The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - My Pen of Light - Part One

Episode Date: March 15, 2020

A Jordan B. Peterson "12 Rules for Life" lecture from his book tour in New Zealand. Recorded February of 2019.

Welcome to episode 50 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter. I hope you enjoy this episode. It's called My Pen of Light, and was recorded in Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 20th, 2019. I remember Dad playing with the pen he mentions in this podcast. Someone gave it to him. It has a bulb that turns on when you press it into a piece of paper or something. He really liked it, so if you were the one

who gave him that pen, thanks for the pen. Dad's still recovering getting better and better. We're going to publicize all the neural rehab treatments we're doing, but if you want more information about some of them sooner, I have information on my Instagram at Michaela Peterson. When Dad's fully recovered, we'll come out and talk about it in greater detail. Have you ever wondered where you came from or your family's background? I got into a bit of an obsession in 2014 about trying to figure out who I was related to. At or all, we'll do that to you. And I haven't seen a site more effective for helping with that than Ancestry DNA. With Ancestry DNA, you can learn about your family with accuracy.

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I'm going to test out their scallops because they don't add preservatives to them, and that's actually quite rare. Right now, butcher boxes offering new members ground beef for life. That's one of their best offers, honestly. It's two pounds of ground beef in every box for the life of your subscription. Plus $20 off your first box. Just go to butcherbox.com slash JBP or enter promo code JBP at checkout. That's butcherbox.com slash JBP or enter promo code JBP at checkout. My pen of light, part one, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 rules for life lecture. Well, that was very enthusiastic. Thank you. So I'm going to do something tonight that I haven't done before at all at any of these talks.

I have in my book, Twelve Rules for Life, Twelve Rules, and hence the title. And I've covered them in various ways in various places. I think this is the 140th theater or something like that that I've spoken at since last January. But you know, there's an extra chapter at the end, I called it a Coda, it's a musical term, and sort of a recapitulation of the themes in the book from a different perspective. And I've never talked about them. And so I thought that I might do that tonight for something

new, because I try to do something new each night. I mean, I can't completely, because I have a limited array of knowledge. And so what's recapitulation of different themes and attempts to make problems I'm working on clearer and so forth. But I do try to make it. Original enough so that it's forcing me to think on my feet, you know, because it's good to think on your feet and it's really good practice.

It's one of the wonderful things about what I've been doing is, you know, I'm going to a different town, city every two days or three days, and speaking with two or three thousand people generally and having to come up with a problem and then try to formulate it clearly and then try to make some headway on it, you know, and then at the same time trying to see if the headway is communicable. So it's a fun, it's a engaging enterprise to attempt to do properly. And it's a form of dialogue with the audience. And so usually I stand up and face everyone like I am now and speak spontaneously. And that way I can keep an eye on everyone and make sure that they're mostly listening.

And I can listen to the audience and make sure that it's mostly quiet because that's a good sign that people are in fact all focused on the same thing and that whatever's happening is important enough to quail all the competing tendencies that might otherwise be preoccupying you with your complicated lives. I think I'll probably move this chair a little bit closer, however, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to because I don't know the rules, there's a bunch of rules in the 13th chapter 15 or 16 or 20 or something, quite a few, and I don't have them memorized and so I have to rely a bit more on notes tonight than I usually would. So, but I've done this, I've sat like this before and it's worked, it's worked well.

So let's see if we can do this tonight and say some new things. So that's the plan. And then afterwards, after about 70 minutes or so, then I'm going to answer a variety of questions that you've submitted to that Slido system. And so hopefully we'll have a productive evening as a consequence. So let's see what happens. All right, so first I'll tell you the story about this chapter.

I wasn't really sure that I was going to include it. I liked the way the book ended. It originally, it ended with the story of my daughter. The chapter, chapter 12 is pedicat when you encounter one on the street, and it's a morality tale, I suppose, about attempting to look for beauty during dark times to remember that it's there and to provide some solace for yourself and for the people around you. If you can, by remembering and noticing that there are still things that are worthwhile and beautiful in the world, even though things are progressing in a difficult manner.

And the chapter ends, chapter is about my daughter's illness, and it ends pretty positively because she recovers substantially. And that's still the case. In fact, I would say she's doing better and better. So that she was just in Switzerland a month ago, we spent most of January. I spent much of January in a hospital room in Switzerland. She had her ankle, which had been replaced when she was 16. She had it redone because it was slipping sideways. And we went and found the surgeon there

who had designed the joint. And he figured out why it was slipping and screwed it back in place and shaved off some of the bottom of her femur and while she was awake, all of that, quite a complicated process. And anyways, that all seems to be going very well. So what the point is is that the book had ended quite nicely with this rather personal story with a reasonably happy ending. And then I went down to California and met this friend

of my name, Dale Ressie. He runs this company called Founder Institute, which is a cool company, I think. What Adele has done, which is quite remarkable, is set up about 165 schools of sorts in cities all over the world, in 165 cities, variety of different languages, I think eight or nine different languages. He did that all in about four years,

and what he does is gather together groups of people, about 50 who all have entrepreneurial ideas, early stage entrepreneurial ideas, early enough so that they're not ready to quit their job to pursue their new potential occupation. And then he brings them together and he matches them with entrepreneurs who've had a long history of success and teaches them how to go about generating a business plan into starting a small

business. And his goal, which is a fairly lofty goal, is to export Silicon Valley to the rest of the world. And he started about 2,500 new businesses over about a five year period. And I do the testing for his applicants because I know at least in principle some of the psychometric,

I have some of the psychometric knowledge necessary to identify people who are likely to be good entrepreneurs. And good entrepreneurs, first of all, tend to be relatively intelligent because you have to solve problems on a constant basis. And they also tend to be high in a trade called openness. And openness is the trade that's most, it's a big five trade. There are five traits, by the way, hence the name big five.

And one of them is trait openness, and it's essentially associated with creativity. And high levels of creativity are relatively rare, despite what all the pop psychologists will tell you, because they'll tell you that everyone is creative, and that's complete bloody nonsense. Well, I mean, how many of you have written a symphony? Well, I mean, how many of you have written a symphony? Well, I'm just wondering.

How many of you have painted an oil painting, let's say that's hanging in a, well, even in your own house for that matter? That would say that anyone would allow to be hung in their own house, even more to the point. You know how many paintings Pablo Picasso created works of art in his life? And then these weren't trivial works of art.

These are major works of art. There's about fifth, well, I'm going to blow the story if I tell you right off the bat. You might think he made a productive career of about 65 years. And so let's say he managed one a week. That'd be 65 times 50, 3500 painting, something like that. Which is not bad.

He wants to hell a lot more than zero. I can tell you that. But that isn't even close. He created 65,000 pieces of art. Three a day, every day, for 65 years. And if you go online, you can go online to the Picasso, online Picasso project, and you can see about 15,000 of them.

