The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Responsibility is the Key to Meaning

Episode Date: September 29, 2019

Dr. Peterson visits Texas for a lecture on his 12 Rules for Life! This episode is a standout from his 2018 tour.

Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's Daughter and Collaborator. This is a podcast from Irving, Texas, recorded on October 11, 2018. Not much of an update this week to be honest. Hopefully we'll have good things to tell you guys next week. For now, remember to eat healthy. Exercise once you're healthy enough, it will help you get healthy if you're not too sick. Try out an infrared sauna,

use cold immersion therapy, or take a cold shower in the morning, and avoid doctors and pharmaceuticals if you can. If it's life and death, go ahead, but otherwise do so at your own peril. I've named this podcast, Responsibility is the key to meaning. Enjoy. Responsibility is the key to meaning, a 12 rules for life lecture by Jordan B. Peterson. Give it up for Jordan Peterson, everybody! You can tell you're in Texas. Well thank you very much. It's very nice.

So as Dave pointed out, this is, we've been on tour for quite a long time and this is the last city, American city that for now, anyways, that I plan to speak at. I guess I'm in LA in December, but I'm not going to count that. So my wife and I have traveled to, I think think 85 cities since February, something like that, and talk to about 250,000 people, I guess. Yeah, it's a lot of people. It's amazing, really, and it's surprising that so many people are interested in. I would think deeper psychological ideas, and that there's a public audience for that.

It's really quite remarkable. And it's been a real privilege to do this, I would say. I've enjoyed it a lot. It's been unbelievably positive, you know? Not the whole experience. But these lectures have been unbelievably positive, as far as I can tell, the majority of people who come aren't really coming for political reasons and that's just as well as far as I'm concerned

because I'm not really interested in the final analysis in political ideas. I'm interested in them as ideas, but I'm not really interested in them politically. I'm more interested in psychological development, I'd much rather concentrate on the development of the individual. And that's underneath politics in some sense, because almost everything is nested inside something else. And our political system depends on the integrity of the individual. It's predicated on the idea that the individual citizen, not consumer, but citizen, is the foundation

of the state, so that sovereignty inheres in the individual, which is a really daring idea, crazy idea in some sense, sovereignty that inheres in everyone. And one of the prerequisites for having that work is that the people in whom sovereignty inheres are as together and honorable and honest and decent and responsible as they can possibly be. Because otherwise, well, if the foundation isn't solid, and if the individual is the foundation of the state, then obviously the state isn't solid, and I believe that the state, in some sense, is the kingdom of the dead. And the reason I say that is because it's something that's bequeathed to us. And it's bequeathed to us by those who lived in the past,

all our institutions and our infrastructure for that matter, all the tried and true ways that we do things aren't our inventions anymore than our languages are invention. It's something that is a gift to us from our ancestors, let's say, but the problem with our ancestors is that they're all dead. And dead people can't speak or see, and so that means that it's up to the living to serve as the eyes for the dead. That's one way of thinking about it, it's a very old idea. And to see and speak for the dead, and so that means that you're responsible as an individual

to keep your eyes open and your tongue sharp and your words aligned and your house in order because according to the great myth that our culture is predicated on, the integrity of the society, the integrity of the society. The integrity of the future and of society depends on you. And I think that's true. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said,

when he was reflecting on the horrors of communism, he pointed out that the Christian idea, Judeo-Christian idea, was that every single person was a center of the universe. That's how the universe is constructed in some sense, is that every conscious creature, every self-conscious creature, let's say, is a center. And it's not easy for us to understand how something could be built so that it could have multiple centers, because of course we tend to think that the way we think is that something has one center, but reality is very, very complicated and it could easily be built so that it has as many centers as there are people.

And that's a crazy idea in some sense, but it really seems to work. And so everyone is in some strange sense of center. I've thought about that from the perspective of networks, I think it's a way of approaching that idea and making it comprehensible. You know, if you think of yourself, if you think, well, there's seven billion people,

and you're just one of them, in some sense, you can get away with anything because what the hell do you matter? There's seven billion people. It doesn't really matter what you do. If you think of all those people as isolated units, and maybe you think of a line of them, seven billion long, stretch around the entire world

and just take one person out of that, doesn't seem to make any difference at all. And I think that's not an accurate way of thinking. Partly, it's depressing in some sense because it means that your existence is without significance. But it's also a relief in a perverse way because it's a relief to be insignificant perversely because it means that it doesn't matter what you do and

if it doesn't matter what you do well, it doesn't matter what you do and that's kind of sad, but on the other hand if it doesn't matter what you do doesn't matter what you do That's kind of a big advantage if you're looking for an excuse to do whatever the hell you want. And so it's better to understand that we're all nodes in the network and you can think about this erathmetically. During your life you'll have the opportunity to Effect the thousand people deeply I would say for better for worse and each of those thousand people will affect a thousand people So that's a million people one person removed from you and a billion two people removed and

And we know how formal networks work AI networks compute computational networks is the misbehavior of a single node can produce tremendous instability in the system. And so we're networked and more than ever now. And so what that means, I believe, is that what we do for evil or for good is amplified really beyond our understanding. I think that is the way the world is constituted. It's something that our great religious stories insist upon,

that each person is related to the absolute in some manner and has some divine significance as a locus of consciousness. I've thought a lot about consciousness too, trying to understand what it is. It seems to me that it's something that I try to develop a fair bit in 12 rules for life. I don't think that we're driven mechanically like clockwork or in a deterministic way. I mean, we're deterministic machines to some degree, and we're limited in the scope of our ability. But I don't believe that we're driven like a clock is driven. I don't think there's any evidence that we are, not any compelling evidence. I think instead, we're creatures that confront potential. We're not driven by the past. We're creatures that confront potential.

And the potential is the future. Potential is the great expanse of what could be. You know, when you wake up in the morning and your consciousness re-emerges from the darkness that had enveloped it, you confront the day and you confront the possibilities of the day. And for better, for worse, you know, that can be an exciting proposition all those opportunities that are lying there for you to take or it can be a daunting challenge if things aren't going so well in your life but in any case it seems that what you confront is an expansive possibility of potential and that it's up to you to decide how that potential is going to manifest itself. I mean, we seem to hold ourselves responsible in that manner. You know, very often in life,

it seems like you can go to the right or you can go to the left. You have a choice. You can make this reality manifest itself or this reality. You're not omniscient. You don't necessarily know what's going to happen, but you have some sense of it, and you can at least intend something, even if it doesn't turn out that way, right? You can see how things might unfold, and you can decide, well, I'm going to act in this manner because I want this outcome. And sometimes that works.

And that's a very strange thing, because what it means, and I think this is right, I think that what it means is that you're the mechanism by which the potential that constitutes the future manifests itself as the reality that constitutes the present and the past. And I actually think that's in keeping with our physical models of reality, but I'm not going to go into that because, well, no one should ever talk about quantum physics in my estimation, unless they're quantum physicists and I'm definitely not that. But I do think that each of us confronts potential and casts that into reality.

And so that's one of the reasons that I believe that our fundamental stories insist that each of us has a transcendent value. We have transcendent value in our role as co-creators of being itself. And so that's a daunting responsibility. And then it gets worse, actually, because I think the manner, the valence of what you produce when you confront the potential of the future is dependent on the ethics of your choice. So for example, if you decide to live nobly and truthfully, if you decide to lift your eyes above the horizon and establish a relationship with a transcendent goal and live in truth and attempt to make things better rather than worse, then the choices that you make take the potential that lies in front of you and turn it into something that's good. And if you decide by contrast to work for the

demolition of things and for pain and destruction, then what you bring into being is not good. And I became convinced of that, at least in part, not by looking at what was good, but by looking at what was evil, I would say. I spent a lot of time studying what happened in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union and with some side journeys into Maoist China, and so forth, but those were the two primary areas of my focus.

