The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Competence Hierarchies

Episode Date: November 10, 2019

"Competence Hierarchies" is a Jordan Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture recorded in Birmingham UK (November of 2018).

Hi, I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's Daughter and Collaborator. Today's episode is a 12 rules for life lecture recorded in Birmingham, UK on November 7, 2018. I've named it Competence Hierarchies. You'll see why. This is a good one. Dad talks about dominance hierarchies or competence hierarchies in the animal kingdom and how we've evolved in our part of these hierarchies or competence hierarchies in the animal kingdom and how we've

evolved in our part of these hierarchies whether we like it or not. If we're not a fan of these hierarchies, I think it might be because we're at the bottom. It's an interesting lecture. Weekly updates not much on the parent side, everything is still slowly progressing in the right direction. Here's a mccala tip. Hopefully you've already figured this out yourself. Stop sleeping with your phone in your bedroom and start exercising these morning. I just started a couple of weeks ago.

I wake up at 6. I bought an alarm clock with a light. I don't need the alarm part. The light wakes me up fine. So I wake up at 6. Exercise for 45 minutes. I don't think it'll always be that long. What I'm doing now most people could do in their sleep. It's basically rehab physio. My multiple surgeries and pregnancy have made me a very weak individual. But I do that for 45 minutes, shower, wig scarlet up, and I don't look at my phone until 11. That's new. It's outside of my room to avoid the temptation. I got the inspiration from someone named Chris Will X on social media, found him on Instagram. He has a podcast called Modern Wisdom that I quite like and think you would too if you're interested in optimizing your life. He's fairly new but I think the podcast will be quite big.

It's difficult to find true intellectuals and I think he's one of them. Check it out. If you enjoy this podcast, I think you'll enjoy that one too. Modern Wisdom. These small changes have improved my mornings and entire day dramatically. You could start by sleeping with your phone outside your bedroom and just see how it goes. It's not good for your brain to check it first thing in the morning and get overwhelmed by a list of tasks you need to do in that day anyway. That's it for Michaela Tips for now. Enjoy your day. Competence hierarchies. A Jordan B. Peterson 12 rules for life lecture. lecture. Before we do anything else, we just got incredible news. Just five minutes before the show started, the foreign minister of Sweden. You know this lady, Margot Wallstrom, she just said that Jordan Peterson should crawl back under the rock he came from.

So this is a very special show, little does she know, he crawled out of a lobster shell. But how ridiculous, foreign ministers are scared of this guy and you guys all came here, that is pretty great. So make some noise for Dr. Jordan Peterson, everybody. I think the Swedish Foreign Ministers comment actually had something to do with lobsters. So maybe it was okay. I don't know, maybe that's a hallmark of success as a consequence of visiting Sweden.

I was to be to annoy the Swedish foreign minister. That might be a good thing. I had a discussion when I was there. I don't remember actually if it was in Denmark or if it wasn't, if it wasn't Copen, Hagen or whether it was in Stockholm about the conundrum that the Scandinavians are facing. You know, they've done more than any other nations in the world to produce a gender equal society. And one of the consequences of that

is that the differences between men and women have got much larger rather than much smaller and the scientific evidence for that now is so overwhelming that even psychologists from Berkeley have admitted that it was true. And so you know that that's, that's as true as something can get when it, when it defies radical left-wing logic so thoroughly and indisputably that even people at Berkeley can't deny it, then it must be true. But it leaves the Scandinavians in somewhat of an awkward position, but it's the same position that all of the countries in the West and then in the world are going to be in as we become richer and our societies become more egalitarian in their provision of equality of opportunity,

which is that men and women will get more different because that seems to be what happens when you give people freedom of choice. And then that drives differences in occupational choice, for example. And so one of the things we're really going to have to figure out over the next 20 years is what to do now that it appears impossible to simultaneously maximize all outcomes and all opportunities. Because for a while I think people hope that that was a possibility, right? If you made your culture flat in some sense and removed as many barriers as you possibly could to advancement and to choice, that that would make people more the same and that would make outcomes more the same occupational choice perhaps salary

distribution of income and all of that but it doesn't look that isn't what the data are revealing what they're revealing is quite the contrary. So it was interesting to go to the Scandinavian countries and have a chance to talk about that, and it'll be interesting to see how that rules out politically in part of what's happening at the moment is that there's quite a movement in Scandinavian, no doubt it's happening here, it's also happening in Canada to develop gender-neutral kindergarten, for example, or gender-neutral parenting styles.

And, you know, I think that that's quite appalling personally, given that I don't actually think that there's anything wrong with the fact that there's males and females, which is a good thing since there actually are males and females. But I'm also not that concerned about it, which is a good thing since there actually are males and females. But I'm also not that concerned about it in some sense because I knew this 25 years ago if you take a vowed feminists, for example, who have become mothers and who have decided that they're going to treat their children, boys or girls alike.

And you compare how they interact with their children. If you compare them to people who don't have the same doctrine, you find that there's very little difference in the actual interactions. Because, well, first of all, a lot of the way that you interact with your children is actually a consequence of your children rather than your ideology, you know, unless you're a hideous parent. Because, well, I mean that, I mean that technically, I suppose, because, you know, if you have a good relationship with someone, you actually personalize it to them, right?

And it does look like in families that are functioning well, the dynamics between the parents and the children are very personalized. So even the micro-environment of each child is quite substantially different. You can tell that if you look at studies, they look at the similarity of personality between siblings. So you could say there's three reasons that siblings might be the same, biological similarity, shared environment. So you could say there's three reasons that siblings might be the same, biological similarity, shared environment. So that would be what they share in common in the family, and then non-shared environment. That would be what happens to them, that's individual, that their brothers and sisters don't also experience. There's almost no effect

of shared environment. You think, well, what does that mean? Does that mean that parenting doesn't matter? Because shared environment doesn't have much of an effect. And, well, no, that isn't what it means. It means that you don't treat all your children the same because they're not actually the same. And that's actually a good thing. So, you know, these things, like so many things, that we discover if we apply scientific methods to the analysis of various phenomena, it turns out that they're much more complex and tricky than we'd ever imagined. They don't necessarily line up with our a priori empirical or our a priori ideological

conclusions. And so, anyways, that was some reflections on the visit to Scandinavia. And it's kind of a nice introduction, I would say, into what I want to talk about tonight. I'm going to talk about rule one. Since I've come to Europe, and I've done a dozen lectures now, this is the 12th one. And the last one in the UK, I've been working through my book backwards. I've worked through it. This is like the 90-second city I think I've been to.

And so I've worked through it forward, and I've worked through it by grouping different rules together. And, you know, I've tried all sorts of variants because I like to make the lecture each night unique and different and get somewhere new with it. But I'm down to rule one. And it's a strange rule in some sense, because I talk about things that people don't necessarily expect like the biochemical similarity between lobsters and human beings,

and that strikes nonbiologists as rather strange. I mean, it's actually the case that, you know, a fair bit of what we know about biology and about human biology actually comes from studying creatures that are even simpler than lobsters, crustaceans. They're not that simple actually, lobsters. I mean, try to assemble one from scratch in your basement and you'll find that out. They're very complicated creatures

and they've been along a long time. And so, and they're alive just like we are. And at some unbelievably distant point in the past, we shared a common ancestor. And that looks like about 350 million years ago, which is a long time, way before there were trees, for example. It's a long time. But there are evolution, like once biology conjures something up that works, it tends to conserve it, and it tends to conserve it

for very long periods of time. And so you can find amazing similarities between creatures that have diverged from one another. Ages, eons, millennia, millions, billions of years ago, billions is pushing it, hundreds of millions. And biologists know this quite well. They study things like learning in flatworms, for example. Flatworms are pretty damn primitive.

They study fruit flies and all sorts of creatures that have a short gestation period so that you can look at genetic effects over time. Nobody ever questions whether or not the findings that the biologists produce as a consequence of studying creatures other than human beings are applicable to human beings. They're not exactly perfectly applicable because obviously there's variation among animals as well as similarities, but you know the general rule is continuity in life. And you can be accused of anthropomorphism with regards to animals, which is the attribution of human traits to animals. But that criticism really died as somewhat painful death back around 1960

when people realized that the criticism was actually reversed, you should assume that animals and humans are alike, unless you have reason to assume otherwise. That's much more in keeping with the notion of biological continuity across the species. So I've been accused of anthropomorphizing lobsters, for example. And they are quite a bit unlike human beings, but in some interesting regards, they're quite similar. And in the first chapter, I was actually trying to make a point about that, like a serious variety of points, but one really serious point, and it has to do with hierarchies.