And you know, it's impressive. And Bach, JS Bach, he wrote so much music that it would take a competent, modern copyist, just transcribing the music by hand, 40 years of eight hour days, just to copy what he composed. And you know, that's just a couple of examples among many. You see people like Thomas Edison's, who I think had 240 to 250 to 300 patents,

which is an awful lot of patents. And some of those were major league patents. And there are people who are, they're so damn creative that you can't even really explain it. Mozart used to claim that whole symphonies would just pop into his mind complete. All you'd have to do is write them down. And he was a particular expert taught intensively

by his father, but obviously he's also capable of, or what would you say, he had an integral musical genius that was part and parcel of him, that fortunately met excellent instruction. And Nikolai Tesla, who invented many of the things that we take for granted, including the electrical power grid systems that we use, which is kind of a big deal, as well as the electrical motors, and many other things. He said, he was a very strange person.

He said that whole inventions would pop into his imagination, basically in blueprint form, right down to the level of the angle of the screws that held the mechanisms together, and that sometimes those ideas came so quickly that he couldn't write them down fast enough before another idea would come into his head and sort of obliterate the one that he was working on. So, well, we don't understand that sort of thing at all, but one thing we can understand is that those people were creative. There's no doubt about that. And it does turn out that if you want to be an entrepreneur, then it's good to be creative. It's good to be high in openness. And by the way, you can find out this,

it's not the only good trait, by the way. And there's real disadvantages to being creative, like huge disadvantages. It's very hard to settle on a single identity if you're a creative person. And so it's easy to become a dilatant, especially if you lack discipline and instruction. So that's a real problem for creative people. It's almost impossible to monetize creativity. I mean, there are a lot of musicians

and hardly any of them make any money. And there are a lot of people who write fiction and almost no one gets published. And even of those who do get published, very few people sell enough books to make a living at it and certainly a much smaller fraction to make a living over any reasonable amount of time. It's now, if you're creative and you're successful, you can be radically successful. So it's like a high risk, high return investment, but it's very, very difficult. And so we don't want to be thinking it's an untrammeled good,

and that's part of the reason why everyone isn't creative. It's just too damn risky. And then there's other jobs, many jobs, for which creativity really doesn't suit you. So for example, if you're a lawyer, manager, administrator, banker, even an academic, for that matter, we found that the correlation between creativity and academic success among graduate students was slightly under zero. And also that their correlation between academic grades and creativity was zero. And also that their correlation between academic grades

and creativity was zero. So if you're creative, you're kind of a pain in the neck. Well, because if you're truly creative, you do things in such a radical manner that other people can't really evaluate what you're doing. And you might really be right, but you're forcing them to take a big risk to accept what you're doing on faith. They have to rejag their entire mode of evaluation.

And given that there's a high probability that you'll be wrong if you're creative, given say that most new businesses fail, for example, and that it's very hard to monetize creativity, it's not surprising that creativity is a tough route. For most jobs, managerial administrative jobs, academic jobs, banking and law and that sort of thing, conscientiousness is a much better predictor and a much safer bet. And so if you wanted to have a secure life and one where you had the highest probability of success you would choose intelligence because that's a good thing all things considered and conscientious

niche which is dutifulness and orderliness and industriousness but if you wanted a high risk high return life well then you'd choose creativity. In any case In any case, now I have no idea why I was telling you that creativity story to tell you the truth. Oh yes, I do remember now. I was adding this 13th chapter to the book and it was a more creative chapter I would say and I wasn't so sure that I should do it and I went down to I was working on this chapter I went down to California to talk to my friend Adele who worked with creative people and as I said it started all these businesses which is a big deal right it's like that's such an amazing thing he's such an amazing person he's's this six foot four guy. He's completely bald. He's really, really charismatic, enthusiastic like you wouldn't believe. Unbelievably hard

working. You know, and he decided that he was going to teach Silicon Valley entrepreneurial techniques all around the world. And then he set up 165 schools in four years and started 2,500 companies. It's like, it's impossible, right? That's all of that's impossible. And yet he did it. And so I had gone down to visit him and we'd spent an evening together long evening because we hadn't talked for a long time and he gave me this pen which was kind of a knick knacky thing, you know, it was just a ordinary pen, but it had an LED light on the end of it and an ordinary pen, but it had an LED light on the end of it. And so I was writing something in the dark.

We were in his head at Tesla, one of those new electric cars, and I was writing something in the dark. And I thought, well, this is kind of cool. I've got this pen of light, and I started using my imagination, which I suppose someone moderately creative, creatively might. And I thought, well, that's kind of interesting that I get this chance to write down things with a pen of light. I wonder if I could play a game with it. So I thought, I asked myself a question. I said, what could I do with a pen of light?

Assuming I could write in light, you know, which I thought was a very cool sort of notion. Now, you know, there were reasons I did this, and it was partly because I was familiar with some of the stranger things that psychoanalytic types and stranger people, didn't psychoanalytic types, had been experimenting with it the turn of the 20th century, things like automatic writing and so forth.

Ceyonses, sayonses, and that kind of thing, were very popular at the beginning of the 20th century. And people would go to saances, and the person who was leading the saience would fragment up in a spirit would enter them, so to speak, and they would become a different person. And that person would act in a manner that was quite unlike the normal person that everyone knew. And it was quite common. And it was, you know, a parlor, what would you say?

It was quite widespread through late Victorian Europe. And Carl Jung studied those sorts of things, and so did Sigmund Freud. And it was part of the study of those, the ability of people to fragment themselves into alternate personalities, let's say, that gave the psychoanalysts the idea that each of us were, in some sense, relatively loose connections of aggregated personalities. And you know, it's definitely the case that we are that. And you can tell that because you see, if you think about it at all, you know, it's definitely the case that we are that. And you can tell that because you see if you if you if you if you think about it at all, you can tell that that's true because, you know, you find yourself doing strange things

that you wouldn't think that you would do or that you don't want to do or that you're ashamed of doing and maybe that you can't stop doing and it's very funny that it's you that's doing it and it's you that doesn't want to and it's you that's telling you not to and yet you go ahead and do it anyways. And so there's a real fragmentation there and you know or maybe you're talking to someone and you're very angry with them and so you know you get angry and you love them hypothetically except when you're angry at them. And as soon as you get angry, especially if you're really angry, all you can remember when you look at them is all the things they've done in the past that have annoyed you and all the things they're likely to do in the future that annoy you. And then you say all sorts of things that are quite harsh

and perhaps cruel. And that half an hour later, you regret. And you think, well, what the hell? It's like, here's this person that I'm married to. And when I have to stay married to hypothetically. And I said all these nasty things. And now I'm sorry about it. It's like, well, which person are you exactly?