And what I learned from that was that the horrors of the totalitarian state are to be laid primarily at the feet of the citizens of those states who refuse to take ethical responsibility for their actions and inactions. More importantly, they're inactions, actually, generally speaking, their complicity, but also their sins of commission. And since it seems to me that what happened in Nazi Germany and also in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 in particular, was about as close to hell as anything could actually be without actually being hell than the idea that you can bring something approximating hell into

being as a consequence of your faulty and malevolent moral choices seems to be to be factual, it seems to be accurate. And so that's actually optimistic. It was optimistic discovery, so to speak, for me, because it also meant that if you were capable of making things that terrible, that it was also possible that you had the corresponding power to make things good. It's not easy to understand exactly how you might manifest that self. But avoiding hell is something. That's a start and determining that you're going to do that

to work to make things better rather than to make them worse with every opportunity that you have. It's not an easy thing because you get better and you get resentful and you get hostile and you get angry. And you might get to the point where you shake your fist at the sky itself and curse the fact that there is something rather than nothing. Life can put you in a position like that, but it's not good. It's not good, and it makes things worse,

and they can be really bad, and it's better to work towards something that's good. It's our responsibility to do that, and I think we can do that. And I think that that works for us psychologically because it gives us something worthy of pursuing while we suffer through our limited lives. And I also think that it alleviates the problem because we're the sorts of creatures who, if we chose to choose the good, could actually make things better.

And I think we have been making things better. I mean, we're stumbling along and we don't know everything, but there's a lot of good news, there's a lot of good news afoot in the world, even though you wouldn't know it, given the terrible polarization that seems to have gripped us in recent years. You know, I read the other day, for example,

now more than half, hypothetically, we passed this threshold last week, more than half the world, more than half the world's citizens are now middle class. So that's absolutely amazing, you know, and we cut the rate of absolute poverty in the world by 50% between the year 2000 and the year 2012. So that's absolutely beyond comprehension. The UN now projects, according to their current economic analysis, that absolute poverty given their current definition,

which is a dollar 90 a day, which is not very much money, but is a lot more than the dollar a day that the typical person lived in all through the Western world in 1895, by the way, if that's your threshold for absolute poverty, then there won't be anybody in the world that's below that threshold by the year 2030. We'll have completely obliterated absolute poverty. It's like, wow.

You know, and that's not all the good news. There's more good news. We're probably going to peak out at about 9 billion people. For years, everybody's met not everybody. Many people have been prophesying that we're all going to die of starvation in an overpopulated nightmare. And that seemed wrong. We're gonna add about 2 billion more people, and at the rate at which fertility is declining

as women become educated, because it turns out if you educate women, then their family size shrinks unbelievably rapidly, in one generation, to below replacement, actually, which might be a problem, but it's probably a problem. We don't have to worry about tonight, but it looks like we're gonna peak out at something approximating nine billion,

and it also looks like we're not going to have real trouble feeding that many people because we're getting better and better at feeding people all the time with less and less land. And so one of the examples of that, for example, is there's now more forest in the northern hemisphere than there was a 100 years ago. And because a lot of marginal farmland has been returned to forest.

So, and then it also turns out this is really cool, and not what you'd expect. How do you get people to care about the environment? Well, you don't stop them from developing. You don't put a, you don't put the brakes on economic development. What you do is you try to get the poor people to be rich as fast as you can. Because as soon as you get them up above about $5,000 a year in gross domestic product on average, then they start caring about the environment. And so when people are real poor, then they have to, well, eat everything in sight and

burn everything that will burn just so they don't die. And that turns out to be a very inefficient medium to long-term strategy. If you can get them up to the point where tomorrow is secure, at least to some degree, then they start being absolutely consumed with day-to-day necessities and can start thinking that, well, we should take care of things in the longer run a little bit, if we can. And so, you know, there's more forest in China than there was 30 years ago. Well, we should take care of things in the longer run, a little bit, if we can. And so there's more forest in China than there was 30 years ago.

And that's really something. And of course, their starvation in China is essentially a thing of the past, as it is in India. And almost everywhere in the world, the only place that we really have starvation anymore is places where it's used as a political weapon. There's more obese people now than there are hungry people by a large margin.

That weekage go out and have a party in the street about that, right? That would be a lovely party. More fat people than starving people. Another milestone accomplished. And really, it certainly is. And so, so that's a lot of, you never hear about, you never hear about these things.

I kind of keep track of them. I follow people who are studying these sorts of things. And I learned about them about five years ago. I was working for this UN committee. It was producing a report for the Secretary General on sustainable economic development over the next few decades. And I got the manuscript to begin with, with the people that I was working with in Canada.

There were people all over the world who were working on this. It was interesting, you know, because the members of the committee were all heads of state. And so they were appointed to the committee, but heads of state, former heads of state, they're so busy, they don't actually do anything.

They just fly to places and meet with people. They're just, they don't exist in some sense. Their schedules are so packed up that they don't have an extra time to sit on a committee. So they just push the responsibility down the bureaucratic hierarchy until someone shows up who's got some spare time, and that's the person who does it. And that was in some sense how I got on the committee. But it was interesting to work on it because it also became clear right away that nobody

who was writing the document really knew what they were doing. And the reason for that was, who the hell would know that? There isn't a school that you can go to with very, very few exceptions that teaches you, let's say, planetary ecology, economics and political management on a global scale. How do you deal with that? Well, we don't know, so people stumbled through it. So we were stumbling through it. And the first thing that became evident was that the narrative of the report was like

stuck in 1985. It was all like capitalists against, well, I suppose the rest of the planet, the North against South. It was all this antagonistic sort of cold war nonsense that was really done with, in some sense, done with, technically, by 1989, hadn't been updated. And business, a lot of the report, had business being the enemy of government and God was just

clueless as far as I was concerned. So we rewrote the underlike narrative and predicated on the idea that there are people of goodwill operating at sort of every level of organization, not everyone obviously, but most people in that business and government could cooperate and that more or less, we'd like everybody to have more money. And if they were healthier, that would be good. And if we didn't eat every creature on the planet, well, we're trying to get our act together, that might be for the best as well. You know, we're trying to make the document something that was just sensible. And I read, like, I don't know how many, many books, hundreds of books, while I was working

on this. And it was so strange because the more books I read about it, the more optimistic I got. I thought, wow, things are way better than I thought they were. We're making headway on so many things you can hardly believe it. We're pushing back disease in Africa. Like Africa is actually starting to boom. So that's, you know, the life expectancy in Africa is now the same as it

was in Europe in 1952. I mean, that's not much of a gap, man. And that's happened over the last, basically, over the last 50 years. That's really something. And same with child mortality rates, they've fallen to basically the European levels in the 1950s. And, you, and that's an accelerating curve. It's getting better and better faster and faster. So that was all quite surprising. I mean, there were some things I stumbled across that I thought were really bad. What we're doing to the oceans is really bad, taking all the fish out of the oceans,

the way we're doing it is unbelievably stupid, and will stop but it's a technical problem to some degree because no one owns the fishery resources everybody takes everything they can get and it's a very bad long-term management problem but there are places like Iceland seems to have got that under control and there are places around the world that are building or establishing marine preserves you know that they're protected. And that seems to be working, and maybe there'll be more of that. There's at least some movement in the right direction. But all things considered, there's never been a better time

to be alive. And there's way more promise that sits in front of us right now than there ever has been in the entire history of the human race. And so, yeah, I know. It's like, what the hell, who expected that? I think we got stuck in the West to some degree in a Cold War nightmare, you know? Because from 1945 to 1989, not all of you are old enough to remember this, but lots of you are. I mean, most people were 50% convinced that we were going to end it all

in a nuclear catastrophe. And, man, it sure looked like that because the Russians were building tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and the Americans were building tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and the weapons got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. You know, one of the things, you know, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, that was a fission bomb, that was the first generation of atomic bomb, and it was bad, right? It was the biggest explosion in human history, the Hiroshima explosion, and it was tiny compared to the fission bombs that emerged in the aftermath of Hiroshima, because it was just a beginner's bomb, you know, so to speak. And you know, the next generation, the hydrogen bombs, some of you know this, they're fusion bombs, so it's a

different, it's a different atomic reaction. You know that a hydrogen bomb uses an atomic bomb as its trigger. So, and so it was hydrogen bombs that we were producing, and I think that made everybody very, very paranoid and gloomy and pessimistic about the future of the human race. And it isn't clear that we've shaken that off, really. Who knows how long it takes to shake something like that off? It set the tone for our self-conception for a very long period of time. But now it looks to me like you could make a case

that we have an unlimited expanse of potential emerging in front of us, case that we have an unlimited expanse of potential emerging in front of us and that we could defeat many of the ancient enemies of mankind over the next two or three decades if we were careful and we stayed our course and we didn't do anything foolish. Now, God willing and with some luck and all of that, I mean, it's not all rosy. There's a lot of us and who knows how we might destabilize things, but my sense is, well life has always been tenuous, that's for sure, always, and for most people far more