And so the first thing I want to do is talk to you about hierarchies. You know, the most real things that you encounter aren't necessarily the things that you can easily see. You know, like numbers are a good example. It's like mathematicians like to debate the reality of numbers and Normal people are included in that discussion to some limited degree and make numbers are obviously a form of abstraction But then there's something that's truly real about them, right? I mean once you Lay out numbers and you can start to manipulate the man

They give you a grip on the world like nothing else. And so the discovery or invention of numbers, what was it? Was it a discovery or was it invention? Well, that's not so obvious, but most mathematicians I would say would go with discovery. And it's like, well, it's not something that you see, a number, or you can taste or feel, or sense in any concrete, in any concrete way the same you, the way you would detect an object, but number is real and really, truly real and

in that it gives you a grip on the world. It's one way of thinking about what constitutes real. Real is useful. That's not the only way of thinking about what's real And so there are lots of things that in the world that are real that aren't Evident to your senses and definitely one of those things is hierarchy and You know chimpanzees for example, and this is true for lots of primate groups. They really understand hierarchical position. And so, for example, there are aristocrats among most primates, and there are peasants. That's one way of thinking about it. It's quite hereditary. And so, if you happen to be a rather large juvenile peasant primate, and there's a rather small juvenile aristocrat primate,

you'll tend not to pick on him. And the reason for that is that your nervous system, which has done a very good job of mapping the hierarchical relationships between everybody and your troop, knows perfectly well that that little primate that you could take out in two seconds is connected to a bunch of other ones

that will tear you apart if you make a mistake. And so primate nervous systems are very, not just primate nervous systems, but complex mammalian nervous systems are wired to respond to the existence of hierarchies with modulation of motivation and emotion. So the perception isn't direct, it's not so much that you would see something, but you would certainly experience it emotionally. You'd be afraid, for example, or maybe you'd have respect, whatever that might be, whatever that might be among animals.

And you know one animal, if you have two dogs, you know one of them's dominant. It's almost always the case. And I don't know what that non-dominant dog feels towards the dominant dog, but it's something like respect. It's something maybe there's a bit of fear there, but it's still a perception that's embodied in an emotional reaction. So anyways, you can perceive hierarchies, even though you can't see them, and you do perceive

them, and it's unbelievable, and deep, deep parts of you perceive them. Now, I want to talk about, first, for a minute, about why hierarchies in some sense are both prevalent and inevitable. So let's start with prevalent. See, the problem with most animals is that they're competing for scarce resources. And so you see hierarchies form to allow for preferential access to scarce resources

in the absence of continual combat. And so in chapter one, I've been criticized by people who haven't read the chapter for only for comparing human beings to lobsters and for making a case that just because lobsters are hierarchical doesn't mean that all other creatures are, and first of all, I never said that all other creatures were, I said, that a very large preponderance of creatures across a variety of species are, and that human beings are as well. Chickens are, for example, so if you're a farmer and you go out and you feed your chickens, there's the chickens that get the chicken feed first are the same chickens every morning.

And then so the aristocratic chickens get their food first and then the second rate chickens get their hangers on, get theirs next. And then this sort of bedruggled low status chickens get theirs last. And you might ask, well, why did the low status chickens put up with the second rate feed? And the answer to that is that it's better

to be a little hungry and have substandard food than to be a little hungry and have substandard food and be pecked to death. Right. And so animals organize themselves into hierarchies around scarce resources, so they don't add continual combat to the problem of scarce resources. Right, so it's better to know your place, not that it's necessarily pleasant or good, but it's better to know your place than to be continually fighting at risk to your very survival for that place.

And so it's also the case once a hierarchy is established that it tends to be pretty stable because the cost of disrupting it is extremely high. Now, competitive animals, especially if they're interested in advancing their mating opportunities, will sometimes take the risk to make a move up the hierarchy. But they do that at extreme peril, and so they do it very carefully. So one of the reasons that we produce hierarchies, that hierarchies are spontaneously produced, is to produce something approximating stable peace in the face of scarce resources.

Now you get hierarchies that form even in animals that aren't very social, like songbirds, I also use them as an example in the first chapter. Rens, little birds, I don't know if you have rins in the UK, you have rins in the UK. They're little birds, they're very feisty, they'll knock other rins off their purchase, they'll fill other birds houses with sticks, they're knock other rims off their purchase, they'll fill other birds' houses with sticks. They're very territorial. And what the reason the birds care about territory is because if you're a bird, well, territory matters. And so what do you want if you're a bird? Well, you want to put your nest somewhere and you want it where it's not too windy and

it's not too cold and it's not too sunny and where the rain isn't gonna Rain on it too much and it's far away from predators So those are high quality nesting and maybe close to food that'd be a plus and so there are high quality nesting Places and you can imagine instantly there's a hierarchy of high quality nesting places, right? Because some are gonna be better than others across all those parameters. And then there has to be some competition that determines who gets access to the high-quality nesting areas.

And that's exactly what happens. And then the more feisty, physically healthy, dominant birds that have the most sort of threatening song, because that's part of what a written song is. It means, here I stand, attack a singer of my prowess at your peril. Right? And so, and then those birds attract mates that are of high quality because the mates are looking for a high quality nest in a good place to have some eggs and then those chicks are

more likely to survive. And if a avian virus comes sweeping through the population, the birds die from the bottom of the hierarchy upwards. And the reason for that is that the birds at the bottom are stressed. They don't eat as well, they're more stressed by predation, they're not sheltered as well, etc. So they're immunologically compromised and so if something comes along that will affect birds, then the birds at the bottom die. And it's the same with human beings. There's an old saying when the aristocrats catch cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.

And that's actually, that's technically true. There's a great series of studies done in the UK called the White Hall studies. They're very cool. So there's done on two sets of civil servants, about 75 years apart. Just imagine there's a hierarchy of civil servants. And there's like high status civil servants

and then there's low status civil servants that are barely clinging onto their job and then you track them across time and you see who's most likely to die and the answer is the civil servants along the bottom. Okay, so now that was the first white-hole study, and then the second white-hole study was done 75 years later, and what was so cool about it was that by the time the second study was done, which was actually rather modern times, the average living standard of the low-status civil servants in the second study was probably higher on average than the high status civil servants in the first study Right because everybody had just got so much richer. So the absolute level of wealth had gone way up

But the relative risk of death remained unchanged So one of the things that's really rather brutal about hierarchical organizations is that they are associated with mortality risk. And so that's part of the reason why we tend to regard them as real. Now, all right, so now the next question might be, well, so you have animals and the reason they organize themselves into hierarchies is because they compete for scarce resources and they have to do that in a manner that stabilizes the competition without undue conflict, right? So that makes reasonable sense.

And you might think that the same thing would be true of human beings, so it's a matter of, and you might think, well, the animals do that by expressing power and that the same thing is true of human beings. Well, the first thing is that it's not exactly obvious that the more complex animals structure their hierarchies, purely as a matter of power, let's say physical prowess and the ability to physically dominate another animal. So there's a primatologist who I admire greatly named Franz DuWall and he's studied chimpanzee hierarchies to try to, and they tend to have a more masculine structure.

So the most dominant chimpanzees tend to be masculine, although there's a female dominant hierarchy as well, and some of the female chimps are far more dominant than some of the male chimps overlapping hierarchies say, but at the very top it tends to be males. And it is the case that if you're like quite the staggering physical specimen as a male chimpanzee, that's a non-trivial advantage in establishing, let's call it dominance, or prowess, or authority,

because we might want to use a plethora of words just to make sure we don't close off our interpretations too early. It is the case that that gives you a leg up in the striving for position, and that that in turn gives you a leg up with regards to access to food and also to preferential mating opportunities. And so the more the higher you are in the chimpanzee, the more you are likely as a male to leave offspring. It's not because the chimped females are choosy about who they mate with, by the way,

which is quite interesting because a chimpanzee female that's ready to mate because they have mating cycles, they have estrus cycles, they'll pretty much mate with any male, but the dominant males chase away the subordinate males, and so they accrue the opportunities to themselves. It's one of the things that makes human beings quite unlike chimpanzees, because human females are selective maters, and that's a major, perhaps even the major difference that's driven us apart over the evolutionary landscape over the last seven million years.