Are you the angry, cruel, vindictive person? Who may well have also said some things that had to be said, by the way, or are you the penitential, sorrowful person? And the answer is, well, you're one at one moment and one another at the next moment, and you're not very well integrated into a single personality. And then, of course, there's the possibility that, and it's necessary for us to be like this, you know, to be dis-dissociable in this manner. So, for example, part of the reason that we can think is because we're dissociable, we can dissociate from ourselves. So, for example, you know, you ask your children, why don't you just do what I tell you to do? And the answer is, well, you're not that bright. And if your children just exactly did instantly

everything adults told them to do, they'd never live to see tomorrow, right? And neither would you. And so there has to be some gap between the words, the commands, and the actual implementation of the commands. And the same thing's true when you're thinking. So when you dream, I don't know if you know this or not, but when you dream, you're paralyzed, except for your eyes,

and your eyes move back and forth, and they move back and forth in keeping with what you're seeing. So your eyes are moving, looking at whatever it is that you're looking at in the dream, and it's been very interesting experiments, indicating that because researchers have taught people to dream lucidly, which means that they can become conscious in their dreams, but not wake up.

And that means they can signal with their eyes to the experimenters, because they are asleep, but they're conscious. And so they know they're dreaming. And then they can move their eyes three times to the left and two times to the right, let's say, and they can signal to the experimenters that that they're in there. And anyways, there's lots of ways that people have found out that, and you know, and then they can look at different things, and the researchers can infer that the eye movements are associated with what they're looking at. The rest of your body is paralyzed,

with what they're looking at. The rest of your body is paralyzed. And there's been experiments done on cats. People figured out which part of the brain shuts off your body when you dream. And they took that out of cats. Cats are often used, or were often used as neurological, surgical animals, partly because they have a fairly complex visual system. were often used as neurological, surgical animals,

partly because they have a fairly complex visual system. And it turns out that if you take this part of the brain out of a cat, and then it dreams, it runs around while it's dreaming, acting out its dreams. You know, and you might do this if you sleep walk, for example. Now, it's not good for the cat, obviously, because the cat can't see, because it's streaming. And so it tends to run into something and wake up in a relatively rude manner and so which is of course exactly what would happen to you if you ran around when you're dreaming but you don't because you're paralyzed

except for your eyes and the reason your eyes aren't paralyzed because what doesn't make any difference if you move your eyes that isn't going to get you in trouble, but the rest of you is paralyzed. And sometimes you wake up. Sometimes people wake up, especially if they go to sleep in the afternoons on their back, and they wake up in sleep paralysis. So they're awake, mostly, not completely, but they find that they can't move. And this is often a time when people hallucinate things like alien abductions and so forth often, which is something that people experience more often

than you might like to think. But one of the more advanced theories about why this sort of thing happens is because people wake up in sleep paralysis and they're half awake and half asleep and still dreaming. And so they can't tell the difference between the dream and the reality and they're half awake and half asleep and still dreaming, and so they can't tell the difference between the dream and the reality, and they're paralyzed, and so then they report all sorts of strange things.

So, anyway, so when you're dreaming, you act out what you think, what you imagine, you're not dissociable. The thoughts and the actions are the same thing, which sort of indicates that you're dreaming with the part of your brain that moves your body. But when you're thinking abstractly, that isn't what you're doing, right? Because what you do, if you think abstractly, if you can, in fact, think abstractly, is you think up what might be and lay out the options, and then you go act it out. And that means you have to fragment yourself into at least two parts. You have to fragment yourself into the part

that does the abstract thinking, which is a part that prefrontal cortex does that. That's roughly this part of the brain. And it's very tightly wired to the visual cortex. So you can imagine, let's say, the future. You can imagine a multitude of futures that you might inhabit, and you can do that in principle without immediately acting them out, which is a good idea, because at least in principle, right?

Because then you can lay out a complex potential pattern of action that might characterize your personality, and you can think it through to the end like a simulation, like you're telling yourself a story, and then if it works out well, then you can implement it in to the end, like a simulation, like you're telling yourself a story, and then if it works out well, then you can implement it in the real world, and if it's a failure, then you cannot implement it in the world, and that's actually, at least in principle, why we evolved the ability

to think, it was Alfred North Whitehead, I think, who said the reason we evolved thought was so that our thoughts could die instead of us. And so it's a great advance, because in animals who maybe think like we think when we're dreaming, tend to act out what they think, and then when they make a catastrophic error, then they just die. But we can generate alternative selves of all sorts, and we can run them as simulations, and then we can kill off the ones that don't seem to do very well and act out the ones that do seem to do very well, and then we don't seem to have to die as often.

And so that's the purpose of thinking, and that's all to say that we are very dissociable, where we're made up of multiple personalities and personality fragments that are unified to some degree by memory and by the coherency of our value structure and what we've thought through and so forth. But, and then we also have to be dissociable to a large degree because we have to understand other people. And so, for example, the way you understand someone else, even though this isn't obvious, is that you watch them and then you notice what it is that you think they're up to. You do that mostly by watching their eyes, but the remote, in emotional display in general, which is why you watch their face, because you notice when you're talking to people,

you almost always watch their face. And you watch their face because you can see where they're pointing their eyes, and if you can see where they're pointing their eyes, then you can tell what they're interested in. And then if you can infer what they're interested in, then you can act like you're interested in it too. And if that happens to be the, and maybe you are. And then if you're also acting like you're interested in it, then your body

will react to that, like their body is reacting to it, and then you can read off your body, your emotional responses to whatever that is, and then you can infer what the other person is feeling and thinking, and that's how you understand people. And so it's what really happens is that if you're interacting with someone else, you run their personality as a simulation on your own body and you read off that simulation. And we're unbelievably good at that. Now, look, think about it. You go to a movie and you can follow all the characters, right?

And it's like living the characters. Otherwise, why would you go to the movie? And you're even willing to live some pretty awful lives at movies, including deaths and murders and all sorts of things that hopefully you don't try at home. But you go to the movie and you watch the characters on the screen and you figure out what they're up to, you figure out what their motivations are. If the screen writers any good, you get some sense of their motivation. And then you can adopt that motivation, you can embody it, and then you can live out

the whole range of experiences of that character on your own body, and that's really exciting for people. And so you can go to, well, let's say you watch Game of Thrones or something like that, or make it breaking bad, and there's what, 100 characters, and they all have these complex narrative arcs. And you're every single one of those people while you're watching it. And it's an amazing ability that our nervous systems,

our nervous systems, our bodies are like places that many, many different spirits can inhabit. You know, and there's you, you're the central spirit that you are, that's coherent across time, but God, there's just all sorts of things that you could be. And so that's all part of dissociability. Anyways, the psychoanalysts were very interested in that back in the late early 20th century, late 19th century, and they started thinking very seriously about what it meant to be dissociable. They're also very interested in hypnotism.