tenuous than it is now. And so, you know, most of us can, we're going to live to be in our 80s at least. You know, I think we're adding, if I remember correctly, even in the West, I think we're adding four months a year to our life expectancy. So as you hit a year a year, then you don't die, right? Four months a year is a lot. And, you know, people keep thinking there's going to be an upper limit but we keep pushing that limit so who knows what's possible. So anyways, I've looked at all that and looked at the totalitarian catastrophes of the 20th

century and tried to figure out what might be done to rectify that propensity, that totalitarian propensity, and the malevolence that goes along with it. And my sense from reading all that I read was that the best way forward was to concentrate on strengthening people at an individual level, that it was fundamentally a psychological issue, not a political issue. We'd say that politics is nested inside of psychology

just like the state is predicated on the integrity of the individual. So you have to attend to the integrity of the individual if you truly want to fortify the state. And so when I wrote my first book, which was called Maps of Meaning, which is a very difficult book, but is now available on audio for those of you that like 12 rules for life and would like to go underneath

and deeper, you could give that book a shot, it's hard, but if you found 12 rules worthwhile, then you might find that worthwhile, and then I wrote 12 rules, and the fundamental reason for that was to lay out a set of principles, I suppose, that was oriented towards fortification of the individual. And part of that was insistence upon insistence that the great individual, the great idea of individuality that is at the bedrock of the Western conception

of reality is correct. It's right. It's the greatest idea that mankind has ever had, the sovereignty of the individual. And that that sovereignty is not associated so much with rights as we insist upon in our comparative immaturity right now, but on something deeper, which is responsibility. And that's a better foundation than rights. You might think, well, you want your rights because then, well, your rights are like a privilege, in some sense, and who doesn't want privilege? It's like, well, I don't know if you want privilege precisely. Maybe you want to struggle, maybe you want to battle, maybe you want to adventure, maybe you want something

difficult to do that you can grapple with. Maybe that's what you need in order to justify your life to yourself, even, as well as to other people. And I believe that, I believe, that people are built for a load, a voluntary load, and that the heavier the load that you take on voluntarily, the better things work, including directly for you.

And so the idea of individual sovereignty isn't nested in the world of rights precisely. Those are the rights are more like precondition for you to take on your responsibility. The state, you have rights so that the state, the rights demarcate how the state can interact with you. It puts a limit on what the state can do, but the reason for that isn't so that you can have your privilege,

so to speak, I hate that word, it's been ruined, but it's the best one I can use at the moment. It's so that you have the opportunity to manifest your responsibility. You think, well, why would you do that? It's because, well, that's what gives your life meaning, is to take on a responsibility. And I don't think we really understood this that well.

When we talk about responsibility and we don't that much, when we talk about responsibility, we tend to talk about it as a duty. And that's fair enough, you know, but that's not rough, it's not precise enough. It's different than that. It's that your responsibility is what gives your life meaning. And you need to your life to have meaning because life is very difficult. It's bounded by suffering and it's painted by malevolence. And so if you don't have something worthwhile to do in the face of that, then it corrupts

and destroys you, and then you make things worse. That's not good. You need an antidote to that. And the antidote seems to me to be responsibility. And I think there are multiple levels of evidence that support that. Like one of the things we know in the clinical realm, for example, is that if you want to make people more courageous, which by the way that if you want to make people more courageous, which by the way is how you treat them if they're anxious, you don't make them

less anxious, you make them more courageous, that's different. What you do, it's really... And it's the same with children. You don't protect your children and shelter them and make them safe because life isn't safe. And so what you do is you make them courageous and competent because they can take that with them wherever they go. And that requires a certain amount of bravery on your part because you have to tolerate

watching your children as they expose themselves to necessary risk. And you have to have faith that something in them will develop to take on those risks. So you have to back off. And you have to let them stumble in the world to the degree that's necessary in order to learn how the world is constituted. And that takes courage as well. And so responsibility is the key to meaning.

And I don't think we got that right. I don't think psychologists got that right. The ones that came closest, in some sense, were the people who talked about self-actualization. That started to happen in the 1950s, that you should develop yourself to the degree that that's possible. There's a responsibility in that, and that's the proper pathway forward. But I think that that got turned into something that was too self-centered and narrowly and impulsively selfish. It isn't self-actualization, it's bearing the responsibility

for proper being itself. That's a better way of thinking about it. Now, that might force the best out of you in that form of self-actualization, but you don't want to put the card before the horse. You know perfectly well that you develop by pushing yourself beyond where you are now. Everyone knows that. That's what you do when you go to the gym. You lift heavier weight, right? You want to push yourself beyond where you are.

And you do that by adopting an ever-increasing burden of responsibility, and that's what gives your life meaning. And it also improves the world as such. It doesn't make things just better for you psychologically. It actually works practically. So if you're a clinician and you're trying to help people overcome their anxiety, what you do is you tell them to turn around and face their fears.

If they're moving forward on a pathway and obstacles emerge, and the obstacles paralyze them with terror, and so they cease moving forward and retreat and look for somewhere safe, they shrink, and the thing that terrifies them grows. And if they move ahead, instead, if they decide that they're going to confront those obstacles to their development, they terrify them forthrightly, then they grow in the obstacle's shrink. And that's the encouragement that goes along with proper clinical intervention.

And it's something that virtually all clinicians agree on. It's not an object of dispute. Everyone who's a well-trained clinical psychologist or psychiatrist knows this. And it's been learned over a hundred years, it's been distilled. It's so interesting to see this safe space culture say emerge on college campuses, safe spaces and microgressions and victim theory, oppression, no press narrative theory, all of that. If you wanted to design a system that would harm people's mental health and discourage them,

you couldn't do a better job than designing that system. It's exactly antithetical. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things, one of the things that I'm embarrassed about, I would say, as a practicing psychologist, is that my professional organizations

haven't come out and denounced that culture as the appalling, what would you call it, the appalling surreal antithesis of what it claims to be. Because if they had any courage, they would have done it five years ago. You know, looking off, I think George, don't remember. Luke and off in Jonathan Height just wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind.

And Luke and off had the misfortune of being in treatment for depression, cognitive behavioral therapy. Now, he's not a psychologist, but he underwent this treatment. And what he learned was that if you go through cognitive behavioral therapy, then you're taught to confront the things that are destroying you, making you anxious, producing emotional pain, to confront them and face them, right? And to strategize in the face of those, in the face of that suffering, and that that's the road to cure.

And in the cardeling of the American mind, he said, well, isn't this the opposite of what's happening at the universities? And the answer to that is, well, absolutely. And what's embarrassing to me is that it took someone who had been a client of a psychotherapist to point out that there was something wrong with the safe space culture

rather than the hypothetically august professional bodies themselves that should have been all over this a long while back, given that it's the core, it's one of the core features of successful psychotherapy. One would be turn around, voluntarily confront the obstacles that stand in your path. Rule one, rule two, get your story straight. That's rule two, and those two things, those are the hallmark of successful psychotherapy, but they're also the hallmark of a successful communicative relationship. You know, and it has to be the same thing. I mean, why would it be that the pathway to health within a therapeutic situation would be any different than the pathway to health in life

or the pathway to health in a healthy relationship? How could those not be the same thing? You know, when you're trying to raise children and you're trying to raise good children, well, you encourage them to go out into the world and take necessary risks, right? To make new friends, to go out in the playground and confront the strange children,

and to not hide, to go out in the playground and confront the strange children and, you know, to not hide, to go out in the world. And you also, you also encourage them to tell the truth, right? And that way they can keep their story straight and the family story straight. We all know this. It's part and parcel of how people learn and develop. And you facilitate that in therapy, and it works to the degree that people are capable of learning, which is a fair degree. So 12 rules for life is about, well, it's a justification for all of that, for that responsibility and that courageous conduct in face of the, of the, of the terrors of life. No escaping the terrors of life. It's an all-in game, right? Life is bounded by suffering and contaminated by malevolence, and it's fatal. You bet your life on your conduct.

You don't have a choice, but you have a choice about what you would bet your life on. And maybe what you need to do is to figure out something worth betting your life on, because that justifies your life. That's the justification for it. And I don't see another way out. I don't see another realistic justification.

