The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Structuring Your World View

Episode Date: January 26, 2020

A 12 Rules for Life lecture from Jordan Peterson in Australia on Feb. 11, 2019 Thanks to our sponsors! https://www.ashford.edu/jordan http://trybasis.com/jordan/

Welcome to Season 2 Episode 43 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's Daughter and Collaborator. Today's episode is a 12 rules for life lecture recorded in Adelaide, Australia on February 11, 2019, named Structuring Your World View. Enjoy the podcast. Thank you. Thank you. It's good to see that you put some more effort into this than those people in Perth. They couldn't even conjure up any protesters. So what I thought I'd always have a problem in the back of my mind that I'm trying to work on when I do one of these lectures.

And I have a set of problems that I'm always working on and I'm trying to clarify their nature more. So they're easier to state and also to formulate more precise and hopefully useful answers. I think that's a nice combination, precision and utility. It's a nice quality for a tool, for example, and most ideas are best conceptualized as tools, because we have to make our way in the world, and we're tool using creatures and

So we need accurate tools and so Formulating things precisely and elegantly so that they can be used properly in the world as a It's a worthy aim and it's certainly the aim of any Intellectual endeavor that's worthy of worthy of the name, and it's certainly the name of any intellectual endeavor that's worthy of the name. It's not something that's merely abstract or ivory tower. If it is, there's something wrong. I thought what I would do today is to see if I could get a little farther in describing the

structure through which we look at the world. And I think that I'm going to try to make this case. We'll see how it goes. At the highest resolution level, the structure is actually quite simple and quite understandable. But at the highest levels of abstraction, it gets much more difficult and harder and harder to represent and harder to understand, but also more and more important. Because you know, the things you do from second to second, well, in some sense, they're not that important, but how that all adds up to your whole life,

that's important. What's kind of easy to say what you're doing from second to second or minute to minute, but it might be difficult to say what it is that you're doing for your whole life or what you should be doing for your whole life even even more particularly but But it's necessary to to know all of that

and so I'm going to see if I can meld some things together tonight that I haven't been able to meld together before so I Think I'm going to start with a relatively simple observation. If you're a psychologist, there's a number of things that you do to help people. If you're a good psychologist, there's a number of things you do to damage them if you're a bad psychologist, but let's assume that you're a good psychologist, there's a number of things you do to damage them if you're a bad psychologist But let's assume that you're not a bad psychologist to begin with You help them

Reflect upon Events in their lives that damaged them And it's those are times when they they went off the track in some sense or someone pushed them off the track. You can tell when something like that's happened in your life, often because you have negative emotional reaction to it, that's the first thing, that's what negative emotion signifies, that you've gone off the path in some fundamental way. And then you have negative memories,

and the negative memories, especially if they're still alive, especially if they're more than about 18 months old. If the negative memories are still alive, it means that you've gone off the path in a way that you don't understand and you've never really completely found your way back. And if you had, you wouldn't have the negative memory anymore. You would have fixed it.

You would have extracted the information from the occurrence that was necessary to put things right again. And that's a useful thing. It's useful to know that, you know. And just from a practical perspective, if you have a memory that won't let you go. In some sense it's because there's part of you that stuck back there.

You never imagine that you have to understand every where you've been, especially have to understand where you've been if it wasn't good. And the reason that you need to understand where you've been if it wasn't good is so that you don't go there again, right? You know, because that's the purpose of memory, it's not to remember the past. It's to remember the past in such a way that you can duplicate the good things about the past in the future and that you can avoid the bad things about the past in the future. Again, it's too alike, it's practical. And so if you have a memory that's 18 months older, older, there's neurological reasons for that.

And it's still negative, it means that there's a hole that you fell in and you might fall in it again. Because you don't know how it was that you got there. And so the part of your brain that produces negative emotion isn't going to let that go. Ever, it will never let that go until you figure it out because it's there to protect you. And if it thinks that there's a trap waiting for you that you might suddenly fall in at any moment because you don't understand how it happened, then it's never gonna let you go. But it's interesting how abstract this process can be.