Hypnicism is really, I've had some remarkable experiences with hypnotism in my clinical practice. I've only done it a couple of times. And it turns out that you don't really hypnotize people. Some people are hypnotizable. And if they are, it's easy to hypnotize them. Basically, all you do is you ask them to sit and get comfortable.

And then you count back from 10 to one and ask them to relax different parts of the body and suggest to them that they're getting more and more comfortable and relaxed. And at some point, you suggest that they fall into a trance and then you can ask them to remember things about their past that perhaps they wouldn't can ask them to remember things about their past that perhaps they wouldn't otherwise be able to remember or to do things in a dreamlike condition

that they wouldn't ordinarily do. And I had some remarkable success in my clinical practice with a couple of clients, one who had psychogenic epilepsy, which wasn't real epilepsy, but was hysterical, which was, I wouldn't say faked exactly, but it was psychogenic in origin rather than physiological. And another woman who had a very naive person who had post-traumatic stress disorder, and I had her relive the post-traumatic experience under hypnosis, which took about 90 minutes, and I couldn't get her out of the trance while it was happening, which was quite frightening,

because it was the first time I'd ever hypnotized anyone. And, but it fixed her right away. It fixed her, she only came back. She only came back once after that. Took 90 minutes to go through the, and it wasn't because it was a failure, by the way. It took her 90 minutes to get through the, and it wasn't because it was a failure, by the way. It took her 90 minutes to get through the experience the first time she lived it in real time. So she was in her chair like this, and her eyes were moving back and forth like someone

was asleep, and she was speaking. But very quietly, I had to put my mouth right up to her, or my ear, right up to her mouth to hear what she was saying. And she was pointing to what was happening in the room as this assault took place. And she lived it out in real time. And remembered a number of things that she hadn't remembered. And then she disappeared for a couple of weeks, which really frightened the hell out of me. And then she came back and we did the same thing.

And she ran through it in about 15 minutes the second time as if the memory had been compressed, which was exactly the case. So that was all cool. So that's all the background to this whole pen of light thing. Believe it or not. Well, it really is. It really is.

And it's like some things are complicated. So I was going to play with this pen. I thought, well, I'm going to ask, I have this pen of light, which is kind of a funny thing metaphorically. And you've got to notice when poetic things happen to you in your life. It was quite a beautiful pen, actually. I mean, it was something that couldn't have even existed

20 years ago. And so even though there a dime a dozen now, it was still quite a beautiful artifact, and it had this quality of being able to write with light. And this idea entered my imagination, which was, well, if I could write with a pen of light, what would be the appropriate thing to write with it? And see, I was working on this hypothesis,

which was that I could ask myself questions and I would get answers. And you know, that's also kind of a strange thing, right? Because you think, well, what do you mean? You can ask yourself questions and you can get answers. It's like, aren't you transparent to yourself? Don't you know what the answers are already? And the answer to that is, well, obviously not.

Because you ask yourself questions all the time when you think, right? I mean, when you're trying to think, you have a problem, it's a question, you don't know the answer to it. And so you ask yourself the question, that's what you're doing when you're thinking, and then you think up something you didn't know. And it's like, it's not obvious how you do that. I mean, how in the world do you think up something that you didn't know?

You think you just know it, but no, you have to think it up. And you don't even know how you're doing it when you're thinking it up. You know, well, I sit there and concentrate. It's like, oh, that's a hell of an explanation. But fundamentally, what you're doing, what you're doing is you're having a call. Is the multiplicity of spirits that constitutes you is having an internal discussion. And the probability that you're asking part of you a question of spirits that constitutes you is having an internal discussion and the probability that you're asking part of you a question that you didn't listen to

before, like a part that you hadn't listened to before, when you're thinking is very very high because well where else would the information come from? It doesn't just emerge out of the clear void, You know, there's a source for it and a reason for it. It's not like we understand it very well, but you are, like it isn't like every part of your brain is connected absolutely to every other part. And that's also partly why you have to think, because you have to, it's effortful for some parts

of your brain, all of which have our personality like to communicate with the other parts and to regulate them. It's complicated business and that's part of thinking. So anyways, you can ask yourself questions, so we can settle that, that's what you do when you think. And if you really want to think, then you ask yourself a question that you really want the answer to, because if you really want the answer to it, well, maybe you're willing to give up the preconceptions that you need to give up in order to come up with a new idea. Because sometimes, it's hard to come up with a new idea

because well, you're just not that bright and you can't think up a new idea. But sometimes it's because something you already think is in the way and you don't want to let go of it. You don't want to make the sacrifice, right? And to think often means that you have to make a sacrifice. It means you have to figure out why you're wrong and let go of that before whatever's new can come along,

which is a good explanation, by the way, of why people don't like to think. Because it's almost always when you think you end up thinking. Sometimes it's a eureka moment. It's just a thrill that you come up with something so new that you've been working on for a long time. And it's obviously nothing but good. But often if you're thinking, especially about something complicated and trouble some, especially if something's going wrong in your life, and you're thinking, you're asking yourself,

well, you know, what's going on, what's going wrong, what am I doing wrong? Well, the answers you get aren't necessarily going to be ones that you're all that thrilled to get. So, you have to want to have the answer. And so, there's this line from Matthew 7. It's a New Testament line, which I'm going to read, because it's a very strange line. It's part of what Christ told His disciples in principle. And there's a variety of very strange lines in the New Testament. It's one of the things that, to me, makes it a very bizarre document in all sorts of ways, because, see, if I was going to create a religion that was going to dominate and exploit people, the first thing I would do is I, and it was, say, based on Christianity,

is I would take the New Testament and I'd edit out about 50% of it because there's all sorts of things in there that are very, very strange, and that don't even necessarily cast the main figure Christ himself in a very positive light. So, for example, there's one scene where he keeps curses a fig tree for not, you know, bearing fruit,

which is obviously a metaphor, but still seems like a rather petty thing for the Son of God to be doing, you know, and I would think that, you know, somebody would have prettified that at some point in the last 2,000 years, but they didn't. And here's one of those lines that's very peculiar one. It sounds completely mad. Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall open unto you. For everyone who asks receives the one who seeks, finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Well, you know, that sounds like that's a hell of a fine deal if it's true,

but you know, really, who believes that and that all you have to do is ask, all you have to do is knock, all you have to do is seek. And, but, you know, it's funny. One of the things I've learned about people is that they start out naive, you know, they trust people, they're naive, and they think they're good because they're naive and they trust people, but they're not, they're naive, and they think they're good because they're naive, and they trust people. But they're not, they're just naive and not very bright. And then they get hurt either by themselves or by other people, and then they get cynical. And then they think they're smart because now they're not like those naive people. They've been around, they've been kicked around a bit, and now they're cynical and kind of hard-bitten.