It has to be something like, well, you've got this catastrophic mortal burden, the burden of being a self-conscious creature, the knowledge of your own finitude and mortality. And the only thing you have to set against that is the worthiness of your pursuit. And you can have that. And then you get to have your cake and eat it too in a

perverse way. And this is a very difficult thing to understand. So in rule 12, I'm going to try to go through the rules backwards. Rule 12 is pedicat when you encounter one on the street. And it's a fairly simple little phrase. And I thought about it a lot when I was dealing with my daughter who was very ill when she was a child in a teenager, although she's much better now. One of the things that really tests your sanity, the integrity of your marriage and your belief in the goodness of being itself is to interact with a child who's ill and in pain and deteriorating as well.

That's about, I don't know if that's as bad as it gets because God, things can get bad, but it's bad enough. And so my family, my wife and I, and my children as well, had to learn how to deal with that and to think it through. And I thought it through to some degree, when my son was young, two or three, three or four, very cute age, so very fragile age. I mean, little kids are fragile.

They get hurt. They fall down and they get pushed over and they fight with other kids. And they get sick and they're very fragile. And of course, that is very disturbing if you're a parent. But then you might think, well, what's the alternative to that exactly? Because one of the things most people have

a soft spot in their heart for little kids, especially if they're reasonably behaved little kids, they're very cute and they're very active, and they're really engaged in the world. And your heart goes out to them. And so that's interesting is that they're really engaged in the world, and your heart goes out to them. And so that's interesting is that they're attractive, as beings, they're very attractive. And one of the things that's so fun about being a parent

that you really don't know until you're a parent is that your children reward you with their existence for your care of them. And you can't really know that till you have your own kids because you're kind of blind to other people's kids. But you're not blind to your own kids. If you love them, you can see what they're like. You can see how remarkable it is that they exist. And the fact that their existence is remarkable is the payment that they give you for the care you have to take of them. And they rejuvenate you, you know, it's like when you're old

and you're, and all you see is memory. You don't see the world anymore. You just see your own memories because that's what happens to you when you're, as you get older. A child comes along and they see the world with unstructured eyes. And so they wake you up again to the wonder of the world and you can see it through their eyes. And that's why, you know, I was so interesting when we first had our daughter, Michaela. She was the first granddaughter on my side of the family. We take her up to Northern Saskatchewan where my family has a number of cabins up there on this lake that's way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. She would be out in the middle of all these older people, most of the more older, over

60, over 65, not my wife and I, but my parents and my extended family and their friends. She'd be in the middle of them and all the adults would just watch her, nonstop, just like people sitting around a campfire. There's a relationship between those two things too, because a campfire is one thing that you don't see from memory. I don't know what it is. We're very attracted to fire. A carnivorous, what do you call carnivorous, fire starting apes.

That's what we are. We're absolutely attracted to fire. We can't not look at it. We can't not play with it. It's a part of the world where our perception, our memory doesn't mask our perceptions. And so there's something magical about fire. We see it maybe like children see it. And then we see children. And we see children like children are on fire.

We watch them because they're so fascinating. And you see them so deeply engaged in what they're doing. And you remember that the world is a magic place. And so, and that's really something to see. And it's the counterpart to their fragility. Without, if they were adults, then that magic wouldn't be there. Now, they wouldn't be as fragile, and that would be a plus, because they wouldn't be hurt.

But the magic, some of the magic would be gone. And there's a magic in fragility. And so, all I thought with my son, it's like, all right, well, it's a foolish little thought exercise. But let's say I don't want him to get hurt. I don't want him to get hurt. So, what do you do with a three-year-old? And you could do anything you wanted,

and so that he couldn't be hurt. It's like, well, he's not two-foot tall anymore. And then he's like 20 feet tall, right? And maybe he has bones of titanium, right? And he has an artificial intelligence for a brain. And if a part falls off, well, you just pick up another part and you screw it on. It's like he's replaced by some sort of, what, immortal mechanical perfection. And this is no joke because it certainly

might be that we're building precisely such things in an attempt to replace ourselves because we're terrified about our own fragility. It could easily be that. And so that, that, that, that, that, what, what would you call it? Ambition might be lurking in the back of our minds because we can't cope with our own mortality. And no wonder, but you think, well, okay, so you replace them part by part until there's nothing, but something that can't be destroyed

under any circumstances whatsoever. But the problem with that is that there's no kid left. It's that you can't get the magic. You can't dispense with the fragility and keep the magic. Okay, well that's we're thinking about. That's we're thinking about for a long time. You can't dispense with the magic. You can't keep the magic if you dispense with the fragility.

Now here's an old idea. It's one of the most profound ideas I've ever encountered. It really burned itself into my imagination when I first encountered. I think I read it in Carl Jung, but it's not his idea. It's an old Jewish idea. And it's an idea that emerged as a consequence of meditating on the nature of God.

And this has nothing to do in some sense with whether or not you believe in God. Just put that aside for a moment. It's not the point. The point, there's a different point that this Zen-like-cone mystery presents. So, it's, see, one of the great questions, one of the great questions, unsolved questions, is why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there being itself? Why does anything exist?

Perhaps non-existence would be better. We're tempted by that. For example, if we become suicidal, we're tempted by that thought. Things are so terrible that perhaps it would be better if they didn't exist at all. It's a very dark road. That idea takes you down, by the way, the darkest of roads, but it's a comprehensible temptation under certain circumstances. So here's the idea. Take a being with the classical attributes of God, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. You can do anything, be anything, you can be anywhere,

you're everywhere at once, you can be anything you want, you have unlimited power. What do you lack? Limitation. Right. So why is there something rather than nothing? Because limitation has advantages over totality. There's advantages to it. Well, what's the consequence of limitation? Suffering. That's one consequence. No being without suffering. Maybe that's the rule.

There cannot be being without suffering. You might say, well, then there shouldn't be being at all. Because the suffering is too much. Fair enough, it's a powerful argument, but maybe there's an alternative. Maybe there's a mode of being that justifies the suffering so that you can have the being, so that you can have your cake and eat it too.

And I would say that the great religious tradition that underlies our civilization is an attempt to determine what pathway in life allows for being and its fragility to exist at the same time that it can be transcended. And it's something like this, it's something like to accept the strictures of the limitation, to embrace it. I saw this, I'll give you an image that's associated with this.

I was in Australia in February, I believe, and I went to this Orthodox Christian cathedral, the Orthodox Christians, like me, for some reason. And so they keep inviting me places, and so I went to this cathedral, and there was a painting, a medieval painting, because the Orthodox types really like medieval iconography, and so it was a medieval painting, because the Orthodox types really like medieval iconography. And so it was a medieval painting,

trip-ditch, three paintings in a sequence. And the middle one had a picture of Christ looked like it was painted like in the 13th century, but it wasn't, it was modern. And there was a cross in front of him, and he was stepping up to it on a set of steps, and inviting people to come along. And so I looked at that and I thought,

oh, I know what that image means. I'm some of it. You never assume that you know what an image like that means in its totality, but it means something that you can understand or someone wouldn't have made it and there'd be no communicative intent. It has meaning. You wouldn't build a whole damn church around it

if there was nothing to it. It's a lot of effort to put into guarding an image like that that no one can fully comprehend. But what it meant in part was the gateway to proper life is through acceptance of the vulnerability of biic. It's an invitation, right? Well, you're limited and you're going to suffer. So what are you going to do about that? You're going to avoid it, you're going to turn away from it, or you're going to turn around and embrace it. And what if it was the case that to the degree that you embraced it, you would simultaneously transcend it? It could easily be the case. It looks like it's the case if you look at it purely from the clinical perspective,

because it turns out that if you get people to turn around and face the things that terrify them into a corner, then they develop. They get to be more than they are. We don't know the limits of that proposition. If you were willing to accept everything that was terrifying about your situation as the necessary price for being, if you could drop all the resentment that was associated with that and justify it as it is, I'm not trying to make a case

that this is a straightforward thing to do, because the suffering is real. Well, then maybe that's the best pathway forward to transcending it. And maybe even to some degree rectifying it, because one of the things that's so interesting is that not only do people who turn around and confront difficult problems gain psychologically, but they often solve the problems. And God only knows how many problems we could solve if we were all in, all of us,

instead of running at 51% committed to the good in 49% scattered everywhere in the wind. It's amazing what people can accomplish when they're single-mindedly pursuing something. They're really unstoppable. And so if there were many, many people who were unstoppable, unstoppable in that matter, who knows what we could create out of the possibility that's in front of us. And so, well, so that's part of the meditation on Rule 12.

And you think about it, you actually like limitation. One of the things we know, for example, I've done a fair bit of work, published work on creativity. Now, I know the literature on creativity quite well, and creativity is a gift, by the way, not everyone is creative far from it. And it's just as well, because most creative people fail dismally at everything they do. So it's not something to be fervently wished for.