I'd been working with this gentleman, who had a brutal, brutal, brutal childhood, man, you just can't imagine it. It was everything you could hope for in a brutal childhood. I mean, he was taken away from his parents. He was assaulted in the most reprehensible manner by the most malevolent people when he was completely helpless for years on end, starved, taken away from his family, demeaned brutal, man. And he often had nightmares about it.

And he's about 50. He's about my age now, had nightmares about it. And nightmares especially would occur during the year when the same month that he would have returned to school. That's actually quite common. It's one of the things that you learn if you study dreams is that often the time of dream occurs has some relevance to its fundamental under,

its fundamental meaning. And it's not easy to figure out what a dream means often, which is also quite mysterious because you think if the damn dream had something to say, that'd just come out and say it. Like what the hell is the point of the mystery, you know? And Freud's answer to that was that dreams contained information that people resisted.

They didn't want to know. And so the dream had to be, in some sense, camouflaged symbolically to make it palatable in some sense to the perceiver. Which I don't think is true, except in a very restricted number of cases, I like Carl Jung's explanation a lot better. I think it's true. It went along with explanation. It was also generated by a developmental psychologist named Jean-Pierre J. It was very interested in dreams. Their notion was that dreams are just confusing because they're

the birthplace of thought. A dream is where you start to think something up, but you haven't got it fully thought up, and that's why it's not clear, because it wouldn't be clear if you were just thinking it up. And you know what that's like, lots of times you're just starting to think something up, and it's not clear. You see this with arguments that you have with people very frequently, you know, if you live with someone in an intimate situation, husband or a wife, you come home and you're crabby and miserable about some damn thing.

And maybe something will trigger you, I don't know, someone does something you think is annoying, and it might be a new explode to a degree that's much greater than the event seems to warrant. And then you have a bit of a conflict with your person, because they're not very happy about being the target for your emotion, and then you have a fight about it, and then like two hours later you figure out what the hell it was that you were upset about, and maybe it was something that your boss said three days ago that seemed

to indicate that the promotion that you'd been hoping for and working for for like three years was less likely to go to you than to someone else. And you didn't bloody well even know that was what was bothering you, you know. And it took a lot of digging to get down into the underlying structure of your thinking, your fantasy before you could even find out what the hell the emotion was there for. You know, if you communicate intently with people that you love, or even people that you don't love, you find very, very frequently it takes a long time to, if you're having a conflict, to even figure out what the conflict is about.

You know, once you figure that out, well, sometimes that can be terribly difficult, but often once you figured out what the conflict is about. Once you figure that out, well, sometimes that can be terribly difficult, but often once you figure out what the conflict actually is about, you know, your three quarters of the way to resolving it. And dreams are sort of, well, dreams are a part of that process, is that they're part of how we stretch ourselves out into the world with fantasy, you know, and think about how things might be. And maybe they're not that way, but maybe they are. We don't leave from not knowing to knowing perfectly in one fell swoop. There has to be this intermediary process of, well, maybe of acting out and then of imagining

and then of contemplating the imagination and then of articulating the contemplation and then of communicating it and then of planning as a consequence of the communication. Then you kind of have a handle on the world before then. It takes all of that to come up with real knowledge. Anyways, one of the things that was quite cool about having talked to my friend about his dreams is that he often has these dreams where he's still being attacked and he's five years old.

And really, he wakes up with physical symptoms, really serious physical symptoms of almost, it's almost impossible to believe that someone could have the physical symptoms that he does, that I'm not going to describe them, but there are consequences of these nightmares, and then he takes it out on his family, and you know, he feels bitter and cynical about the world and hates people and himself, and it's no bloody wonder. I can tell you that. It's amazing that in his good as shape as he is given what he went through, it's hell

of a thing to recover from, to forgive, to forget. Those words are weak, man. When you're talking about situations where people have been through hell, those are just cliches. But one of the things I suggested to him was that, and this is a good thing to suggest to people, you can do this with dreams. So if you have a recurrent nightmare, for example, what that means is that your imagination has gripped a part of the world that you don't understand that presents a danger to you. And it's part of the anxiety and disgust system, if it's producing negative emotion generally.