And that's a hell of a lot more wise than being naive. And that's true. It is. There's nothing good about being cynical, but it's better than being naive. But there's a place past cynicism, which is, let's say with regards to trust, That's a good example. And if you go past cynicism, you decide that, well, yes, clearly people are capable of betraying you and you're capable of betraying yourself, but we can't go around assuming the worst of everyone, and we can't go around assuming that everyone is chock full of snakes, even though they are, including yourself, because it's just too damn complicated, and we want to draw out the best in each other so that we can cooperate and compete intelligently. And so once you're cynical and you know that you can be hurt, but then you also realize the trust is necessary,

then you start to trust people because you're courageous and you say, well, look, I'll enter into an agreement with you and you with me and you know we'll rely on each other's word and hopefully we'll you know put our what would you call it our best interests in alignment because that's also safe but what we're doing is we're encouraging the probability that trust will be validated by using the courage to interact with each other and therefore we increase the probability that trust will actually come to play its proper role in the world. And that's way better than cynicism. And so, well, the same is true with regards to asking yourself questions and wanting. You know, say, well, if you're naive, you think, well, maybe you think of God in this way

when you're four years old or five years old, and you hear stories, and you pray, you've lost something that you need and you pray, and you know, that God will help you find it, and God doesn't, because that doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that he does. It doesn't seem to be a wish fulfillment machine exactly that you can just call on whenever you need a wish fulfilled. And that doesn't seem completely unreasonable to me because it would be a pretty damn weird world if you could just like wish for something and poof there, it would appear right in front of you. Whatever, I think that would be a weird world.

I'm not sure it would be one that would work, but it doesn't matter, because that isn't the world anyways. But one thing I have noticed as a clinical psychologist, and I think this is really, really, really worth knowing, is that most of the times when I see people unhappy with their lives and having not accomplished what they feel in their souls, they should have, might have or should have accomplished. It's in large part because they didn't aim at what they wanted to accomplish. You know, they pursued something they didn't want to pursue,

or they pursued something they did want to pursue, but they just did it half-heartedly, or they just left their aim so vague and so much in the fog, that's a rule for my next book, don't leave things in the fog. They left things around them, so ill-defined in vague and foggy to protect themselves against knowledge of their own failure, that they never did figure out what they were up to. And so they're sort of wandering blindly around in the dark, and they never get to where they want to go.

And it's hardly surprising surprising because what's the probability that you're going to get to where you want to go randomly? Or let's say, what's the probability that you're going to get to where you want to go or need to go? If you just sit there, it's like, that isn't going to happen. So no one thinks it's going to happen. And so at least we know that if you do want something that you need to aim at it,

and you need to ask for it in a sense, you need to have a vision for it, and then you need to make a plan, and then you need to implement the plan. And it might be that that's what asking actually means. Like, let's say you have an ambition, or I could give you an example from my own life. You know, like when I was in graduate school, I hate wearing short socks. When I was in graduate school, I liked to drink a lot and I came from Northern Alberta, which was a small town. Well, it's province, but I came from Fairview, which is a small town in Northern Alberta, and it was a heavy drinking culture. And I liked alcohol, and I had a very active social life

when I was in graduate school. And I was out, you know, carousing about three nights a week, likely something like that, which meant I was basically hung over all the time. Well, it does mean that, by the way, because if you drink more than three or four drinks a night, let's say alcohol withdrawal takes 72 hours to clear and a hangover is alcohol

withdrawal, by the way. And so if you're drinking two nights a week or three nights a week, you're always hungover whether you know it or not. And if you're having some mood problems and you drink that much, it's highly probable that the mood problems are being exaggerated by the alcohol. And that was fine. I was doing my PhD and I was working on this book, Maps of Meaning, which was my first book.

And but it got to the point where I had a problem. And the problem was that the book I was working on in particular was so difficult that I couldn't write it and tolerate it either emotionally. I couldn't tolerate it emotionally because it was too intense. And I couldn't edit it intelligently if I was hungover at all, especially as I really started to work on it and it got better, you know, because if you write something and you keep editing it, it keeps getting better. And that means every time, hopefully,

every time you go back to it and you re-edit it, you better be sharper than you were the last time you edited it or you'll just edit it worse. And then that's not fun because you spend an hour editing what you wrote. And now it's stupider than it was before. It's not, that's not helpful. And I was wrestling with things that I thought were

of reasonably intense psychological significance, except for me, or as far as I was concerned. And I couldn't handle the emotional stress of doing that. So I had to decide at one point whether or not I wanted to write at one point whether or not I wanted to write this book which took about three hours a day, every day, or whether or not I wanted to continue having the great amount of fun that I was having. And I was having a great amount of fun. And so I decided that I was going to stop having that amount of fun. And there were other reasons. My reasons weren't all that pure and noble.

There were other reasons as well. But that was, so I stopped doing that, and I didn't drink anything for like 25 years, something like that, long time, almost the whole time my kids were growing up. And that was a pain because I enjoyed it quite a bit. But I did write the book. And I didn't make a fool of myself in situations

where I might otherwise have, which was also very relevant issue at the time, because I was trying to pursue a complex, what would you say, professional career. And I had to be careful about that. And so, to ask for something, doesn't just mean to make a casual wish that it will appear before you in completed form.

It means that you decide that there's something that you want and that it's necessary for you if you want it to do absolutely everything you possibly can to get rid of everything that's in your way that's stopping you from doing it. Otherwise, you're not asking for it. You're just playing a game. It's like, well, you sort of want it. It's like, no, no, that isn't how it works. If you sort of want 50 things, you're going to end up with none of them.

You know, if you want something, if you're really aiming at something, you have to decide how it is that you have to discipline yourself. And the word discipline comes from an old word, it's a French word, and it's related to the idea of penitential chastisement, which is quite interesting, morphed into something like instruction later, but penitential self-chance stysement. And it basically means, well, let's say you want something, you have to think, well, what are the impediments to me obtaining that?

And some of those might be impediments in the world, you know, maybe you don't have a degree, you don't have the right qualifications or something like that. But then there's also all sorts of internal impediments in the world. Maybe you don't have a degree, you don't have the right qualifications or something like that. But then there's also all sorts of internal impediments, which is that you're just not who you need to be in order to attain that goal. Maybe you can't speak well enough, you can't write well enough,

you don't dress well enough, you're not disciplined enough, you don't have a good enough social network, you don't have a family that supports you well enough, you don't get up in the morning, you're not very hard working. You avoid things when you shouldn't be avoiding them. You're willfully blind. What else might be wrong with you? Oh God.

