like, okay, wrong by whose standards? Well, you could say, well, you shouldn't do things that other people think are wrong.

Well, you could debate that, but it's deeper, it's a deeper question is like, well, maybe you shouldn't do the things that you think are wrong. Well, you could debate that. But it's deeper, it's a deeper question is like, well, maybe you shouldn't do the things that you think are wrong. And let's say that you've done a whole bunch of things in your life that were wrong. And let's say that you've warped the fabric of reality because you've done those things that were wrong and that if you don't repent for them and repair them, then that, then them, then those errors that you've woven into the fabric of things, they stay unrepaired. So you have to repent and atone to use the classical language.

Atone means to become one again. So Sosha Nitsyn said that he did that, that he thought, well, I can't go back exactly and rectify the past, but maybe I can make amends in the present for all the things that I left undone. And I would say that I wouldn't say that I have done that successfully, but I could say that I have tried to do that, that I'm trying to do that. And so, I'm atoning for what I regret about the past, by trying to behave as carefully as I possibly can in the present.

And that seems to be, I can't think of any better thing to do about it than that. And so, in some sense, whatever regrets I have are being... Yeah, I'm atoning for them sufficiently so that they're not plaguing me. And I'm pleased with when I look at my life, I'm grateful for it. You know, I'll sand the downs. And I think that, well, in some sense, too, I think that I'm sort of, sort of privileged to atone for it. That's an interesting thing, is that it's really something. You have the opportunity to set what you've done wrong, right.

You could do that. And that is a privilege. And so it's a privilege to try to do that. I think I could put things right. It's like there isn't a better thing, there isn't anything better to do than that. And you can put things right by your own standards. You know, I mean people feel guilty. And that can become pathological. You can feel too much guilt. You have to calibrate your guilt. You have to have a dialogue with your conscience.

It's not infallible. But you do have a sense of right and wrong. And if you follow that sense and you put things right, then you could find out how right things could be. And then you wouldn't have, you would dispense with the regret under those conditions. And you would put things right as well. And then that's what you should do as far as I can tell.

So. So... APPLAUSE That ladies and gentlemen is how you end a year long 120 plus stop United States tour. I'm going to get out of the way. Make some noise for Jordan Peters and everybody. Thank you guys for coming out tonight. APPLAUSE 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 added out to chaos.

Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See JordanBeePeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanBeePeterson.com slash personality for information on his new e-course, and if you want some support or a group to offer accountability on figuring out your health, check out lion.club.com. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please leave a rating and Apple podcasts, a comment to review, or share this episode with a friend.

Thanks for tuning in, Mary Christmas, happy holidays, and comment to review, or share this episode with a friend. Thanks for tuning in. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and talk to you in a couple of weeks. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson. On Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.B. Peterson. Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanBP.D.S. My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found

at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com. From the Westwood One Podcast Network.