It may not be the only thing, but it's a major driver. Anyway, one of the things DeWal has showed quite clearly is that brutally tyrannical chimps tend to meet a terrible end-yone. And why is that? Well, I don't care how strong you are as a particularly Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque chimpanzee, but two subordinates, three-quarters your strength can easily take you out on a bad day. And so that's exactly what happens in chimps are very, very strong. And they're hunters, and they have very powerful teeth,

and they tear each other apart. So when two subordinate chimps decide they'd had enough, they've had enough, and they go after top tyrant, it's not a good day for him. And Duval has documented that in some brutal detail in his multiple books on the emergence of morality in chimpanzees, actually, very, very good books, very readable and well worth attending to.

One of these, he's one of the scientists that's striving to produce something approximating a biological, a biological account of the emergence of morality. And there's lots of biologists working on that idea and with a fair bit of success as far as I'm concerned. What DeWol found instead was that the chimpanzees males that tend to engage in reciprocal interactions

with other males, so friendly reciprocal interactions, which means they have friends, you know, from the chimpanzee perspective, and chimps do, like, hang around together, and they have relationships that can last for multiple years, and they do groom each other, and they do support each other in battles, and all of that. And so there is a reciprocity at work. And so if you happen to be a male chimp and you're pretty good at reciprocity and you have like a bunch of allies, then you know you're sort of part of a nice chimp gang. And that means that some big monster solitary psychopath chimp can't take you out so easily.

And that's a very, very interesting thing to contemplate when you're making claims, for example, that human hierarchies are fundamentally based on power. And that's a claim that's made all too often in the modern world with our insistence that our culture, for example, is nothing but a patriarchal tyranny, which implies that it's uni-dimensional hierarchy, and that the only thing that regulates position in that hierarchy is something like arbitrary power. It's a very, very pathological view of human society. I think it's motivated by very questionable motivations,

and it's certainly predicated on an anthropology that's under informed to say the least. Now once you get to the human level, things get even more complicated because, friend of mine, I worked with for years. I talked a lot about dominance hierarchies in my lectures and even in 12 rules for life, I talked about dominance hierarchies in my lectures. And even in 12 rules for life, I talked about dominance hierarchies. And that was a mistake. My friend, he has a, just so you know, he has a master's degree in engineering from MIT and a PhD in psychology from Harvard. So he's a very bright guy. He said, you shouldn't use the term dominance hierarchy. And I said,

why not? It's the standard terminology that's used in the biological sciences. And he said, yeah, but you know, you don't know how much Marxist thinking had infiltrated the biological thinking and affected the terminology because it's not obvious that hierarchies are predicated on dominance exactly. Hierarchies exist, but whether or not they're dominance hierarchies, that's a whole different story. That's an assumption. And I thought, God, I don't want to hear that.

I've been using the idea of dominance hierarchy for like 20 years. I don't want to have to rethink that. So I was annoyed at him for like a month while I was rethinking this through. And then I stumbled across the phrase, competence hierarchy, and I thought, oh, that's much better, that's much, much, much better. You know, and you see this in other animals too,

this competence hierarchy, so there's these cool birds, you could look them up if you wanna look up a cool bird. I don't know what you're doing later tonight, but there's these birds called Bauerbirds and they're fascinating birds. And so they have hierarchies too, and the males arrange themselves into a hierarchy, and then they display themselves for the females, and then the females come by and check them out.

But they don't use power. So what a Bauerbird does is it makes this really fancy nest that sort of hangs from a twig. It's woven together, and then it's lined with something soft. And it's really quite an architectural masterpiece, given that a bird had to build it out of sticks with its beak. You know, it's really something. And then what they do is they make a front yard, they sweep it clean, and then they decorate it with like, so maybe there'll be a quarter of it that's covered with red petals, and maybe they'll go find some green glass if they can, and then they make a little

decoration out of green glass, and they artfully displays some twigs over here. And it's a fairly big, like the bird is a decent size, and so the whole Bauer bird yard is about this big, and then there's a fair number of Bauer bird is a decent size, and so the whole Bauer bird yard is about this big, and then there's a fair number of Bauer birds in the same vicinity, and then the females come and visit each Bauer bird art gallery, and they stand there. They look because birds look out of one eye. You know, they have one eye for predators and one eye for things that they eat, by the way, which is quite interesting.

So, if you ever see a bird eyeing you with the wrong eye, then you're lunch. The bird is hoping you would be. But anyways, the females come and eye the display, and they fly off and check out another one. If the display attracts a mate, then theauerbird, the male Bauerbird is all thrilled but if like five or six females come and go then the Bauerbird has a little fit and terraces nest apart and races all his artistic production and then he does it again. And so that's damn cool and then there's this other creature called a pufferfish, you know what a pufferfish is. And's like it's a fish, you know, for God's sake, it's a fish. And this is what the bloody pufferfish does.

You just can't believe this. There's a great video of this. Some of you may have seen this. It's quite gone, quite viral, because no one can believe it. This pufferfish, he goes to the bottom of the ocean. It's deep as he can go. Anyways, there's still light down there. And then he makes this amazing sculpture in the sand.

It's about eight feet across. And it kind of looks like those rose stained glass windows. It's kind of got, I mean, it's not detailed like that. It doesn't have images of Christ in it. It's just made out of waves and eddies in the sand, but they're quite deep, they're like this deep and they're very symmetrical and the damn things almost perfectly round and that fish, she goes in there and he picks up like stray shells and stuff with his kind of like a beak and spits them out and he does all this by waving his fins.

He's got fairly powerful front fins, and he does all this digging by waving his fins in his tail, and he looks at his creation, and he swims up, and he adjusts this part of it, and that part of it. That's also how he tracks mates. And so the idea that it's, that it's hierarchical position based on power is the only regulating factor for the construction of hierarchies that allow access to scarce resources,

turns out to be quite wrong now even in animals. And it's really wrong in people as far as I'm concerned because first of all, and this is part of taking the idea of the patriarchal tyranny apart. I hate both parts of that phrase. I don't like the patriarchal part and I don't like the tyrannical part. I don't like the patriarchal part because it isn't obvious to me that human culture is solely the creation of men. That seems to me to be somewhat of a sexist presupposition. To begin with, because I don't think women were just sitting around doing nothing except being oppressed until 1962 when Betty Friedan wrote the feminist mystique and all of a sudden they emerged onto the world stage. That doesn't strike me as a plausible description of the course of human history. And the tyranny part is like, well, this is our culture of the tyranny,

that's what we're describing, it's tyranny compared to what? Exactly. It's like it's not perfect, no society is perfect, that's for sure every society tends towards blindness and towards stultification towards a certain degree of corruption. and a given hierarchy can definitely be taken over by people who only use brute force and power, but that's actually a sign of the degeneration of the hierarchy, not a signal of its appropriate effectiveness. What we do is human beings, first of all, we don't exactly live in a world where we're competing

like animals for a finite set of scarce resources. I mean scarce resources can be a problem. There are some zero-sum games, but we're also pretty damn good at coming up with new games, with new rewards and new rules, and also producing a whole plethora of goods that we didn't have before. So it's not a zero-sum game. And what that means is we don't have one hierarchy. We have many diverse hierarchies. And there's many ways that you can climb to the top or hope to climb to the top or at least move slightly upward

in many different hierarchies. And so I like to take apart the idea of the tyrannical patriarchy by thinking about it in a more high resolution manner. And I always think plumbers are a good example, you know, because plumbers have a hierarchy. They're successful plumbers and unsuccessful plumbers. And so there's a hierarchy in terms of wealth, let's say. Some plumbers have whole sequences of plumbing shops, right?