It's an alarm system, and it isn't going to let you go. You think, well, why do I have to be cursed with a recurrent nightmare? Well, it's because you have an alarm system and the alarm system is saying danger, danger, danger, danger, danger, danger. And unless you think about how to not have that danger, then the alarm system isn't going to go off because it doesn't want you falling into the same hole again. And so it's miserable that you're stuck with the problem. I. And so it's miserable that you're stuck with the problem. I mean, there's no joke that you're stuck with the problem. You can't just wish it away because the problem is real.

Now, it doesn't mean it's well-defined necessarily, you know, because an alarm system isn't a precise diagnosis of a problem. It's just a description that something's gone wrong, and then to precisely define it and then to conjure up a solution takes a tremendous amount of work. And so when I was talking to him, I suggested, well, look, you know, here's something you're going to have to do, and you're going to hate it because it's a hateable thing. You wake up in the morning, you have these nightmares. and you're going to hate it because it's a hateable thing. You wake up in the morning, you have these nightmares.

Now what you have to do is when you have the nightmare, you have to sit during the day and you have to think about the nightmare. You have to bring it back to mind in as much visual detail as you can and you have to allow the emotions that you were experiencing to re-emerge. And you think, God, if all the bloody things you wouldn't want to ask someone to do, if they were suffering in that manner, it would be exactly that.

But there's a woman named Edna Foa, who's a real psychologist, and she treated women who had post-traumatic stress disorder from violent sexual abuse, stranger rapes, which are actually quite rare, and of course, very horrifying, and she used exposure, same sort of idea, and she hooked her clients to psychophysiological measuring devices that measured heart rate and skin conductance and other indices of physiological response, and then had them relive their horrifying experiences voluntarily and showed that the women who showed the highest levels of negative response, like the

most extreme levels of negative response, well they were re-experiencing voluntarily the traumatic occurrence, got better faster and stayed better longer. And it's quite a mystery, you know, because you think, well, if the damn event did you in, so to speak, why in the world would re-experiencing the event be curative. And the answer is there's a bloody big difference between having something happen to you accidentally and facing it purposefully. Like, there's all the difference in the world. It truly is the case.

You don't even respond physiologically to the same thing that you run away from, that you do, that when you face it, your whole different physiological systems are in play. And fundamentally, we're built to confront catastrophe voluntarily. That's that works. Now that doesn't mean you won't get killed because it is after all catastrophe. And none of this is mindless optimism just because you decide that you're going to act in a heroic manner,

doesn't necessarily mean that you're not going to get killed. But, and you're going to get killed anyways, because that's how life goes. But you don't have a better bet than that, generally speaking, than to confront what it is that's threatening you for rightly. And in that, there's some possibility that you'll discover how it is that you will deal

with it. And it's not easy, you know. This friend of mine, you know, he was abused by terrible men, the sort of men who would sexually assault children who were putatively under their educational care, let's say, and you know, that's a dark problem to untangle. You know, I mean, one of the things that an experience like that leaves you with is, well, why? Period, why?

Period, right? Why, period? Why me, that would be the next question, and another question would be, how in the world can there be people like that? And then another question would be, how can the world be like that? And another question would be, well, what am I like if there are people who are like that?

And I'm also a person. That's another problem. And then another problem is, well, what am I left with of myself once I've been through an experience like that? You know, and it's not like, it's not like those are simple questions to answer. Every single one of those questions is an absolute bloody killer. Like they're deep, deep, deep philosophical questions, and they're their sorts. And that's really why those sorts of occurrences cause post-traumatic stress disorder.