Most creative ideas are catastrophic failures, and they take the person who has the idea out with them. Now they're necessary because now and then you have a creative idea that's so damn good, it just wins everything. But it's a high risk high stakes bet and most of the time you fail. And so it's okay that everyone isn't creative because it's a very risky enterprise. If you want a creative solution to a problem, it actually turns out that putting more constraints on your pursuit produces more creativity than putting less constraints on it.

I'll give you a funny example. You could look this up if you wanted to. If you don't have anything better to do. You know what a Haiku is? A Japanese poem? It's ridiculous, say. It's like, you can only have three lines It's about why three couldn't you say more in 50? It's like yeah, but it's three

Three you're gonna play the high-coup game and then each each sentence has a certain number of syllables and If you don't follow the rules then you don't get to write a high-coup. That's it. You got to accept the limitations So and so there's this funny archive online, which I think is just exactly what human beings are like. So there's this archive online called the spam high coup archive. And it's not the kind of spam that you get in your email. It's like the lunch meat, the pink lunch meat.

And there are 15,000. The last time I looked, 15,000 high-cougs about spam in this archive. And that's what people are like. It's like, okay, well, you know, it's not bad enough to write a high-coug, anyone can do that. It's like, no, we're going to make it about the least poetic object we can possibly conceive of. And they're unbelievably witty and comical. And, you know, there's a game in that, it's right, and the game is, well, let's limit ourselves to some extreme and ridiculous manner and find in that limitation a wealth of possibilities that wouldn't

otherwise exist. And it's so perverse, you know, you think, well, why are people vulnerable? And I don't know if this is a justification for the vulnerability of being, perhaps it is. Maybe it's a justification for being. It's so strange that, perversely, when you impose limitations on yourself that are stringent, you open up a world of possibilities that wouldn't otherwise exist.

It's like, well, think about chess, for example. There's a lot of chess games, like possible chess games. There's many many of them and you know you might think well, isn't it just kind of arbitrary that you can only move a night in an L shape? Like wouldn't it be better if just all the all the pieces were queens? It's like no It wouldn't be better because you couldn't play chess then. And that's so strange. It's like, this is what you're saying. You're saying, you take the pieces of the chess game

and you make them less limited, which is what you do if you transform them all into queens, and then the game is destroyed. So, what's up with that? How can more be less? And I don't know the answer to that exactly. Like, I don't understand it precisely, but it's clearly, you know, when you're playing a video game, you incarnate yourself in another world.

And it has slightly different rules. And you think, well, that's entertaining. Let's jump into a world that has different constraints and see what possibilities emerge as a consequence. And you do that voluntarily. It's like, I actually think there's something deep, deeply metaphysical and profound about that, because the closest simulations we have to reality are video games. And we think of video games as just games. But there are simulations. And the simulations, it's a huge industry. And the demand for reality in simulation

is one of the things that drives computational power forward. There aren't many things that we need, the vast computational power that we continue to develop to do. But one of the things we need, vast computational power that we continue to develop to do, but one of the things we need that computational power to do is to make ever more real simulations in game space. And so then we make these universes that emerge online, and we pop ourselves into avatars, you know, and we take on limitations that we wouldn't otherwise have,

and the experience worlds of possibility that we wouldn't otherwise have, and how to, since we're trying to simulate reality when we're making those games, how do we know that that's not an accurate simulation of reality? Maybe it is. There's something necessary about limitation.

So then you embrace limitation. You say, you say yes to it to the degree that you can and that requires courage. It's the same as the picture that I just described to you. It means that you have to willingly accept your mortal limitations with all the horror that that entails. And there isn't anything you can do that's more courageous than that. You know, it's like embracing your own death, death as a precondition for being. And that could easily be the case.

And I mean, I don't know if people can even manage that because it's a lot to ask, but it does appear that that is the pathway forward. It really does appear that way. And it might turn out too that you discover that there's a little more to you than you thought because maybe you're strong enough to actually do that. And if you found out that you were strong enough to do that, well, then maybe a lot of the sting out, the sting in it would disappear. It's possible.

You know, you know already that if you do something Nietzsche said, he who has a why can bear any how. And so, you know, you have to stumble forward in life with the burdens that you've been cursed or blessed with, I suppose, and the best way to stumble forward under those conditions is to do something that's tremendously worthwhile. Think, yes, that was worth it, because that's what you want to think when you're doing something or when you're finished it. Well, you're doing it, you want to think, this is worthwhile. And what do you mean? It means it justifies the sacrifices that I'm making. There's something about the process that I'm engaged in that justifies the sacrifices that I'm making. Well, that's what you need for your whole

life. You need something for your whole life that justifies the sacrifice of your life. And maybe that's within your grasp. And I do believe that that's to be found through the adoption of responsibility. And the responsibility for you, responsibility for your family, responsibility for your community, but at a more fundamental level, it's responsibility to put yourself together so that when you encounter the potential that lies in front of you, you make the decisions that transform that potential into the best possible reality. And I think we're all doing that. That's what... Woo!

Applause And I think we hold each other accountable for that. We hold ourselves accountable for that. And we hold the people around us accountable for that. Because you don't... You tell yourself... If you're looking back at your life with regret, you think there was so much potential there that I didn't use, and now it's gone, and that fills you with sorrow. And if you have children, and you think, well, my children aren't living up to their potential,

then you're not happy with them, you know, you want to shake your fist at them or your finger at them and say, look, you're not, you want to shake them them. You want to shake your fist at them or your finger at them and say, look, you want to shake them and you want to say, look, I know there's more to you. I want you to live up to your potential. Well, and it outrages you ethically, unless you're jealous of your children, which is a very bad idea. It outrages you ethically that they're not doing everything they could. You can see the wonderful person that's there.

You have privileged access to that as their parent. You can see what they could. You can see the wonderful person that's there. You know, you have privileged access to that as their parent. You can see what they could be and then it hurts your soul when they deviate from what you believe you've seen that they could manifest. And so this is deeply embedded in us in an ethical sense. And it's part of our dialogue with our conscience. We hold ourselves accountable when we don't live up to our potential, when we don't interact with what's in front of us and bring what's best forward. So, you know, I did these biblical lectures last year. Yeah, thank you. I'm hoping I'll get back to them in September. That's the plan.

I want to start lecturing about Exodus, which is a story I absolutely love. It's an absolutely amazing story. It's unbelievably deep. And like the stories in Genesis, I was very interested, especially in the opening of Genesis, because I do believe that, see, I believe that our political system is nested inside a story. It has to be just like your waking consciousness is nested inside a dream. You have to dream. You cannot live without dreaming.

You'll lose your mind if you don't dream. You have to dream. No one really knows why the psychoanalysts made a lot of progress in determining why I think especially Carl Jung. In any case, it's the case that your linear articulated, waking consciousness is dependent for its integrity on the dream. And we don't know what the dream is. It's images and stories, and it's artistic endeavor, and it's the great narrative of humanity.

It's the stories that structure what we don't yet understand. It's like there's a buffer between what we know and can say and what we don't know at all and that buffer is filled by the dream. And for better or worse, the dream that our culture's embedded in is a religious dream. And the religious dream is old, it's very old. And it's something that's evolved.

It's not something that people thought up in any real sense, any more than you think up what you dream. Dreams happen to you. And the religious revelations that under our culture happen to us, and we did what we could to make them coherent and to lay them out. It doesn't mean we understand them, but it doesn't matter, because they're still,

they're the buffer ground between what we understand completely and what we don't understand at all. It's the great dream of mankind, the religious substructure. And I was very interested in the stories at the beginning of Genesis because they're very, very old. Who knows how old they are? God only knows how old they are because they're very, very old. Who knows how old they are. God only knows how old they are. They're very, very old. And obviously they're unforgettable because we didn't forget them. And so there's some, well, it's something to think about. Stories don't survive for thousands and thousands of years by accident.