They become plumbing magnets. And well, why would that be? It's like, well, hypothetically, they know how to fix pipes. That might be requirement number one. But then obviously, they know how to hire employees. And then they know how to keep them, and reasonably happily, because you don't hear very often of sweatshop plumbers

being, or plumbers' slavers who have their plumber employees laboring away in the basement with someone cracking the whip at them. It's usually a fairly, what would you say, free exchange among a plumber and his employees. And then generally, if you're gonna be a plumber and you're gonna survive for any length of time, you also have to treat your customers

with a certain degree of decency and respect and honesty. You have to do the job you were hired to do for the money you were promised that you promised to charge. And then it actually has to work, because otherwise people write bad reviews on Yelp, and so forth, and then soon you're not successful. And so, and then it's pretty obvious that if you hire a plumber, you're not doing it to participate in some sort of power game,

except perhaps in the most abstract possible way you hire a plumber because Well, you don't want sewage in your house and that seems important Right we could all more or less agree that that's Up an individual and a collective good and so the plumber is servicing that particular need and then you might Phone some people that you know or some contractors you know or whatever and you say well Do you know a good plumber? You don't say do you know the most powerful plumber in the neighborhood? You say do you know a good plumber and then you get a recommendation and the good plumber gets even a little bit more Business which puts them even little higher in the hierarchy of plumbers and you don't have

roving bands of tyrannical plumbers. And you don't have roving bands of tyrannical plumbers, linked armed arm in a patriarchal, what would you call, phalanx, coming to your door, insisting that you hire them or else. And I would say, as ridiculous as that image is, our society is composed of many overlapping hierarchies of that type, almost all of them based to some degree on competence, and usually a competence that we can measure to some degree and that we collectively agree upon is a form of competence. I mean, sometimes it's arbitrary. There's a hierarchy of basketball players, obviously. Some can do it professionally and very few. Tiny, tiny percentage of basketball players

can do it professionally. And then if you take that tiny percentage of basketball players who can do it professionally, there's even a tiny percentage who happen to be superstars of the type that can manage a multi-million dollar career over several years, right? A vanishingly small proportion of people, and it's pretty obvious that being able to bounce a basketball and put it through a hoop is a rather arbitrary skill, right? I mean it could have been a different game,

in which case that particular athlete might not have been that good at it, but even if we just generate some arbitrary standard of value like basketball, which isn't entirely accurate, it has to do with this ledic prowess and the ability to hit the target, which is a very important thing in life, but you get a hierarchy that's produced around something as arbitrary as that instantaneously. And no one ever questions that.

It's built into the structure of things that as soon as, and here's the reason for hierarchies, this is what's built into the structure of things. You have a problem. Actually, you have a whole set of them, right? You need to eat, you need to have fresh water, you need to have shelter, you need to have company, you want some luxury, you want some adventure, like there are things that, and some of these aren't strictly necessary, there are things you want,

but a lot of them are necessary. If you don't have them, you're in pain, you're anxious, you suffer. So you want to address the suffering, that's a problem. In order to address the suffering, you need a solution to the problem. What people are going to offer you and what you might offer. Other people is the possibility of solving a problem, you know, an individual problem, and one that we identify collectively. As soon as you admit that there's a problem, you know, an individual problem, and one that we identify collectively. As soon as you admit that there's a problem and that a solution needs to be put in place, and someone could offer it, you immediately produce a hierarchy of value because it becomes

valuable to fulfill that requirement, and as soon as you produce that hierarchy, you also produce a hierarchy of talent, Because it turns out that no matter what pursuit you determine to pursue, and then implement collectively, you will inevitably produce an unequal distribution of talent and instantaneously construct a hierarchy. And of course, you're going to do that. How else would you do it? If it's an important problem, like if it's how to design computer chips, for example,

it turns out to be a very difficult thing, and you get 100 people together, and you want to design a computer chip, the first thing you should do is figure out which of those 100 people actually knows how to design a computer chip. And then that's the person that you should put in the forefront of the hierarchy, unless you don't want to design a computer chip.

And it's pretty obvious at that sort of level of technical prowess who's barely able to manage it whatsoever and who is absolutely stellar in comparison. And if your company or your project is operating in a, let's call it, in a, in a functional and honest manner and it's pursuing a valuable goal, then it organizes itself so the people who are best at pursuing that goal occupy the positions of not power but authority. And how else would you do it? The alternative is, well, everyone is the same.

Well, that doesn't work because the talent is unequally distributed. And it also doesn't work with regards to decision making. It's like, if you're in a company and you've got 100 people, and maybe you have to make, I don't know, how many decisions a day, more than one, that's for sure. Let's say 50. So you're gonna get everybody together, all 100 people, and they're all gonna discuss all 50 options, and then what are they gonna do?

They're gonna vote, or are you gonna come to a consensus? It's like, while voting, even then you, you have a hierarchy, you have the people who won the vote against the people who lost. so you have to come to a universal consensus about every decision in the absence of a hierarchical structure. Well, if you want to drive yourself absolutely, start raving mad, then you set up an organization like that, and the empirical literature actually suggests quite clearly that people are happier at work,

more satisfied and less anxious when they're in a functional hierarchy where the lines of authority are clearly delineated. Now, that assumes that people observed that there's some relationship between the hierarchical structure and competence, right? Because that's what validates the hierarchy, at least in principle, is competence. Okay, so now, having said that, I would also say, so we need hierarchies, then I would say, well, this can help us understand political ideation to some degree. There are differences between people who think in a conservative manner and who think in a liberal left manner.

There are temperamental differences, and some of them have to do with attitude towards hierarchies and some of them have to do with attitude towards borders. So the liberal left types are rather skeptical of borders. They're skeptical of conceptual borders around words or concepts because they don't like things to be locked into one place. They like to dynamic interplay between ideas because they like new things to be generated. And there's real utility in that, especially if you're locked in a problem that you cannot solve.

You need to disintegrate your categorical structures and restructure them so that you can get yourself out of being stuck and moved for. So there's real utility in that. Whereas the more conservative people, they think, look, we've got these things in their boxes, in their nested boxes even, and things aren't working too badly. So let's not muck about with the categorical structure anymore than we have to. Let's keep the borders between things intact at every level of conceptualization, right up to the political itself, because the conservative types tend to be more supportive

of the idea of solidity of borders, let's say, where the liberal types think, no, we wanna make the borders permeable because we wanna free flow of goods and ideas. And it's like, who's right? And the answer is, well, it depends on the circumstance. Sometimes the border should be tighter, and the wall should be higher, and sometimes the border should be looser,

and more ideas should move back and forth. It depends on where you are in your culture, right? If things are getting too structured and rigid, time to release the borders, time to make them more permeable. But if everything's falling apart and everyone's confused, it's like, well, maybe you want to shore up the institutions to some degree.

And the question is, how the hell do you know when to do what? And the answer is, by arguing about it. And I'm absolutely dead serious about this. This is why I think, fundamentally, why I think that free speech is the canonical freedom and responsibility. Because if there are these two goods hierarchical structure or borders, let me use borders as an example, at the moment, border solidity versus border permeability, each of which is advantageous at different stages in cultural development

as the years will by, then the only way to decide if your position properly has a culture on that continuum between those two opposing views is to have it out. And that's what we do. That's exactly what we have elections. The left wingers, they have what they say, what they have to say, it's oh my god, they also do the same with hierarchies. So the right wing tends to it. And it's associated with this idea of maintaining categorical integrity.

The system is working pretty damn well the way it is. And mostly it's based on confidence, so don't mock about with it. And the left wingers say, yeah, but it's tilting towards tyranny. It's kind of sultified and blind. And the people at the bottom don't have as much opportunity to rise to the top as might be good for everyone. And they also criticize even the idea of hierarchy itself because one of the consequences of producing a hierarchy, and this is an inevitable consequence, is that the bulk of the, well there's two things.

If you produce a hierarchy, the bulk of the creative work is done by a small minority of people. That's the first thing. The square root of the number of people who are doing a job do have to work. That's the rule. That's the predo principle. And so it's a really, it's a killer rule, man, because it means if you have ten employees, three of them do have to work, everyone understands that.

But if you have a hundred, 10 of them do have to work, and if you have a thousand, 30 of them do have to work. And so, that's a killer principle. It also explains why large companies tend to collapse, right, because once you get up to 1,000, you've got 970 people who are only doing half the work and 30 that are doing the other half. And then your company waivers a little bit.

You know, you have a bad quarter and the 30 that are doing half the work, think, child man, we'll see you later. I've got opportunities elsewhere. And then you're left with the 970 people who are only doing half the work. That's right, instant death spiral. And that happens to companies way faster than you think.

In any case, you get this creativity distribution, which I just described, and that's rough, but you also get an income distribution problem that's the same. And so that's why it's exactly the same principle. And it isn't necessarily that the creative hard workers are also the ones that get the most income. It's not like there's a one-to-one relationship between those things. You want it to be close because otherwise your hierarchy isn't functioning worth a damp.

But it's not going to be identical because no system works that way. And people gerrymandered the system and sometimes people get paid more than they should and sometimes people get paid less. You know, because no system is perfect. But in any case, one of the consequences of producing hierarchical entities is that a disproportionate amount of the revenue, the goods, the wealth, flow to a tiny minority of people.

And so that's why you have the richest 13 people have as much money as the bottom. I think it's $2 billion, something like that. And you have the infamous 1% that control the vast majority of wealth. You're all in that 1% by the way, just so you know, because maybe not all of you, but pretty much all of you. To be in the top 1% worldwide, you need an income of $32,000 a year. So, you know, who's in the 1% depends very much on how large you make the population pool. And it's a

little bit disingenuous, I would say, to say, well, let's reduce the geographical locale across which we're calculating comparative incomes until we're poor, despite the fact that we're actually not, and so that there's a 1% that's way above us, and we can assume that they're rich in some pathological manner. It's like if they're rich in some pathological manner, then so are you. They're richer, so maybe they're better at it than you in their pathological manner, but historically speaking and even in terms of comparison across the world, it's definitely you.