They're so difficult that they actually, that the mere fact that the question has been posed in some sense is enough to produce psychophysiological damage. Because if you have post-traumatic stress disorder, it produces relatively permanent neurological transformations. One of the things that happens is that part of your brain called the amygdala, which is responsible for negative emotion. It's responsible for many things, but that's one of the things that's responsible for.

It grows. Another part called the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that seems to be something like the central meeting place between articulated memories and the control systems for emotions. It shrinks. Now memories control emotions because, you know, if you're somewhere and you know what you're doing and you've been there before well then you you have the situation mastered in in some sense all of you have been in situations like this before right in crowds in a theater

Listening to a speaker you know you're familiar with this and because you're familiar with it, you have memories that are similar to it and so the memories stop you from being apprehensive, you know, like most of you don't know the people that you're sitting beside and you certainly don't know all the people around you, but you notice they're all kind of acting the same way you are which indicates that they at least know what the bloody rules are and are unlikely to go off sideways in some catastrophic way. So your memory structures inhibit your emotions, and that's what keeps you calm. And that's also really something unbelievably worth knowing, because one of the things that

I had tried to wrestle with for a long time was why it was that people were so Let's say enamored of their belief systems You know why we would fight to the death to protect our belief systems because we clearly will and Part of the answer to that is well our belief systems regulate our emotions You know, it's the fact that it's it's more complicated than that because it's not only that you know how the world works and because you know how the world works, then you don't have to be terrified everywhere you go, like you would be if you were dropped naked in a jungle in the middle of the night, let's say. It's not merely that you know, it's that you know and other people know

at the same time so that we can all go places together and we can act out the same belief system. And because we can do that, well then we can cooperate and we can compete and we can predict each other quite nicely. We kind of have some sense that we're all pursuing the same aims, at least to some degree. Well, here we're pursuing precisely the same aim. I mean, technically speaking, all of you are aiming your perception at the stage, right? So technically you're all pursuing the same aim and you all can see that and you're all acting that out and that's why you can sit here calmly and maybe even more than calmly, you, calmly and risk being interested in what's going on.

And so that's interesting, that there's this interesting isomorphism between each of our beliefs. If we're in a culture that's functional, we all have our beliefs about how the world works. But then we share those beliefs with the people that are around us, and then if there's a match between how we think the world should be going and how everyone else is acting around us, then we're calm. And that's why and how beliefs regulate our emotions. And so that's why culture is necessary. It's partly why the idea of multiculturalism is actually wrong. Now, I don't want to be, I don't want to be like too cut and dried about that because there's some real utility in diversity of human experience, right? And it's, and that's

because human beings have complicated problems to solve. And if we all thought exactly the same way, well, that would be great if we were all doing perfectly well, but it would be a complete bloody catastrophe if anything ever went wrong, because we don't only have, we wouldn't have any solutions to the problems. So we want some variability in people, because new problems are going to come along, and who knows who's going to solve it? It isn't going to be everyone. It'll be some odd ball who comes up with some crazy solution. Well, a thousand other people come up with crazy solutions that are wrong and maybe the one guy or the one woman who

manages the proper crazy solution produces the answer for all of us and thank God for diversity of opinion because of that. But having said all that and knowing perfectly well that variability and human ability is a remarkable thing because we can all share that as well as some of us are musicians and you know some of us are artists and some of us are teachers and some of us are lawyers and some of us are plumbers and thank God for all that. We still have to be nested inside a coherent structure that's partly cognitive,

that it's partly your belief system, and it's partly sociological, so that we are all playing the same game. And that's really the definition of peace and prosperity and productivity. At some level, we have to be playing the same game because we can't trust each other. Anywhere that a bunch of kids on a elementary school playground,

they can't organize themselves unless they're all playing the same game. It's just fratcious and fighting if they can't decide that, well, it's time to play 10, time to take 10 minutes to play soccer instead of just that, well, it's time to play ten, time to take ten minutes to play soccer instead of just arguing about what game we're going to play. So, you know, this is a technical thing that we have to get right when we're thinking about the multitude of cultures that inhabits the world.