It's a long list. And I'm sure you could all add another dozen things without that much thought. So if you do want something, then you have to think, well, what is it that I need to change? Sacrifice. That's the key issue. What do you sacrifice in order to have fate smile upon you in the manner that it might?

And that's a hell of a discovery that human beings made a long time ago. Was that we're the only creatures that have really figured this out, is that you can give something of value up in the present to obtain something of greater value in the future. That's really the discovery of the future. It's also the discovery of delay of gratification. It's even the discovery of work itself. It's the discovery that the future can be bargained with and that the future is somehow malleable and that you have some, what would you call it, Iota of free will and choice

about how your life is going to turn out. I mean, these are major discoveries. And as far as we can tell, no other creature has managed it. But the notion is, well, if you want something, then so let's assume you're asking, here's what I want. You engender a vision.

Here's the conditions under which my life would be worth living, something I would really like to pursue. Some adventure I would really like to undertake. It's like, well, what do you have to give up in order to get it? Well, that's a hard question. My sister was a very adventurous type, and she came from the same little town that I came from,

and she had all sorts of ridiculous adventures. She smuggled Mercedes trucks down through the Sahara desert from France into Niger. Niger, I think I don't remember how to pronounce that properly, but they did that for a while until they, the two-reg tribesmen in the desert got a little bit too violent, and that became a bad idea. And she babysat orphaned baby gorillas in the Congo and worked in Norway and was a tour guide in Africa on safaris for years. And her friends were quite jealous of her, her friends from this little town. And they always told her how lucky she was

that she got to go off and do these things. And as far as she was concerned, there was some luck because she was in good health, but it wasn't so much luck. It was just the decision that she was going to go do it. And that meant there was a bunch of other things. She wasn't going to do. And so she made the sacrifices that were necessary

to have these adventures. And so you got to ask yourself, and this is back in relationship to this Matthew line about asking, and it will be given to you and knocking in the door will open. It's like, well, if you're asking and it's not being given to you, maybe you're not asking very carefully and maybe you don't want it very badly and you're not knocking even on the right door. And that's tell you, man, that's worth thinking about because, as I said, with my clinical

clients, it was pretty damn obvious that most of the time, barring catastrophe and bad luck, which, you know, is always lurking around the corner, that people didn't get what they want because, didn't get what they wanted needed because they never aimed at it. You know, and so I'd have people in my practice that were 35 or 40 years old, and their lives really hadn't got going. And it was because they kind of desalco-torally pursued one thing or another, and they kind of half-hazard manner. They never really finished anything, and they never really ended up anywhere. And you know, they kind of consoled themselves with the idea that, well, maybe nothing was really worth doing. Anyways, which isn't, by the way, a helpful thought if you're actually going to go out and do something.

And also not one that works very well because if nothing is really worth doing, then life isn't really worth living. And that's not a very comforting thought at 4 in the morning when you're 40 and you're facing the failure of your life. So none of that's all that helpful. So, and then there was another thing I learned about asking yourself questions and this had to do with arguing with my wife. And we have a fairly combative relationship, I would say, although it's a very good one,

and it's combative in a good way because I think that you should be You're fortunate if you're associated with someone that you have to contend with a bit, you know that I've got a little bit of spirit and we kind of know this from I think reasonable psychological experiments showing that if you Imagine I asked you to document how many positive and negative interactions you had with your partner in a day, and you did that for like a month And what you'd find is if it's like fewer than five positive interactions to one negative interaction then you guys your your relationship is probably not gonna last. It's too much negative

But then you might think well, what about those people, you know, none of whom exist, by the way, who have like a hundred positive interactions to one negative interaction? It's like, well, their marriages don't last either. And I think the reason for that is, is that there has to be some balance, right? Like, you want the other person, the person you're with, to constrain you a little bit, you want them to have some standards. And you want to have some standards, and you want to impose those standards on each other, maybe so that you both get less wretched than you are, and easier to live with, and more productive in all of that, and if your partner is just all sweetness and light, and everything you do is perfect, which you can bloody well be sure it isn't, then it's very difficult to have

any respect for them. So, it kind of looks like for every 11 smiles, you have to deliver one slap. And so, and now I'm sure that'll be the headline in some New Zealand newspaper tomorrow. So, you know, yeah. Yeah. Dr. Peterson recommends slapping your wife or husband at least one time in 11 interactions. It's like it's a problem of not really understanding metaphor. But you know what it is. You know perfectly well that you like your wife better and she likes you better if you stand up for yourself now and then and that requires a certain amount of conflict and you

need the damn conflict because you know you try to think things through and that's conflictual and hard but it's just you and your wife tries to think things through but it's just her and you're both ignorant and there's a million, you know there's a million things you don't know and you're full of biases and blind spots. And oh, God, just trouble. And so, you know, but you have serious problems to deal with. And so when you get together and you put your heads together to deal with a serious problem, there's going to be some conflict because to think through a serious problem

is to set up a sequence of arguments that don't come to the same conclusion and battle them out. And so if you're not doing that in a relationship, then you're not solving hard problems. And that's a really bad thing because if you're in a relationship, you have hard problems. If you don't right now, you certainly will. So because hard problems come along in life. So one of the things my wife and I learned to do was that if we were having a scrap

and it wasn't going very well, you know, it was several hours and we were auguring in to more and more serious, you know, recriminations and so forth, that we would separate ourselves and go sit, you know, per on one, something vaguely, hopefully uncomfortable, at least that was

my hope. I mean, sitting on the edge of my bed, and of course, I was hoping that I was completely right about everything I was saying, and that she was absolutely wrong, even, you know, failing to notice entirely that, do you really want to be married to the person who's absolutely wrong? to the person who's absolutely wrong. I mean, it doesn't even reflect that well on you. So... Um... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is my wife. She's wrong about everything. And I picked her. It's like, you're a real bloody genius, you are. So, um... So, the deal was, well, you go to your room and I'll go to my room and you go think about what you did that was stupid that made us have this argument and I'll go think about what I did that was stupid that made us have this argument.