At the very least, they're adapted to our memory, right? Obviously, the stories that survive are those that are adapted to our memory. So they fit us like a key fits a lock. It doesn't mean we can understand them. And so I tried to understand the first part of Genesis for a very long period of time. And there's a series of propositions in the book that I think are extremely interesting. And so let me lay them out. So the first are the characters or the elements of reality. That's a more accurate way of putting it. What are the fundamental building blocks of reality? As consciously experienced, that's a better way

of thinking about it. This is a materialistic idea. It's a different kind of idea. It's the fundamental elements of experience, not the fundamental elements of material reality. It's a different idea. Genesis presents this notion. It's echoed in mythology all around the world. The same sort of substructure. I wrote a lot about this in maps of meaning, finding out about these things from people like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and Eric Neumann, and these great mythological scholars of the 20th century. So in Genesis, you have three elements of experience. You have whatever God is, you have whatever God's word is, and you have whatever

that operates on, and whatever it operates on is the Tohu Vabo, it's potential, it's chaotic potential, it's something like that which could be, but isn't. And I think that's the same potential you confront when you wake up in the morning. You're talking, you think about the future, so what's the future? Well, you can't hold it, you can't touch it, it has no weight or no mass, it has no presence, it isn't real, it's only potential, but potential is some kind of, it's the reality that isn't yet. And there isn't any way of gripping it, any tighter than that, because it isn't, but could be, and that's what it is. It's what isn't, but could be. And that's what you confront, always. That's what you're grappling with. And that's portrayed on the large scale

in the initial parts of Genesis. You have God, God's paternal structure. It's the same thing as the structure that you are except on the large scale. And then that uses a process, and that's the word, to encounter the chaos and transform it into reality. And so, and what does that mean? I mean, I mean, I remember this is the fundamental story of our culture.

It means that your ability to use your communicative, your conscious and communicative intent truthfully is what can be used to take the potential that lies in front of you and cast it into being. So the word is Communicative Intent, but it's also the truth. It's both of those in the opening chapters of Genesis. It's Communicative Intent and Truth. And so you use Communicative Intent and Truth to encounter potential and turn it into reality. And so that's what God does. And then every time he does that, day after day,

in the narrative, then he steps back and says that it's good. And so here's the hypothesis. Well, that's the first thing. He says that it's good. And then the next thing that happens is that another proposition is laid forth, and that proposition is that man and woman alike are made in the image of God. So the first part of the story is a description of what constitutes God.

God is a structure that uses truthful communicative intent to extract habitable order out of chaos. And then to the degree that so if what's being used to encounter potential is truthful, then the reality that arises is good. It's an ethical proposition. And it's really interesting, I think it's the deepest of ethical propositions. So here's what it means. It means something like, there isn't any better way to transform what could be in to what is then to do it with truth.

Period. And it's a very weird thing to contemplate because you know, well, when we clap and we're happy about this, but we're not, because lots of times telling the truth gets you in real trouble. Right? It's easier to circumvent the truth, and at least you think, well, I'll deal with it later. It's like, no, you won't, because it'll be way out of hand later. If you don't deal with it right now, you take the easy way out because you don't want the conflict in the present. I'm not saying that you should run around getting yourself in trouble, but people aren't

that careful with what they say. They're not that careful with how they act. It's partly because they think they can get away with it, or because they don't want to withstand the conflict that utilizing the truth in the moment would produce. And I don't mean you get to tell the truth just to hurt people's feelings. That's not the truth. Its partial truth used as a perverse weapon. The truth is much more complex than that.

But the proposition in the story of Genesis is that if you use, if you confront potential with the truth, then the reality that you produce as a consequence is good. And that's a hell of a thing to think about. And I do believe that it's the case. I mean, I do believe that we tell people that we love that they should exist in the truth. You don't tell your children that they should lie about everything and their life will go very well. Unless you're a bloody psychopath, you know, and you're oriented very much towards producing

something approximating hell. And even if you don't live out the truth yourself, if you're attempting to advise someone that you care about, then you try to put them on the straight and narrow path. And so we all know at the base of our being that the proper way of interacting with potential is with truth. And the proposition in the first chapter of Genesis is that the reality that's produced as a consequence of facing potential with truth is good. And that could be, and so that's a guideline to how to live in limitation. You have limitation, and that puts potential in front of you.

But the price that you pay for that is suffering and the possibility of malevolence. And the question is, well, how do you maintain the possibility without falling prey to the suffering or degenerating through the malevolence? And the answer is you confront the potential with truth. And I think that that's, I think it's true. I think it's right.

I think it's accurate. And I think also that, I also think that we know this, although not consciously enough. And the reason I think we know it is because we set up our entire societal structure, particularly in the West. But the ideas are spreading everywhere very rapidly. Particularly in the West, we set up our society in the following manner.

What's of sovereign importance in the West? The individual, period, the end, even religiously speaking, we have a divine individual at the center of our mythological conception. I'm not speaking religiously, I'm speaking anthropologically or psychologically. You can leave the metaphysics behind. You don't have to, but you can. The idea is that the individual is at the center. And why?

Because the individual is the thing that confronts potential and transforms it into reality. And the reality that is manifest is a consequence of the nature of the ethical choice of the individual. And it's on that that the ship of state sails forward or founders. The question is, do we believe that?

It's like, well, is there another way of conceptualizing how we've structured our society? I can't see it. We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal. Are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Well, what's the equality exactly?

I mean, it's not like we're all the same because we're not. There must be something fundamental that's associated with being human, that's the foundation for that equality, that value that puts you not above the law, but at least beside the law, that keeps the state at bay from you. Well, what else can it be than your willingness to contend with potential itself and to determine the course of the unfolding of reality to decide whether you're going to tilt things

towards heaven or towards hell because you've got both choices. That's necessary to understand that, it's terrifying to understand that, because it means that everything you do that you don't do properly, tilts and shifts things in a direction that if you had any sense, you would not want to go. And that's a horrifying realization, and it's no wonder people shy away from it, but the cost of shying away from that

is to casually engage in that sort of behavior. And I think, and I learned this from Jung as well, we're too technologically powerful for that now. We don't have a buffer. We have to get our act together. And then we have because we're at this cusp of power in some sense where we can change everything. And if we're sensible enough, maybe we'll change everything so it'll be radically better. And if we're not sensible, then maybe we'll change everything so it will be radically worse. And we got a taste of that already in the 20th century. It would be lovely not to revisit that. And so I wrote 12 rules for life and maps of meaning because I discovered some of these things and

they struck me very deeply. They changed the way that I looked at the world. They terrified me into being very careful with what I said. And that's being extremely useful. And so it's been a great privilege, by the way, to be able to go on this tour and to talk to everybody about this and to talk to all of you tonight about it. So... So I studied the most horrifying things that I could find for a very long period of time. And the consequence of that was that it made me optimistic. You know, there's an old alchemical dictum that I learned from reading Carl Jung,

Instructualness Inventor. It means that which you most want to find will be found where you least want to look. And it's the same idea as rescuing your father from the belly of the beast, the deeper and darker that you, the deeper and darker the place that you look in, the brighter the light that shines at the bottom. And the reason for that, as far as as I can tell is because we are capable of transcending the hell that we are also capable of producing. That's within our grasp. And so the lectures as far as I'm concerned, from my perspective,

are an invitation that everyone that I'm communicating with, an invitation to everyone that I'm communicating with, to aim up instead of down and to understand that that is your role in the world. You're making the choice with with an invitation to everyone that I'm communicating with, to aim up instead of down and to understand that that is your role in the world. You're making the choice with every decision you make between moving things towards heaven or moving them towards health. And that's meaning.

And it's a meaning that will imbue your life with the significance that's necessary, it helped to rectify what's wrong with the world. I think I'll leave it at that for the time being. Thank you very much. I'm going to give you a round of applause. Keep it going for Jordan Paters and everybody. I mean I think I can speak for everybody in this room, but I felt that tonight. You guys felt that? I'm not kidding.

This guy, every single one of these shows that we've done, 60-someone shows, everyone is different, but he seriously just brought it. So let's bring it back out. Jordan Peterson. I mean, you seriously brought it tonight. Were you planning that all day after 60-some-odd shows? You know, because we do have a little bit of a break now before we go to Europe. Well, it isn't really the way I planned it.

It didn't go the way I planned it. It didn't go the way I planned it. That happens fairly frequently. You know, I'll prepare a talk backstage, but then that isn't what happens. And I think it's probably... But I still have to do the preparation. If I don't do the preparation, the talk doesn't go well. So I have to do the preparation and then leave it behind.

It's something like that. And I think maybe, you know, I was a little more emotional maybe tonight because this is the end of, I mean, we've done 80, you and I have done 60 cities, I believe, but that's so far it's been 85 and this is kind of the end of it. It's not, I'm going to Australia in February and then Europe will get in March. This is an ending. It's an ending of the North American section of this. It's been quite an overwhelming experience to do that much traveling and to talk to so many people with that degree of seriousness and serious intent.