It's like, yes, the diversity is a wonderful thing, and let's not be foolish about that. The diversity culturally and also individually. But that has to be nested inside something that coheres and brings us together. And then the question is, well, what might that be? That's actually part of what I'm trying to drive at. Tonight, my friend, he, one of the things I recommended to him with his dreams, was, said, you got to think about your dream, and you got to bring it to mind, man, you're not going to like

this, but you got to bring it to mind. And maybe you should do it when you first wake up because it's fresh in your mind, and then maybe you should do it just before you go to sleep again. And so that's a good trick, by the way, if you have recurrent nightmares, or even if you don't sleep very well, and you know that there are thoughts that are disturbing you, mostly dream related thoughts, you bring the dream to mind just before you go to sleep.

And just before you fall asleep, you kind of enter that stage where you start to dream, but you're still a little bit awake. The images start to come, it's called a hypoagogic state. If you can bring the dream to dream, but you're still a little bit awake. The images start to come, it's called a Hippogodgic State. If you can bring the dream to mind then, that's extremely helpful, especially if you can also play with it a little bit and update it a little bit. So what I said to him was, well, you're not five. This is the thing, your dream's wrong, right?

I mean, you were helpless and the dream is representing that, but for somehow, you're still five in your damn dream. It's like, that's no good. It's no wonder you're still terrified. You're 58. You're not five. You're stuck back there. It's like a part of his soul is back there. That's more true than you'd think, because it means part of him didn't grow up, and it means there's information back there that he didn't incorporate. And so that means part of them hasn't developed as much as it needs to, and that's partly why he's still suffering. Then he told me that he hadn't looked in the mirror for 35 years. So that was really something, you know? That was really remarkable. And it was some of that with shame,

while a lot of it was shame. And I said, well, well, it's no bloody wonder that you don't know how old you are then. It's like, you know, you haven't seen how old you are. I said, maybe you'd have to look in the mirror, you know? And so he said he'd never brushed his teeth and the mirror, he didn't comb his hair and the mirror, none of that.

He avoided mirrors. And so he was avoiding self-reflection, right? He didn't want to see who he was. And you can understand that if you've been damaged badly enough that you might not want to see that. But it doesn't matter because there it is, man. And what are you going to do? Not look.

Because it's there. And so I said, well, you better spend an hour looking at yourself in the mirror. And so he did that. And he said it was a very strange experience because he didn't realize how old he was. Because, well, 58, it's not young, you know. And so he could see all sorts of things about him that were quite shocking that his face was somewhat lined and his teeth were not the teeth of someone who was 20. And he's not a bad-looking guy for 58,

but he's had a hard life, and he's a little bit beat up around the edges, and could be worse. But it was quite a shock for him. And he said it made him cry, it made him laugh, and it was a shock. And he did that a lot and he thought about his dreams a lot and then he started getting older in his dreams. It was really cool and quite fast too, give again that he'd been stuck there for 53 years, took about four months before he was 40 in his dreams. And now he's as old as he is in his dreams. And he said the truly negative elements of his dreams have just about disappeared completely, along with that, along with that

a fair bit of the bitterness. And I like, look, I don't want to be, again, I'm not any polyanna about this. He's not done with this. You know, when school time comes around next year, I'm sure he'll make another descent into the abyss, you know, because these things are very difficult to straighten out. His big problem is that he has to come to terms with the fundamental reality of human evil, right? I mean, there's just, I mean, how the hell else are you going to say it? When you were thinking about, so you went to a school that was supposed to educate people, and that the school was taken over, at least in part,

by people whose fundamental goal was to sexually pray on children in the most sadistic possible manner, imaginable, and sort of starve them, and misuse them, and not educate them all at the same time, all well-pretending that what they were doing was something Christian and positive. Now, I don't know what your word for that is. Maybe you have a word that's better than evil, but I don't have a better word for that, and so I'm going to stick with it, and it's a damn useful word under those sorts of circumstances. And it's also the case that if terrible

things happen to you and you develop something like post traumatic stress disorder and you don't have a fully fledged philosophy of good and evil, you will not recover. And I've talked to a lot of... And I've talked to a lot of... Applause It's a funny thing to applaud. There's obviously some people in the audience that know this. I've talked to a lot of soldiers over the last year and a half, two years, who've been watching my lectures or listening to my podcasts, etc.