And I don't think that that's necessarily such a bad thing, in some sense, because some people have to be rich first before everybody can be rich at all. And you might think, well, that's a hell of a thing to say, but I don't really think it is, because if you look at what happens to consumer prices, for example, you want some gadget, like a 55 inch TV. It's like what, you can get one of those things now for probably 200 pounds.

I mean, they're very inexpensive. But when they first came out, they were like 20,000 pounds or 50,000 pounds right early on, 100,000 pounds. And so only the rich guy up the street had one. Well, it's a good thing there were some people around that had excess pools of capital because they would have never bought things to begin with and driven the price down so that the rest of us could afford them.

And so one of the things that's useful about rich people is they can produce a market for really cool things that you get to have a little later. And you don't get as much status for it, but at least you get the damn thing, not something. So, okay, so the right supports hierarchies and borders and conceptual categories and likes to keep them relatively intact. And there's reasons for that. And the left says, wait a second, the categories are too rigid. We're not letting information flow. The hierarchy is too corrupt,

and plus there's all these people who are stacking up at the bottom. And that's the other thing that happens in hierarchies is that not only does a disproportionate amount of the goods, let's say, flow to the top, but the largest number of people stack up close to the bottom. And so then you have this eternal problem of inequality. And that can get so steep that it actually threatens the stability of the hierarchy itself. Because one of the things we know is that if inequality steepens too much, especially if there's no way of moving

from the bottom to the top, then the young men that are trapped at the bottom get violent. And so even if you're a conservative type, one of the things you might think is, well, we don't want to steep in the damn hierarchy too much and we don't want to restrict access to mobility too much because then the people at the bottom, they have nothing to lose. And one, if you have something, the only person that can beat you is the person who has nothing because they have nothing to lose.

And so you don't want to have too many people around that have nothing if you have something because they don't have anything to lose. And so even if you're just selfish capitalist, you might think, well, you know, let's keep the painful inequality to some moderate minimum so that the whole damn thing doesn't destabilize. All right. Part of the reason, so there's a bit of a validation for a left wing and a bit of a validation for a left wing and a bit of a validation for a right wing And and even more validation for the idea that you need to communicate across those different political viewpoints

And one of the things you might also be interested to know is that those political viewpoints are not Entirely but in large part influenced by biological factors So this is a cool thing and it's only been figured out in about the last 15 years. So once we got a decent personality model, the same models, by the way, that have been used to show that there are gender differences in personality and that they maximize as societies become more egalitarian,

same line of research. We found that conservatives tend to be high in a trait called conscientiousness. And conscientiousness is the second best predictor of socioeconomic success after intelligence. It's an important predictor, and it's a predictor of marital stability and life satisfaction. And it's good to be conscientious. It makes you a little square. That's a good way of thinking about it. But as a long-term strategy, it's a good one.

Orderliness and industriousness. And the conservatives are particularly high in orderliness. And that seems to be that proclivity to keep things where they're supposed to be. And conservatives, orderly types, it isn't that they're afraid of disorder exactly. That was a theory that was very current amongst psychologists for a long period of time. But it turned out that conservatives are actually less neurotic than liberals.

They're lower in negative emotion. And so the whole fear thing didn't pan out very well. But what seems to maybe be the case is that conservative types who are orderly are sensitive to disgust, and so that when category boundaries are violated, the emotion that they experience is disgust, kind of a judgmental disgust. And so I found that extremely interesting when I was reading biography of Hitler.

I read this book called Hitler's Table Talk. It's a very interesting book. It was a collection of his spontaneous speeches, diatribes, let's say, at Meal Times in the evening, from I think 1939 to 1942. And they were just recorded by secretaries. And so you just got a sense of what Hitler thought about everything.

And he was a very strange person because he was very high in trait openness, which actually is a liberal trait. He's a very creative person, surprisingly enough. But he was also extremely orderly. And so a devote of willpower. So he was very proud of his ability, for example, to stand in the back of a car, going through the hordes of people that were worshipping him and to stand like this for like eight hours at a time.

He saw that as a signal application of will. And he was also obsessed with hygiene. He bathed four times a day, for example. I learned this, I took apart what happened as Hitler, what would you say, accelerated his purification strategies. So one of the things the Germans did right off the bat was to institute public health programs. And so they produced these vans that would go around and do TB screening. So they're trying to get rid of tuberculosis.

Seems like a good thing. Pathogen concern driven by disgust. And then the next thing they did was decide, well, when I was a clean up the damn factories, too many rats, too many mice, not enough flowers, too much dirt. And so they had the Germans fumigate the factories. To get rid of the vermin. They used zyclon. Zyclon, I think, A, there were two variants. One zyclon was used in the death camps, and the other was used as a general insecticide, pesticide.

And so that's where that started. And so they started to clean up the factories. It seemed like an okay thing, but then they decided they're also going to clean up the mental institutions. And that was starting to push the envelope, let's say, a little bit too far. And then that just went completely out of hand. And if you read what Hitler said, it's absolutely fascinating because he regarded the Aryan race as a body, that was his central metaphor, a body that was under assault by pathogens. And so that's why I was always talking about purity of blood. And so his desire to eradicate wasn't driven by fear, it was driven by disgust. And it was a consequence of excess orderliness. So, and you know, you can tell that too.

I mean, if you look at how the Nazis arrayed themselves in their political displays, you know, at Nuremberg, for example, which was this massive display area, huge grounds where all the Nazis would gather in perfect squares, right? Absolutely perfect. Thousands of people lined up in absolute precision. And then when they go stepped in Mars, everyone was exactly the same. So orderliness gone mad. And orderliness is actually one of the sign quite on of an industrialized society. And that's one of the things that makes that so terrifying,

because it also means that part of what drove the Germans to, for example, to their high levels of engineering excellence for which they were absolutely renowned, not only in World War II, but certainly even now, was that orderliness, that unbelievable orderliness, and the thing is it can get seriously out of hand. And so that's a fascinating thing to know. It was one of the most shocking things I ever stumbled across

as a social scientist, and really I really found it quite alarming because there's a reason to be orderly and discussed sensitive and the reason to be discussed sensitive is because you want to protect yourself from foreign pathogens. You have to because you'll die, you know, and it's certainly the case that many times in human history where cultures came together that had been separated, the results were absolutely catastrophic. That happened to Europe with the bubonic plague, for example. It happened to the North American Indians when the European showed up, right?

Rife with syphilis and all sorts of other diseases, mumps and measles, and smallpox, right? 95% of the Native Americans died. So many of them died that by the time the pilgrims came to the East Coast, the Indians were desperate to have new people because they couldn't even get their crops off. So that was all very frightening because it showed that what happened in the case of Germany was at least in part the elaboration of an instinct that was designed in fact to protect people from from from actual pathogenic pathogenic exposure it just gone too far and of course everything can go too far Conservatives are hiring conscientiousness especially orderliness and their lower-in-trade openness and

Openness is the creativity dimension and if you're an open person You tend to like aesthetics you tend to like philosophy you tend to person, you tend to like aesthetics, you tend to like philosophy, you tend to like movies, you tend to like literature, you tend to like art, you have a sense of it. And you also are interested in ideas for their own sake. And that also makes you someone who, if someone throws you an idea, it'll, six or seven ideas will make themselves manifest in your imagination. So the boundaries between ideas are more permeable for creative people,

until so to be conservative, you have to be relatively non-creative, and you have to be orderly. And to be liberal, especially on the left, as you move towards the left, then orderliness goes down and openness goes up, because all you see then is the utility of moving laterally across borders, something like that. And now that what's so interesting about that is that both of those are extremely useful sets of traits because sometimes you should just do the things exactly the same way that

everyone has always done them for time immemorial. It's a hell of a fine strategy. If it's already worked, keep doing it. But sometimes that's fatal. And so then you need a creative person who's willing to transgress against the boundaries and generate something new so that you can get out of your now counterproductive box. And so it's the same thing with regards to the political dialogue that I described earlier, except now it's a dialogue between biological types. Should we stay the same or should we change?