It's a relief, too, to be finished for a while, I think. And so, well, so that all came together, I suppose, to influence what I said tonight. All right, let's start with a good one then. Will you move to America and run for President of the United States? That job makes people old. Well, it's a very nice suggestion, but it's obviously impossible, so I don't have to think about it. Thank God. Thank you for that literal answer. How does scientists avoid their own biases? Oh, by

competing with other scientists. I mean, you, well, look, there's a couple of answers. So this is what I tell my graduate students. Look, there's lots of things that we've discovered in psychology that aren't real. Lots of them. Now, that's true in science in general, right? Because people make mistakes. Now, okay, so here's the problem. So if you're a graduate student and you're moving to get your PhD

and then maybe you wanna have an academic career, you have to amass a list of research publications and in order to publish something, you have to have discovered something. So if you don't discover something, you don't publish, and then no matter how hard you work, you fail. So the reward system isn't set up exactly right because it rewards publication and not truth.

And so, and it's tricky. Let me give you an example. So I had this graduate student who worked really hard. Here is the project. We were trying to predict academic performance. Great. We already knew that you to predict academic performance, grades. We already knew that you could predict with IQ, and quite well, and you can predict with conscientiousness,

which is a big five-trade. And so you can pick up about 45 to 50% of the variation in grades with IQ and conscientiousness. And maybe you could predict more accurately, and maybe that would be useful for selecting students, for example. So we used this questionnaire that tested that assessed people's values that was very well

documented. A lot of work, decades of work had gone into it, and we thought, well, we'll give people IQ test, and we'll give them a test of conscientiousness, and then we'll give them the value assessment, and we'll see if we can use values to pick up a little bit of what's left over. And we gave them a very thorough IQ test because we wanted to let IQ do its job and we gave them a very good conscientiousness test. So we set up the study properly and when my student ran the study, he found there were 12 values that were being assessed and two of them helped predict grades.

Publication. OK, but by that time, I already knew that just because you found something once didn't mean it was true. So I said to him, you can't publish it, you have to replicate it. When you replicate it didn't work. So then we replicated it again, it didn't work. That was like two and a half years, done. Right, and he never got his PhD. Now there were other reasons,

but that was a big part of it. It was very demoralizing to him. And I could have said, well, published the first paper. So now, so then you think, well, who the hell is going to be a scientist under those conditions? Because the more honest you are, the less likely that you're going to be able to publish something. That's rough, man, especially when it's a lot of work to do a study, a lot. It's a year and a half to do a solid work to do a study and publish it. Minimum. Okay, so then why not cheat?

But or more, it's more subtle than that. So imagine that you have a set of data It stacks and stacks of numbers in a spreadsheet and there's lots of ways you can analyze it and Some of those analysis are gonna look better than others now you remember your whole damn career is on the line So you might think well how can you stop yourself from being biased towards doing precisely those analysis that are gonna produce the results you want from being biased towards doing precisely those analysis that are going to produce the results you want. I mean, even if you're an honest person, if you're an honest person, you would understand

that you would have that bias, because there's a lot riding on this, man, your whole future. So what did I tell my students? I said, look, guys, this is what you got to understand. If you discover something that isn't there, you can spend the next 15 years of your life studying it. So do you really want to do that? Not only that, if you publish it, then other people will spend the next 15 years of their

life studying it. And maybe that's okay, because those are other people. Obviously, it's not okay. But you know what I mean? It's more distant. It's like, establish a falsehood, tangle yourself up, and it devote your life to its analysis. That's on your epitaph. I studied a phenomenon that did not exist. Right?

Okay, so that's one way that you can avoid your bias. It's like you gotta be afraid of the right thing. You wanna fail in the short term, that's a real problem. You wanna risk failure in the short term. You be honest, you do your data, and else it doesn't work, you scrap the study. That hurts. Doesn't hurt as much as wasting 20 years of your life.

And getting more and more crooked with each repetition, right? Until there's nothing left of your scientific integrity at all, and then nothing left of your integrity. It's a terrible, terrible outcome. So I try to terrify my students into abandoning their bias. But, well, because it's the only reliable way of getting rid of your bias is to be afraid of the pitfalls that it will, that it will throw up in front of you. And then, of course, science formalizes this as well. It's like, you know, we published

a paper in a journal called Psychological Review on the relationship between entropy, which is the tendency of things to deteriorate across time, to randomize across time and anxiety. Because I think anxiety is a response to emergent entropy. And we wrote that paper for two years and then it was reviewed. I think it went through 19 separate review processes. And each time three people assessed the paper and basically the response. If you

submit a scientific paper, here's why a scientist has a party. They never do, by the way, but if they were going to have a party, this would be why. They submit a paper to a journal and then they get a letter back like three months later, four months later. So you've put a year and a half into it. And the paper says, there's three opinions, usually. And then the editor summarizes the opinions. And here's the summary. Everything about your stupid experiments sucked. And we don't think you're very smart.

But if you do these 25 difficult things and you do them better than what you already did, there's a tiny chance that we would allow you to resubmit the paper. Then you go out and have a party because that constitutes good news in the scientific world. So, and I mean, I'm not saying that scientists have it any harder, like if you write a screenplay, good luck to you, man. Like you just don't have a chance of ever having that do anything. It's the problem with creativity, right? It's like, even if it's a really good screenplay, the probability that that will be made into a play, and that the play will be successful, or it'll be made into a movie, it's like,

no, no, you're way more likely to be struck by lightning while you're asleep in your bed. So, I know the default position is rejection. So, okay, so, so, but that's also how scientists control for bias. It's like, you can't just publish a paper, it's hard, you have to send it out for people who are very, very skeptical to destroy before it reaches the light of day. And in disciplines that are, that still have some integrity,

you can game the peer review system. And that's really happened in the humanities in my estimation, terribly. You can game the peer review system, but it's not game in science. 1990% of the time. And so you work against your own bias by being terrified of producing a false positive result,

because then you waste your life, and then other people control your bias in the competition for publication. And that means that, you know, there's this replication crisis in social psychology. Some of you may know about, some of you may not. Many of the great findings in social psychology haven't replicated

when people have put them to the test. And everybody's all shorted out about that. It was like only 30% of the classic social psychology papers replicated. I read that, I thought, wow, 30%, I would have been on five. Because it's really hard to discover something. And even if you do it rigorously in an unbiased way, and you're subject to peer review review and you use proper scientific methodology,

the probability that you'll discover something genuine and real that's new is really low. It's really hard. If we're batting .3, that's great as far as I'm concerned. You know what I mean? You think about this in other domains. It's like, what's the problem? You start a new business. What's the probability that it'll fail? It's like 19 out of 20. It's like, what's the problem? You start a new business. What's the probability it'll fail? It's like 19 out of 20. It's gonna fail. What doesn't mean you shouldn't start a business because we need businesses,

but almost everything you do is likely to fail, at least in its first iteration. So the fact that there's failure in science is like, well, of course there is, it's very hard to get things right. So, but it's worth it, man. If you can get something right, then, you know, that's the other thing I tell my students, don't underestimate the utility of getting something right

if you can actually do it. Like, we produce this program that helps people write about their future. It's called the Future Authoring Program. And it's at self-authoring.com if you're interested. And I looked at the literature to try to find something that was solid that people could do for themselves that would be of utility for them. And so I scoured the literature because it's very hard to find an intervention that is

self-applied that is likely to work. And then we tested it, and if people do the future authoring program when they're in university, they're 30% more likely to stay in university. It's a huge effect. And so thousands of people have done this now, thousands of university students,

and they're 30% more likely to stay in university. So that's a huge impact, because we think we got something right. We replicated it three times in three different once in at McGill University with high achieving I.I.V. League type students once out of business school in Holland with thousands of undergraduate business students and once in a like a vocational college community college and it had the same effect in all three places. And so, and then, well, now we can distribute it online

and thousands of people can do it. So if you can get something right, the payoff is massive. And so that's another reason to try not to be biased, because you might hit gold, you know? And so that's worth being extremely skeptical and cautious about. So I always told my graduate students, you think you found something?

Go do the analysis again and see if you can make it go away. Do the analysis six or seven different ways, because there's different ways. Statistics isn't an exact science. It's an investigative technique. Go back and do your analysis and see if you can make your result disappear. If you can't make it go away, you still probably don't have anything, but the probability is slightly higher. Just to be clear, we're not getting to all the questions.