Of course I'd go to my room and I'd think, well, like I'm 95% right at least, I know it, maybe more, maybe 99%, but maybe there's one percent stupid thing I did that I can think up that I could admit to and then I have the 99% victory and she'd have the 1% victory and that'd be a good outcome. And so I'd sit there and think, okay, perfect as I am. Perhaps there is something foolish that I did or failed to do in the last two, three months, or maybe even before that, that slightly increased the probability that we're in this mess that we're in. What was it? And I actually wanted to know, just a rather terrifying thing, and I'd sit there and,

just as sure as hell. So this is prayer, right? You think our prayer is answered? I'll tell you, here's a prayer that will be answered all the time. Sit on the edge of your bed and ask yourself, how am I stupid? Man, I tell you, you'll get an answer to that question like so fast that it's just terrifying. And it's really about the best thing you could possibly pray for, because if you are stupid, you should know. If you know you're stupid,

if you figured out some way you're stupid, then you don't have to act that stupid thing out, and then you don't have to get walloped for it. And so really, maybe all you should be doing is praying to figure out why you're so damn stupid like every day and hoping that you learn and I think that that's Well, that's definitely one of those things that if you ask it will be given to you no doubt about it And so that's pretty cool and you know, you don't need to think about it all metaphysically, although you can You can just think that well, you know, you're you're set up You can just think that, well, you know, you're set up biologically to note your own errors. And you know that, because you wake up in the middle of the night and you're guilty in the shame

and you're thinking about all the stupid things that you've done. And that happens pretty. There's a part of your brain that deals with mistakes you've made. And it uses negative emotion. It uses guilt, shame, disappointment, frustration, and anxiety to track errors that you've made. And it's always knocking at the door, which is why you get anxious and depressed.

And if you sit there on the edge of your bed and you open the door and say, okay, God, what did I do wrong? It's like, hey, that thing, that alarm system, it's ready to report a whole litany of sins. And the reason for that is it would actually like you to stop being stupid in that particular way so that you don't like die painfully and so you can get an answer. And so I learned that you could ask yourself questions and get answers like that and that's all the background.

And so then I thought, well, I have this pen of light, and now I'm going to ask some questions. See, I am talking about that. What would I do with this pen of light? I said, what could I do with it? So I'm going to do something important with it, because I'm writing in light. It's like, let's not mess about here. And so I wrote down, I was actually writing and allowing myself to, let's say, dissociate imaginatively. And I wrote, what could I do with my pen of light?

And the answer came, right down the words I want inscribed on my soul. And I thought, hey, well, that's not so bad, you know, it's a little old test in the mentee, if that's a word, a little, maybe a little over the top, but, you know, it was okay. It first started, that why not have words of light inscribed on your soul? That's a nice poetic idea.

So I thought, good, that's a good starter. And then I thought I'd ask myself some questions. Real questions, like questions I actually wanted the answer to. And so it was like a meditative exercise, you know? And so I asked, I wrote down these questions and then I'd sit and just sort of open up my space of imagination, let's say, and see what came in, which is, I guess, what you do

when you think, because I don't know how the hell you think, because you think, and what words appear in your imagination, whatever that means, and then you have them, and then you can write them down. And it's certainly the case, like when you're writing, when you're creating, when you're writing, and an artist say this as well, they often say that it's not so much that they're doing it,

it's that something is flowing through them and that they allow that. And you know, that's a metaphor too and God only knows what it means. It means the muse is at work in them and it's a creative spirit and it's not just their creative spirit because there is a creative spirit that in, what would you say, it occupies all of us, which is why we can define such a thing as creativity, and it's been working over a very long period of time, and it inhabits us to a lesser or greater degree, and it has a history and all of that, and its own opinions, and you can communicate with that, and so that's what I was trying to do.

So here's some of the questions and some of the answers, and so I'll read some of them, not all of them, but some of them and talk about them a little bit. And so the first question was, and you know this was all happening sort of in the middle of a lot of this political crisis and weirdness that I'd got involved in about two years ago when my life had got flipped upside down, and I was starting to become, let's say, notorious for reasons that no doubt were somewhat deserved and somewhat weren't, but were certainly happening. And so I was in a rather chaotic state and I was curious about what sorts of things I might be up to and what I should do.

And so the first question was, what shall I do tomorrow? And the answer was, the most good possible in the shortest period of time. And I thought, I like that quite a bit. I mean, you might as well have an ambition for tomorrow. I mean, you gotta go to all the trouble of getting out of bed. You know, there's that first, and maybe you need a reason. I mean, frequently you need a trouble of getting out of bed. You know, there's that first and maybe you need a reason. I mean, frequently you need a reason to get out of bed, especially if you're not, if things aren't going that well

for you for all sorts of reasons, because your life has become unduly complicated. And so you need a reason and you think, well, if you need any reason, well, why not have a good reason? And a good reason might be, well, what could I do to seize the day? What could I do to do the best I possibly could in this day, in that period of time? Because you can also conceptualize your life across different spans of time, and you generally do.

But a day is a nice span span because it's not that long. It'll end, you know, not too long. You'll get to go to sleep and it'll be over for better or worse and in a time that isn't unbearable. But it's also enough so that you could do something during the day. And it's obviously the logical unit of the conceptualization of consciousness,

because we're conscious for 16 hours in the day, and then not for eight. And so our life is actually made up of 16 hour chunks of consciousness. And it's easy to think of your life as a stack of papers. You know, each paper is a 16 hour time of consciousness. And that your job is to maximize the quality of that entire sheath of papers. And that's really useful to know, too, because what it means is that you duplicate the day

over and over, kind of like Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, you duplicate the day over and over. And what that actually means is that the things that you do each day, that you might consider mundane, because you do them each day, are actually the most important things in your life. And that's a really important thing to know too. It's like you spend say three hours eating, and maybe you spend three hours eating with your family, and it's like three hours of unrequited hell. And that's, and maybe not, you know, but probably. You know, that's 21 hours a week or a hundred hours a month or let's say a thousand hours

a year or it's six months of work weeks a year for your whole bloody life. You know, and so then you might think, well, geez, I have to eat three times a day. Maybe I should get my act together around that and pay a little attention to the quality of what I have eating and also the quality of how it is that we're interacting as a family while we're eating. A lot of socialization does take place around the dinner table

and you think, well, God, if we could bat 750 at the breakfast lunch and dinner table, then we've basically taken care of 20% of the totality of our lives. It's really something to consider. And so that's a good thing to know. You only remember one thing from today. Remember that the important things that you do in your life

are those things that you do every day, because you do them every day. It's not vacations, it's not the exceptional experiences in your life, it's the things you repeat. It's how you're greeted when you come home after work. You know, it's how you put your kids to bed at night and how that goes. Anything repeated, get that right, get it right.

And you can adjust like 80% of your life by playing with those habitual routines until they're pristine and well-practiced and well put together. So that's a good thing. And so that's part of doing what's good today, figure out how you might have a good day, and then you might figure out how you

would have a good day that you could repeat might figure out how you would have a good day that you could repeat. And that might mean that there's some things that are annoying that you need to attend to, that you know you need to attend to, that you go and attend to, even though you don't want to. Maybe you only do a bit of it, because that's all you can handle, but at least tomorrow is a little better than today.

And then in the shortest period of time, that's kind of nice, because, well, if you're gonna say yourself an ambition and you're going to do something good, why not do it efficiently? That would be good because then you could do more of it and it's kind of a better challenge. And so I often tell my graduate students, for example, that if they're going to run an experiment that they should design the experiment, then they should sit down and figure out if there is some way they could do it 10 times faster. And they almost always can. And so, a lot of good, efficiently, sounds like a hell of a fine plan.