We don't know, so we better talk about it. And so, and that's why, again, free speech is so absolutely necessary because that's the mechanism by which people who truly differ, like truly differ, can come to some reasonable consensus and keep the whole ship of state relatively on course. like truly differ, can come to some reasonable consensus and keep the whole ship of state relatively on course. Now, the reason that I talked about

lobsters in particular with regards to hierarchies is because I was trying to make a criticism, I was trying to put forward a criticism of Marxism, but it was a funny thing because this is in chapter one, still it was a criticism of Marxism that I was actually trying to make from the leftist perspective. So let's say for a minute that you accept this proposition,

there's gonna be hierarchies and they're problem solving social technologies. Okay, now, but they have a problem, and the problem is that the problem of inequality and the problem of dispossession of those at the bottom. It's a big problem. And maybe you want to do something about that, and maybe you should, because why not have some compassion for people who are dispossessed, especially the case for children, because it's not obvious. Maybe you're dispossessed because you've never done a lick of work in your life, and you deserve to be barely clinging to the edge of reality because of that. And I'm not saying that that's

the primary reason that people become dispossessed, but there's one of them, there's many, many reasons, ill health, bad luck, God, there's an endless array of reasons that can throw you down to the bottom. Old age can do that. And so can extreme youth. And, you know, it's not necessarily such a good thing that dispossessed children stack up at the bottom, because they don't have the opportunities they might need. And even if you're just a greedy capitalist, well, that's kind of foolish because maybe you want those kids to grow up and invent something like new and luxurious that you can have that

no one else can have, right? So, it's a fool's game to keep people at the bottom if you can allow them access through their competence and talents to something approximating the top. And so what that means in part is we can agree that something should be done on behalf of the dispossessed, and so we can say, well, there's a valid reason for the existence of the left wing as long as it doesn't go too far, just like there's a valid reason for the existence of the right wing if it doesn't go too far, just like there's a valid reason for the existence of the right wing if it doesn't go too far. And so, but if you're a leftist and you actually care about the dispossessed,

then you need to understand how hierarchies work. And you don't get to be all Marxist about it because the problem with Marxism, as far as I can tell, the problem. There are many problems with Marxism, as far as I can tell, the problem. There are many problems with Marxism. But this is a big one, is that it attempts to lay the blame for hierarchical dispossession at the feet of the West and capitalism. And that's wrong. It's a way worse problem than that. It's a far worse problem than that. So

hierarchies are unbelievably ancient and the problem of dispossession therefore equally ancient. And the idea that a radical restructuring of society among lines that for example aren't capitalist is somehow going to magically rectify hierarchical inequality. That's a fool's errand. And we even, we know this, I would say, anthropologically as well, you know. For example, if you study paleolithic gravestites and paleolithic times, let's say that's 10 to 25,000 years ago,

something like that. You already see massive evidence for inequality. Some of the people in the gravesites are buried with a substantial amount of paleolithic treasure, often metal, because you could imagine metal, especially gold, silver, very hard to come by, and a very tiny proportion of paleolithic corpses are buried with almost all the gold and silver. And you can't attribute that to the vagaries of capitalism. It's a much much deeper problem and then you put that in the context of the entire almost entire animal kingdom where you also see

hierarchical structures and you see radical dispossession and radical inequality in the distribution of resources, you come to the understanding that this is a far deeper problem than can be rectified by mere criticism of, say, the West or capitalism. This iron law of unequal distribution is a applies to all sorts of weird things, say, so it's not just animals and people, man, it's stranger than that. So a tiny proportion of all the stars in the galaxy have almost all the mass, right?

It's the same with planetary bodies, even in the solar system. A small number of planets have almost all the mass, even though there's lots of planets, to those who have more will be given, it even works on a cosmic scale, it's the same with plant size in the Amazon jungle. Same with the size of cities,

a tiny proportion of the cities have almost all the people. So there's an iron law of distribution here that Pareto, his name was, an economist originally mapped out. And something that Marx noted when he said that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, but he didn't really understand, as we should understand, it was

a single example of a much, much broader and more complex problem. So I could take a second even just to outline the problem and how it works out. Think about this. Imagine we did this. Imagine we give everybody in this room $10. And then you have to play a game with each other. And this is the game. You and you play the game, and you're going to sell him, you're going to exchange invisible bananas, because you don't actually have a banana, so you have to use invisible ones. What you do is you flip a coin, and if you win, then you have to pay a dollar to him,

and you get the invisible banana, and you get to eat it, but now you don't have a dollar. And so we just have all of you play this game randomly, okay? And soon what we find is everybody starts out equal because everybody has $10, but pretty soon like some people have $8 and some people have $12. And then you're in a little bit of trouble because if you have $8, you've only got 8 good bets left, but if you have $12, you've got 12 good bets left. And then you play a little longer and

Well, soon some people have 18 dollars and some people have two and then you play a little longer and some people hit zero And there's a big problem with zero because as soon as you hit zero, you don't get to play You're out of the game and then if you keep playing the game You just run it right to the end then everybody stacks up at zero and one person has all the money. And you've all experienced that because you've played monopoly. Right? And that happens in every monopoly game. Mostly it's a game of chance. And you know that because the same person doesn't always win. It doesn't matter that it's just a game of chance. What happens is you get a very rapid development of a pre-dow distribution. Everybody stacks up at zero and one person takes everything. And it's not like our economy is as simple as a monopoly game, but it's not a bad, low resolution

analogy, which is actually why we find it somewhat amusing as a game. Okay, so that's all about hierarchies and boundaries and political differences and the reason for free speech and all of that. And I'll close with this. The purpose of chapter one was to make those points at least in part. That was the purpose. But it was also to set the stage in some sense for the rest of the book, because there's a claim in chapter one, and the claim is that you should stand up straight with your shoulders back, and the critics of my book, who usually criticize chapter one, because, well, I said before, because they hadn't read it, but if they have read it, that's all they read, because there's certainly plenty to object to in the rest of the book.

They seem to assume, and maybe this was my own flaw, as a writer, that I'm trying to make a case that you should use power to be dominant. And that's not the case that I'm making at all. The case that I'm making is that that's actually a very unstable way of achieving position in a hierarchy, especially if it's a competence hierarchy because if it's a competence hierarchy, then the best way to attain authority status is to be competent, and then the question is, well, what does it mean to

be competent? We already kind of talked about that with regards to being a plumber. It's like, well, first of all, it might not be such bad. I didn't have a skill that you could trade with other people. That seems to be kind of pro-social. It requires a little discipline on your part and makes useful to other people. It doesn't seem to be anything particularly wrong with that, but that's not enough. You also have to be able to trade honestly in continual reciprocal interactions. So you have to be a fair player, let's say. And I think there's plenty of evidence that the most stable way of positioning

yourself properly in the long term, in a reasonable hierarchy, is actually to be a fair player. I think there's an echo of that when you tell your children it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. Because what you're actually telling your children is don't sacrifice the opportunity to be a major player in a series of games for the opportunity to win a single game. It's very wise advice because really what you're telling your kids is, it doesn't matter

if you win this game. It matters if people bloody well want to play with you. Right, right? Now, so now you know that when you tell your kid the next time it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, matters how you play the game, and they look at you like they have no idea what you're talking about. You can tell them. You want to be invited to play as many games as you possibly can. And the way you do that is that you play fair.

You play reciprocally. And so that's predicated also on a certain kind of ethic. And that was the ethic that, well, I tried to outline that in 12 rules for life, like generally, but to at least provide the bare bones of that in the beginning chapter. There's a certain amount of courage that that requires, like a certain amount of the willingness

to open yourself up to the possibility of the world, to trust other people, for example, which is something that you have to do, if you're gonna engage in reciprocal interactions with them, you have to extend your hand in trust, even if you've been bitten a few times, you know, you don't stop petting dogs because a couple of dogs bit you.