Oh, I like this one. Who is your go-to source that you trust for news? Who is your go-to source that you trust for news? One guy likes CNN back there. That's a great question. Well, for a long time it was the economist magazine. I like the economist. I like the Atlantic monthly for a long time, but I don't really care for it now. It's got social justice trouble, bad social justice trouble, even though they do publish

some essays now and then, Kualaete, I like. Kualaete's pretty good. Kualaete's pretty good. You know, I mean, a fairly diverse range of topics. I believe that they're oriented in the right direction. But in terms of mainstream news, man, you can't trust the CBC in Canada. You could trust the CBC for a long time until about five or six years ago,

and then all of a sudden that was gone, man, it was gone. And so the major news networks in the US, I don't pay any attention to them, I never watch CNN, I never watch NBC. I don't even remember the rest of them. CBS, does that even still exist? It's like, I've been treated well by Fox, you know. So, so, and ignored by the other media except MSNBC and of course they took out a terror. They did an absolute MSNBC. Did the worst piece on me of any journalist? And that is an intense competition.

You have to be in order to win that competition, you have to be incompetent and malevolent both at the same time, and they manage that. What do you think it says about Fox that they're the only ones that put us on? I mean, I've got Tucker coming on my show next week. I can't get any of those guys. Well, that's easy. It says that you're in the basket of deplorables along with me. Hey. We're in good company. That's all right. I love my son, but do not want to attend his gay marriage ceremony due to my beliefs. I've expressed my love and support, but it feels dishonest to attend. Help.

Oh, God. my love and support, but it feels dishonest to attend. Help. Oh God. Hey, it's our last night for a while, you know? Okay, well look, I'm not going to tell you what to do, and the reason for that is that I don't know what you should do When if you're a clinician I'm a clinician and there's a rule if you're a clinician and one of the rules is there's a number of them one of the rules is Do not steal people's destiny from them and so what I would do if you were sitting down with me to To solve this problem is we would lay out

the argument on both sides in as much detail as possible so that we really understood the landscape and then we would also have a discussion about what it is that you want to have happen. So what do you envision as the future that you want to bring into being? And you know, you could make a case that you could sacrifice your principles even at the cost of your psychological well-being to show support for someone that you love or you

could say, well, you have deeply rooted convictions and you feel that your son has picked a path that isn't appropriate and you're not going to be complicit in that decision. I mean, those are basically the positions, right? And I'm absolutely not making case for one of those positions against the other in your particular case, because I don't know the particulars of your situation. I think that it's necessary under those circumstances to ask yourself very hard questions, though, is like, what makes you so sure that your motives are 100% pure? You know, because the case you're making is that the reason that you won't attend the ceremony is because of a commitment to a certain kind of moral integrity on your part.

And that could be the case. I mean, maybe you're maybe maybe that's true. And maybe it's maybe it's 100% true. Maybe it's 80% true. Maybe it's 50% true. I don't know, but I would say that you should investigate the possibility that there are other motivations than the one that you stated.

Because almost everyone in complicated situations has is suffering from multiplicity of motivations. And God only knows what's motivating you. It might be only what's good, but it might not be. And you need to figure that out, because to the degree that you're motivated not to attend by motivations that you are not willing to understand, this will not work out well.

So that's... APPLAUSE What is one skill that you think everyone should master in their lifetime? Negotiation. People are very bad at it. They're really, they're really unbelievably bad at it. It's actually quite a miracle how terrible people are at negotiation. And so to negotiate, to negotiate, the first thing you have to do is you have to figure out what you want,

or need and want, let's say. And that's hard enough, because what are you going to do with minute to yourself? What you want? Highly unlikely. I mean, first of all, if you make what you want clear to yourself, then you know when you're failing. That's annoying. So one of the rules I'm writing about in my new book, which is called 12 more rules for life, how creative. One of the rules is don't hide things in the fog. And one of the reasons that people don't

make what they want clearer to themselves that people don't make what they want clearer to themselves is because if you make what you want or need clear, then you can tell when you're deviating from the proper path. And that's painful. So if you leave your future foggy and unarticulated, then you can't tell when you're failing. Well, good luck negotiating under those circumstances

because you don't know what to ask for. And then if you're negotiating with your wife, well, and you want something, then you have to admit to her what it is that you want, and then she can use that as a weapon. Well, and you'll do the same to her. It's not, it's not, it's not like that's the particular curse of women, but the problem is that if you, if you let someone else know what you want or need, then you reveal your vulnerability to them. And so you really have to trust them in order to do that, and maybe you're not willing to do that, but then you're not going to get what you want or you need. So there's another barrier to negotiation. It's really hard, you know, but it's a strange thing because if you're careful and you decide what it is that you need and

you ask for it, you overwhelmingly increase the probability that you will get it. Well, first of all, I tweeted something out the other day. You're much more likely to hit a target if you aim at it. And then I put the then I put the future authoring program, you know, there, and I got what you'd expect from Twitter, which was, you know, some nice responses and some responses, like, well, could you possibly say something more obvious? It's like these Twitter geniuses will look at a statement like that and think, oh, well, that's so obvious. It doesn't need to be said at all.

It's like, no, that's not right. People don't aim. They don't aim. They don't let themselves know what they want or need because it means coming to terms with their own vulnerability. And it is definitely the truth that you won't hit a target if you don't aim at it. And it's also the truth that it's very difficult to specify the target and aim. It's terrifying. But I do know from, I would say, vast experience dealing with many, many people that if you aim at something, you will at least move towards it, at least that.

And at least in moving towards it, you might find something even better day in that. And so, negotiation, but you start with yourself, you negotiate with yourself, what is it that you want and need? Can you even admit that to yourself? And it's very difficult because you have to come to terms with your vulnerability to do that. And so, and then, you know, there's another impediment.

Like let's say we've had a relationship for a while and we've, you've thrown a thousand darts at me and I've thrown a thousand darts at you and we've pulled some of them out, but not all of them. And so we're little on the edge, aside around each other. And so, if I let you know what I want, you might give it to me. And then I'd be forced to think that you were okay. And I do want to think you're okay because I'm full of darts from like our last thousand unresolved conflicts.

And so I'm not even going to let you know what I want because then you'd give it to me and then I'd have to like you and that would be annoying. I thought we'd been doing just fine, but Boxer's briefs are free-balling. I think we went through this at one point. I think I told you once that that's why I wear pants so that I don't have to discuss that particular question. All right, we've only got time for one more. I think this is kind of fitting to end this leg of the tour.

Can you describe a potential ideal human society 100 years from now? Well, let's make it shorter, ten years from now. Hillary Clinton is president. You're trying to get us killed, what are you doing? Oh, yeah, and then we're finally all civil to one another as a consequence. 10 years from now. Well, it would be good if Africa was richer. That's a reasonable, probably event. We've eradicated the five major communicable diseases, including tuberculosis. That could happen. We've taken whatever steps are necessary to eradicate child malnutrition.

That's inexpensive and could happen. We've decided to be proper stewards of the ocean. That would be good. And the fish are coming back in their plentiful numbers. That would be good. We have harnessed the capacity of our online technology to provide everyone in the world with access to an infinite library of educational resources so that people can learn whatever they want for virtually no cost, unbelievably efficiently. And we've managed to integrate our materialist scientific view

with its religious underpinnings. That's all within our grasp. That'd be pretty good if we could do that in ten years, but God, the sky's the limit. And maybe we have 50 colonies on Mars because Elon Musk has been successful. That'd be cool. How do you work doing? This is where Peter's in and I smoke a blunt on stage. You guys cool with that? All right, well, as we're wrapping up the American tour, I just want to tell you that this has been the professional thrill in my career, but actually the personal thrill.

I am a better person because of this, because for you guys that are sitting here getting this, imagine doing this 60 times and having him stare at you at the end for 40 minutes. It's pretty intense. I'm a better person because you and I'm honored that you included me in this. And let's go take over Europe in a couple weeks, huh? I'm going to get out of the way. Give it up for Jordan Peters and everybody. Thank you. Thank you everyone. It was a great pleasure to be here.

Thank you very much for coming out. It was a lovely place to have this tour. So good night to you all. 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 JordanBeePutersincom for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. Thanks everyone for tuning in and all of positivity recently. 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.p.

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.com. My online writing programs designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at selfauthoring.com, that selfauthoring.com. From the Westwood One Podcast Network. you