And they said, and many of them have said that doing so has helped them rid themselves of the post-traumatic stress disorder, because they've started to become sufficiently sophisticated, philosophically and theologically, so that they can put the terrible things that either happened to them, or that they did, because especially in wartime post-traumatic stress disorders often caused when someone watches themselves do something, they can't believe they could possibly do. And of course, well, what would you expect if you go to war, you know, you're maybe a naive person to begin with, you end up in the battlefield in several times, multiple times, God only knows what sort of situation you're person to begin with, you end up in the battlefield and several times, multiple times. God only knows what sort of situation you're going to be in and God only knows what you'll do. And it certainly might not be something you think you could do,

but like what the hell do you know about yourself? I mean, people are very complicated and they're very deep and they're very dark. And you know, there's plenty of light in this as well, but there's plenty of light in this as well, but there's plenty of dark, and the battlefield is definitely a place where you might encounter it and then have to bear that burden. And if you don't have a context within which to put it, then it's an intolerable burden.

You can't manage it. It's too much the weight of that darkness that characterizes you. You can't reconcile that with your own version of yourself, your old version, naive shallow version of yourself. And so then maybe you have to drink yourself into unconsciousness constantly because there's no other way that you know how to deal with it. And it's no wonder, like it, I mean, these things are no mystery when you investigate them. You think, yeah, well, God, if that happened to me, or if I did that, either way, I'd bloody well be trying

to hide inside a bottle, too. But of course, that's not helpful, right? It's not a good long-term solution. It doesn't just get rid of you here and now for the time being. And that's something, but it's not a good solution for tomorrow or next week or next year, it's just a generating process. So, I wanna talk to you about the belief systems

that we inhabit, and I wanna take them all the way out to the edge, and partly taking all the way out to the edge has something to do with that ability to confront what's terrible. And I would say that part of, okay, we'll do something sideways again here. One of the things we know about human beings is that we have the capacity to get deeply engaged in stories. And the other thing we know about human beings is that we have deep stories, and

the deepest stories we have are religious stories. It's a matter of definition. It's a deeper story, the more like a religious story, it's like. And it's also that we know that there are shallow stories, trivial stories, and that there are deep stories, and that some stories are unaterably deep. We all know that. We don't know why though, right? Because when you say, well, this is a very deep story, it's not like you can just come up with a set of reasons why it's deep, but you know that there are distinctions between literary types from shallow to deep, and deep seems to mean some, means profound. That's another way of thinking about it. It means that it means a lot of things at the same time

at different levels of reality at the same time. That's another kind of indication of deep. And if the story's deep enough, well, then it becomes religious. It's so deep that it has that effect on you. It produces awe, let's say, or it's something that you can't forget, or it's something that a whole culture builds itself on.

Or it's a story that motivates extraordinary axon people's part, like acts of self-sacrifice, or acts of courage, or acts of bravery, or acts of creativity. And when you think about the consequence of Christianity in Europe, was the flowering of this incredible architectural and artistic process over a period of about 2000 years. I mean, it also, you know, your culture. Insofar as it was derived from Europe has elements of the same thing, that incredible architectural and artistic legacy that was all driven by these under underlying fundamental religious ideas that no one really understood, but we're obviously extraordinary and thrilled

by and built institutions to preserve and to reproduce and to describe and to discuss, even though they're mysterious in the same way that dreams are. Well, some of those stories have to do with the necessity of confrontation, really the necessity of confrontation. And more than that, more than that, because that's not the crucial thing. That's the pessimistic thing.