It just deprives you of the pleasure of having some interactions with dogs. And it's the same with human beings. You've been bit a couple of times, no doubt, but you still extend your hand in trust, and you hope you can start to establish a reciprocal relationship. And if you have some skills and you're good

at establishing a reciprocal relationship, and you play fair, and you have the courage that's necessary to do that and to take on important problems and to solve them, which is part of, I would say, adopting a proper stance in the world, which I've tried to portray metaphorically as standing up straight with your shoulders back, then you have the opportunity to take your place properly in a hierarchy and also to ensure that it functions optimally. And maybe it's even the case that if you do that particularly well,

you'll generate enough wealth so that the people who are dispossessed at the bottom won't fall completely off the edge of the planet and that you can set up the situation so that you can provide the means by which people can move up the hierarchy if they have the talent and ability and if they don't to provide them with other opportunities. Which is something that people are also quite good at. If you can't play basketball, maybe you can play chess. You know, we've got many games that people can participate in. And so hopefully, at least to some degree, everyone has the possibility of

finding a place. Now, I know that that's not entirely true, and that some people labor under so many sets of restrictions that they're pretty much impaired in relationship to any conceivable game, and something has to be done to stop this suffering that's associated with that. I mean, we can agree on that, but that doesn't mean that our culture is fundamentally a patriarchal tyranny, and it doesn't mean that the fundamental way that you can sort yourself, for example, if your male is through power, and it doesn't mean that the proper

or even most common route to authority and position in our highly functional hierarchies is the tyrannical expression of arbitrary domination. I don't buy any of that. I don't think it's valid biologically. I don't think it's valid sociologically. I don't think it's valid anthropologically. I think it's a very narrow and motivated viewpoint. And I think it's a very, very hard on people. And so I would say instead, as I did in chapter one, that better to adopt a stance on the world, where you stand up straight with your shoulders back and open yourself up to the possibility of interacting with each other and acting appropriately in the world

and take your proper position in a hierarchy of competence in that manner and keep everything moving forward in the proper way. So thank you very much. All right, let's dive right into it, my friend. I love this first question. And I don't know how we have not gotten it before. How strictly do you adhere to the 12 rules? Tren, just to go through them. Well, you know what? When I wrote the original series of rules, there were 42 of them.

And I published them on a site called Quora, and they became very popular. And, you know, I wrote down things that I felt that were true and also practical and valid. They were maxims, let's say, that I had attempted to abide by. Mostly, I think, because I decided that bringing excess misery on myself and my family was probably a rather counterproductive

strategy and so I think I abide by them as well as I am able to and hopefully as I practice I get slightly better you know moment moment, day by day at doing so. And everyone makes mistakes, that's for sure. But by and large, like I said, I'm not interested in any more misery than necessary. I'm hoping. So I try to live a straight but not too narrow life. That's some serious silence, right? Yeah. Do you believe that finding a romantic partner for life is a human necessity? Well, it's obviously not a necessity because people swap romantic partners quite frequently. So, you know, you don't die when you do it.

Although sometimes people wish they would. you know, you don't die when you do it. Although sometimes people wish they would. Sometimes they wish the person who departed would die too. So, but I do, like humans are a pair of bonding species. That's quite clear. And there's some variation between individuals in that proclivity. You know, I think the biological reason for that is that there's a variety of them, but because our children are dependent for so long, they're just too much for one person.

And so in order for us to survive, man had to become quite domesticated and quite maternal. And that's made us all susceptible to extremely tight bonds. You know, one of the things that's quite interesting, the circuit that bonds you, circuit, we don't have circuits, but it's not a bad shorthand. The circuit that bonds you to your partner is the adult remnant or the adult continuation of the same circuit that bonds mother to infant.

And you can tell that by the language that people use when they talk fondly of the romantic partners. You know, they use baby, for example. And they use the same terms of endearment for their romantic partner. They might for a very young child. It's the same underlying circuitry. It's part of the carous circuit. It was outlined very nicely by a neuroscientist named Yacht Panksep. If you're interested in that, he wrote a great book called

AFFECTIVE NUROSIENCE, which is on my reading list, which is on my website. It's actually, like it's a serious text, but it's actually very readable. It's accessible to, I would say, it's accessible to committed lay people, you know, who don't have expertise in that area. And it's a really wonderful wonder through the biology of love and pair bonding. And so, that's sort of on the biological end. We've got the nature for it. But then on the spiritual end, most societies have attempted to sacralize instinct and to make it cultural and psychological as well as biological.

And so we do that with marriage. And we make the claim that perhaps it's better all things considered to ally yourself with someone in some permanent sense. It disciplines you. It provides you with someone to depend on in sickness and in health, which is a very useful thing. And it can help you by like a, I'm a good marriage, sort of like an endless wrestling match. Because you want someone to contend with, right? It isn't that people are looking necessarily for ease and comfort with their partners. They often wander apart from one another if things get too easy and comfortable.

You want someone you can wrestle with and contend with. The reason for that in part is because there's development in that, you know, to have that optimal challenge and hopefully what happens if you ally yourself with someone is, well, you have someone that can continually challenge you to be better than you are, so that you together can be better than you were, and then you have someone to, like, you know, you have the story of your life and it can get kind of frayed, but you want it to be continuous and you want it to be aiming at something

and you want it to have some tensile strength and some resilience. And if you can wind that together with someone else's story, then you have a cable that, the cable that makes up your life to stretch a story, then you have a cable that makes up your life to stretch a metaphor. It can withstand more tension, it can withstand more trouble. And it gives a depth to your life. You know, this is why people think of marriage as a trap, especially when they're young, sometimes when they're older. They think about it as old-fashioned, they think about it as just a piece of paper,

which is an unbelievably shallow way of looking at it. If anyone ever says that to you, you should just slap them right then and there. That's nothing but a piece of paper. Whap! It's like, so, so. Because it gives a profound... Don't tweet that.

Yeah. Ha, ha, ha. Yeah, I haven't been in trouble for like 10 minutes, so. Yeah, so, so it gives a profundity to your life, you know, to share it with someone over a long period of time. It gives it a gravity and it gives it a reality that otherwise lacks. The fragmented relationships are by necessity superficial and it's not that you don't want

your life to be superficial because it's superficiality is no defense against pain. That's really why. And it's good for you to care for someone. You know, it's like one of the things I realized a long time ago was that people don't grow up till they have children. Of course, people don't have children hate to hear that. And you can grow up if you don't have children, but it's very difficult because in order to grow up, someone has to care. You have to care more about someone else than yourself.

It's like the definition of, it's not, it's a necessary but not sufficient precondition for maturation. And you tend not to care for someone more than yourself till you have a child. And then it really hits you. It's like, no, no, no, it's like this person is more important than me.

But you can get some of that with someone that you're committed to. And I think that attempt to pay attention to the other person and try to ensure that their life isn't any more wretched and miserable than necessary is actually it's good for your spiritual development. And that's an old- good for your spiritual development. And, you know, that's an old fashioned idea, spiritual development, but it's not much different

than psychological development. And to develop your spirit is to become a more potent force for good in the world. And there isn't anything better than that. And you can definitely practice that with someone to whom you've committed yourself to. That's a good sacrifice too. It's like, and sacrifice is necessary.

It marks things out as important. And it's also something to have someone do that for you. It's like, I've decided that you're so important that I'm not going to have a relationship of this step with anyone else. It's like, oh, well, you know, that's kind of, it's kind of like a compliment that, you know, and it is an affirmation of fundamental value. And you can use an affirmation of fundamental value when you're surrounded by all the doubts that you accumulate about yourself, you know.

It's interesting, my wife and I had a conversation just a little while ago, and I told her I couldn't believe how much trouble she's put up with. In the last two years, I thought, because she's just being a complete bloody rock about it, you know, and as being there, really, every step of the way. And so I've, and it was, some of it was absolutely bloody brutal because it was a combination of extreme social pressure and extreme instability of future and really bad health like all at once.

And for a long time too. And I said, Jesus, I'm really impressed that you managed to put up with this. I can't believe you could do it. And she said, well, I'm really impressed that you managed to put up with this. I can't believe you could do it. And she said, well, I'm equally happy that now that you have all the opportunities that you have that you've chosen to stay with me. And it was really fun. It was really good conversation because I was really grateful that she had stuck it out. And she was really happy that, you know, our bonded lasted in the other direction

and so we kind of concluded the two sorry sons of bitches like us were pretty damn lucky that we had each other and that's a good that's a good thing to reflect on when you're when you start to think about how alone and isolated you could be So yeah. Tammy's here somewhere by the way give her a round of applause for sticking up with this guy. Are you managing any fun on the tour? No. Not much but, but I would say having said that, I mean, I'd like to put that in context. I mean, first of all, when Tammy and I decided to do this tour, although we didn't realize it was going to be quite so extensive, we talked this through, like this was not fun. That wasn't the point. We knew that it was going to be very, very structured and strict because we're in a different city, well often every day, a different country. And there's no messing about.

There's no drinking. There's no mistakes because we can't afford mistakes. I have to be at the theater in time. I have to think about what I'm going to say. I have a moral obligation to my audience. So it's an amazing and remarkable privilege and opportunity to be able to do this. And so fun was not on the table. Now, we also agreed that you know if we

could take an hour to go for a walk and go see something cool and see a bit of the city and and take a break when the opportunity to arose that we were definitely going to do that and we have and that's great and there's no complaints in this but we have there's time for fun. This isn't the time for fun, but this is better than fun. So, you know, this is such a ridiculous, unlikely, remarkable opportunity that you have to be an absolute damn fool to squander it in any possible way. And so we both decided right at the beginning that we were like 100%, close as 100% as we could manage, dedicated just to doing this right.