So that was question and answer one. What shall I do next year? Try to ensure that the good I do then, next year, will be exceeded only by the good I do the year after that. Well, that was good, I thought. It's a nice aim, it's a nice thing, kind of a elaboration on the first idea, you know, that you're going to try to do something good

during the day, well, what would you do in a year? You try to make the year better, so that you have a better year this year than you had last year, That's a nice plan and it doesn't mean that you're necessarily competing with someone else or jealous because someone else has something you don't. It's just an improvement on the miserable rich that you were. And, and then it's an improvement the year's better. And you can probably do that. Like my suspicions are, and I've seen this with my clients, you can probably make tomorrow like one one hundredth of a percent better than today. And that's not very much, but man

that compounds quick. And if you do that on a yearly basis, then hopefully your years get better. And so that's a good goal. Things are gonna get better and the rate at which they're going to get better is going to improve. That's a nice A. What shall I do with my life? That's a much broader question. Aim for paradise and concentrate on today. Paradise. That means walled garden. That's kind of a cool thing.

Because we live in walled gardens, you know? That's the natural habitat of human beings, according to this stories in Genesis, that human beings live in paradise, walled garden, or Eden, which is a well-watered place. And so the right place for a person is a well-watered walled garden. And basically, that's what people want.

You want a house with a fence around it, and you want some land in there, where can grow some plants and have some peace. And a little bit of water would be good because otherwise, you know, you desiccate, and all your plants die, and so water would be good. And so you aim to have that balanced properly and to do that well as a superordinate aim. And you want to make that as good as you can. And you aim for that. And then you, and the second part of that

was aim for paradise and concentrate on today. And that reminded me of another part of the New Testament, which is another very strange section, because it sounds like some hippie that you should never listen to is actually telling you the story. And so I'm going to read it to you because it isn't that, it's something else. It's from the sermon on the mount.

And why take ye thought for Raymond clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothed the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you,

oh you of little faith. Therefore, take no thought, saying, what shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be closed for your heavenly Father, no thought that you have need of all these things. But Seeky first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.

Of course, there had to be a kicker at the end, you know? And it's a kicker that people really don't pay an attention to. And the thing about it is that I believe that it's actually psychologically accurate. It's dead on accurate. You know, many of you have seen the movie Pinocchio, and it's a favorite movie of mine.

And there's a very cool scene in Pinocchio, there's a number of them, that everyone just sort of takes for granted. And Pinocchio or Jopetto makes this puppet marionette, wouldn't had a thing, and he paints its mouth on. That's the last thing it does, so that it has its own voice. Then he has a little dance with it to signify that things are in good order, and he puts it on the shelf. And then he goes to bed.

When he goes to bed, he sees a star. And it's the same star that at the beginning of the movie announces Pinocchio's birth, which you know, you should be able to figure out what that means if you use your imagination a little bit. And, um, Jopetto sees this star and he opens the window when the star light comes in and he looks up at the star and he makes a wish. Which is a strange thing, you know, we wish on stars. Everybody kind of knows what that means. And maybe you play that little game with your kids. And it's a bit archaic, but you might still do it. And we kind of understand that even though it doesn't make any sense.

It's like, what do you mean you wish on a star? What the hell does that mean? And then you think, well, poetically, because part of you is poetic. And you think about what a star is. And a star is something that glitters in the darkness. So that's the first thing. It's light in the darkness.

And that's cool. And a star is something by which you orient yourself. Once people figured out that there was a North star that was fixed in the sky, man, then we could travel all over the planet. So we could guide ourselves by the stars. And that was quite cool. And then we guide ourselves by the stars, and that was quite cool. And then, you know, we worship stars, Hollywood stars, and we call them stars, and that's a funny thing,

or sport stars. And so, and why are they stars exactly? It's not like they glitter at night, although I suppose some of the Hollywood starlets do that, but that's not really the issue. Why do we call them stars? Well, it's because there are targets of emulation, or models of emulation, or something like that. And so, and then there's something that above, they're above the horizon, too. And so, Jim Heddo's idea was that, well, he had made this puppet, which was the prisoner of the forces of other forces,

it was something controlled by strings that were played by other people, that were moved by other people. It wasn't an autonomous being, but that what he would want, if he could have anything, was that his son could be an autonomous being. And so he raised his eyes above the horizon and wished for this absurd outcome that a puppet, a materialistic object, let's say, could develop into an autonomous being

and then told himself that he was being foolish and went to bed. And fair enough, man, but if you're a parent or your father, if you have any sense, that's what you wish. You hope that your new son, let's say, or your new daughter for that matter, is imbued with the spirit that allows them to develop beyond their limitations into something that's truly autonomous and individual. And so what it means is that you have to aim high.

It's necessary to aim as high as you can conceptualize and then having done that to concentrate on the day. And that gives a relationship between the mundane things that you do during the day and the ultimate, the transcendent ultimate and human beings, because we're such strange creatures, we're finite and infinite in the same way in some sense. We need to be grounded across that entire array of reality.

We have to pay attention to the mundane realities of here and now, but we have to be aiming at something that's far beyond us, like as far beyond us as we can imagine. And then that imbues what we do during the day with significance. But by the same token, also enables what we do day by day that's mundane, as mundane as what the day by day things are, to contribute to something of tremendous significance in the future.

Friend of mine, who's trying to rebuild a large tech company, and I were talking about medieval brick layers, you know, and you could be kind of a depressed brick layer back in like 1538, and I think Jesus, you know, it's just another brick, man, another brick, and it's another brick, and tomorrow it's like 200 more bricks, and you know, who wants to spend their whole day laying bricks, or you could notice that you're building a cathedral and it's gonna take 350 years, and that you're not building, you're not laying bricks, you're building a wall that's part of the supporting structure

for this absolutely magnificent edifice that's going to last for a thousand years that's aimed at illustrating something of profound value, whatever that is, conceptualized as God, but the highest value to which people can aspire, all immense, amazing stonework, and imbued with light and music, and aimed at the good.

And then you're not just a bricklayer, man, you're someone who's building a cathedral. And you build it brick by brick. And so it's paradise, you're aiming at it, but you do it brick by brick. And that's worth knowing. And so that's a good thing. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief, whereas newer bestseller, 12 rules for life, and added out to chaos. Both of these

works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See JordanBeePeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanBeePeterson.com's slash personality for information on his new course. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. Talk to you next week. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.B.Peterson. Details on this show, access to my blog,

information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, jordanb.peterson.com. My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their paths, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be at self-authoring.com. That's self-authoring.com.

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