And we've got a good crew. Dave has been unbelievably reliable and helpful. And I have a great stage manager, John, who did the voice of God and he's unflappable. And when problems arise, he solves them with no resentment. He's a very helpful person. And we've had people along on the crew from time to time who weren't right centered on what we were doing.

And we just pulled away from them right away because there's no time for mistakes. And there's no time for mistakes and there's no time for casual fun, but it's been an unbelievably remarkable adventure. And so that's worth the sacrifice of a lot of fun. And you're funny, you're funny. We have fun. I was going to say, I- I- I dragged you on stage to a comedy club in Salt Lake City. That was fun, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

45 minutes of this guy basically telling jokes. Yeah, yeah, that was good. That was good, and we get to play a little bit, you know, you do a nice intro that's kind of comical, and we get to play a bit now and then with the Q and A's, and- Kind of comical, thanks, Dad. That's all. Thank you, so much for the time, and thank you, so much for the time, and thank you, so much for the time, and thank you, so much for the time, and thank you, so much for the time, and thank you, so much for the time, and thank you, so much for the time, and thank you, So I've actually written three quarters of about three or four books now that are all sitting

sort of in their unfinished form. And so I think I'm going to do a book of Q&As because I have collected a lot of them and a lot of the questions are really good and some of the answers are okay too. And so I think people would be interested in that because when I do a Q&A on YouTube, that's the most, those get the fastest views and often the most views of anything I do. So people really like that, interestingly enough. So I think I'll do a book on Q&A book.

I have a follow-up book to maps of meaning. That's a more serious scholarly work, a more difficult work. I've recorded all of these lectures and gone far afield in many of them, and I think that there's probably, and had them transcribed. I think there's another book in that.

And then the next book is likely, the tentative working title is it's beyond mere order, 12 more rules for life. And I said I had written 42 rules to begin with, and each of them seemed to be worthy of further consideration. And so I packaged 12 together that made a coherent story for the first book, but I think that I'm going to take the same tack for the next book.

There's an established market, there's a clear demand, I've got more to say about it, and I would like to try again and see if I can do something similar, but better. You know, I don't want to just do a rehash obviously. So I'm going to try to write another book, another 12 rules book. That's a counterpart to this that is, well hopefully at least the same quality, but with any luck, higher. And that should, I'm slated to submit that next September. But I have a year's worth of grace around that. So that's the long-term writing plan at the moment.

So, and then, not quite, there's another one. Well, I also did, I said, a biblical lectures last year, 15 of them, and they turned out to be very popular. And then in the fall next year, I'm going to do a sequence of lectures on Exodus. And so that'll give me 30, 20,000 word lectures on the first two sections of the biblical corpus. That's about 600,000 words.

So that's about four books. And I could probably win all that down to one really tight book and I think that might be also useful and challenging and all of that. So those are all in the realm of future possibility. So. This is sort of interesting relative to something that happens to you personally just in the last day or so. How would you quantify and qualify a good life and a good death?

Good death? Well, I thought about that lot, you know, I think, wrote about a little bit in 12 rules about Socrates and his choice to die in Athens. The Athenian elite didn't really like him much because he was a troublemaker. I guess someone I can identify with to some degree. And they brought up charges against them, said he was corrupting the youth. And the punishment for that, some of that was, there was a religious element to the charge.

And some of that carried their death penalty, so they're going to kill them. But they said we're going to take you to trial in six months, you know, so it really meant get out of town because we're tired of you, and everyone knew that, including Socrates, and he decided he went and meditated on that. All his friends were preparing his escape route to a different city, and they of course wanted him to live, because they thought he was extremely valuable. But he went and meditated in some sense. He consulted this faculty, he called his Damon. And you might think about that as your conscience. It's the same thing in some sense. And Socrates said that the thing that made him different from other people was that

he always listened to his Damon. It didn't tell him what to do. It told him what not to do. It would warn him if he was about to take a false step. And you know, that was something I experienced very intently when I was in my early 20s. I started to learn that that faculty existed. This was independent of knowing anything about Socrates. I learned that I could pay attention and I had a faculty that would know when I was saying something false or when I was about to do something false and then if I

paid attention and it was saying that I was doing that all the time which was very disconcerting. If I paid attention to it that I could stop doing those things and Socrates said that what made him different from other men was that he If I paid attention to it, that I could stop doing those things. And Socrates said that what made him different from other men was that he always listened to this Damon. And so he went out, thought about, you know, getting out of Dodge City. And he went to consult his Damon and it said, don't run away. And he thought, what do you mean don't run away? What could his stupid advice is that?

These people want to kill me. They will. They're serious. And I could just go away and then I wouldn't be dead. That's a good outcome. But, well, as I said, he'd already decided that he wasn't going to violate this voice. So they put him on trial and you could surcey why they killed him. It's really interesting to read this.

It's the Apologia of Socrates. There's two versions, one written by Plato and one written by Zenefon, and they're both worth reading because they're a little different. They're like court transcripts. Well, that is what they are in some worth reading because they're a little different. They're like court transcripts. Well, that is what they are in some sense. And they're a little different. So that's kind of cool, you know, because it gives you that sense of really being there.

The first thing Socrates does, he's decided he's not afraid of death. Or if he is, he's not afraid enough to run away. It's just kind of like not being afraid. It's not so bad. He just rips these people into shreds. It's just kind of like not being afraid. It's not so bad. He just rips these people into shreds. It's just horrible. I mean, instead of them being the judges and jury

and him being the accused, he flips the table and he tells each one of them because he knows them very well. Just exactly, he accuses one of having this waste role of a son who was definitely going to destroy the entire family enterprise because his father had mistreated him so badly because he was such a terrible human being and he just lays it out in painful detail and you think, God, it's no wonder they wanted to get rid of you, man. You could see what was happening

and you'd say it. But anyways, Socrates comes up with an explanation for why he decided that his Damon must be right, because it was always right. It's like, how could it be right about me dying? He thought, well, you know, I've had a pretty good life. It's been full. People have revered me and I've had very many valuable relationships. And it's been a full life, you know? And soon I'm going to be old,

because he was getting old, and maybe I'll lose my faculties and things. I'll start to fall apart, you know, how what happens when you get really old? And maybe I've been offered a gift from the gods that I could be wise enough to take. I can bow out faculties intact. I can put my house in order.

Before I depart, I can say goodbye to all my friends. I can have my final words. And I can depart with the satisfaction of having lived a complete life. And so that's what he did. And I thought about that a lot, because, you know, like I'm not that interested in getting old, I'd rather maintain my youth and to some degree,

I do what I can to ensure that. And you know, you can have now, especially people might imagine living for 200 years or 500 years or maybe forever, although I think it's beyond anyone's any real possibility, but can imagine extending your life a very long time. Then I wonder, you know, I had kids and I don't think I'd have them again. I don't mean that I didn't love them and I didn't enjoy it. I really did, but it's like I did that.

You know, and there's a bunch of things I've already done, and they were really did, but it's like I did that. You know, and there's a bunch of things I've already done. And they were really worthwhile, but isn't clear to me that I'd want to reestablish a whole new career. You know, I have sub-adventures that take me here and there, like this, for example. But I don't know if I'd go back to university and do another PhD. Like, there's something about having done something that sort of finishes it, you know? And I kind of wonder, is it possible that if you lived your life completely, you could let it go?

And it seems to me that there's something to that. I think that might be the way that things are, is that if you took the advantages that were offered to you, if you exploited the opportunities that you had at hand, if you made use of the potential that was in front of you, you would exhaust yourself in your life and then you'd be done. And that would be okay. The older I get, the more I think that might be okay. And the older I get the more I think that might be true. So that would be a good death, I suppose. A good death would be what would be attendant on a thoroughly lived life. And I mean, I can't tell that for sure. I've watched people die now, older people, and you know, they are often, more often you

might think of the opinion that they had their life. So maybe that's how it is if you're careful. So that would be a good death. And I suppose a good life would be preparing for that. Right? All right, well, I don't think there's any possible way we could top that question. So on that note, I'm going to scooch out of the way and make some noise for Dr. Jordan Peterson, everybody. Thank you guys very much.

Thank you Mr much everyone. It was a genuine pleasure to speak with all of you. So... If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, and Antidote to Chaos. Both of these work stalled 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.

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