The crucial thing is the notion that through, as a consequence of the voluntary confrontation, the victory can be attained. That's the light. And what's so interesting about that too, and it's why it's so rewarding to deal often with people who had post-traumatic stress disorders, because they've gone to dark places, man, like they're hellish places.

And they come out not always, not always, because if you encounter something terrible, it wouldn't be terrible if it couldn't kill you or permanently damage you. It would just be psychologically terrible. I'm not doubt that that's you. It would just be psychologically terrible. I'm not doubt that that's trivial. It wouldn't be truly terrible. I had another client, a young person who had been bullied very badly by someone in high school who they didn't want to have a relationship with.

A person had asked them out and they refused. And so this person decided they were going to make their life hell on earth, which they did. And they hurt this person so badly that a psychotic episode ensued. And when I first saw the client, the person would sit there and move their hands like this. Couldn't really talk.

And when I asked why, they said, well, I can see these lines and I'm trying to get the lines in order. And that's not normal behavior, you know, like to be uncommunitative like that. And then to also be so immense, immersed in it, like in a hallucination that you're dreaming in that sense while you're awake. I mean, you're way, you're way past normality. And what had fundamentally happened was that the person who had been rejected

romantically conspired with a friend to just tease and torment this person at every chance they could possibly manage in high school. And broke them. And so I talked to my client for a long time. They were also taking anti-psychotic medication, which can be very helpful under such circumstances to at least dampen this symptom of mythology, although they really don't constitute a cure. And we went through what happened, you know.

I asked my client, what happened? We laid out the story over about a six month period written down using this program I developed called the Past Authoring Program, which helps people sort of organize their lives into a coherent biography, because you need to know where you've been so that you know who you are, so that you know where you are, so that you can figure out where you're going, and you kind of have to tell the story of your life to yourself. It's like you're mapping where you've been. And if you haven't done that, then you're all over the place,

and your map is full of holes, and you don't know where you are. And so it's a very useful thing to do. And it was quite painful because, well, there were a lot of negative things to discuss. But over the months, and not so long, we pieced it together. And this person was very curious about how it could be that someone could be so cruel as to make it their goal to destroy someone. And that's a tough question. And some of it had to do with their displeasure at being spurned romantically, right?

People don't like that at all. And it's not surprising, you know, if you're enamored of someone, if you've developed an attraction to them and you'd like to make that manifest, you certainly want it to be reflected. And it's sort of a validation of who you are to have it reflected. But if it's not, if it's rejected, it's like, well, maybe there's something wrong with you. I mean, that's, you're likely response, it's either that or anger. It's like, what the hell's wrong with you?

Aren't I good enough for you? It's like, well, no, as a matter of fact, you're not. Good enough for me. Maybe you're not good enough period. Like in some really fundamental sense, you're just not good enough period. And that's a hell of a thing. And again, it's not merely psychological. It's real. You know, there's lots of people who get rejected non-stop, virtually, their whole lives. And it's not always the case that the reason they get rejected is because they have fundamental flaws that are very difficult to rectify, but it's frequently the case that that's the

reason, and that's not a straightforward thing to come to terms with. And so there's every reason to be unbelievably angry about that, and not only at the person that rejected you. I mean, maybe there are all sorts of things that are wrong with you that maybe they've been wrong from birth. You were just cursed with your inadequacies right at birth. That can certainly happen.

And then you think, well, then who are you angry at? So you're angry at fate. You're angry at the structure of the world in general. I mean, then what do you do? You shake your fist and rage at that, and maybe you take your revenge, and that was certainly what happened in this particular situation. And the school did a very bad job of intervening. And so anyways, as this person told the story, they came back to the world.

It was very interesting. More and more coherent, more and more able to speak in complete sentences, and then in complete paragraphs. Because if you're psychotic, you start to fragment. Hey, right down to the level of the word. If you're really psychotic, schizophrenic, your sense is no longer make sense. The way you put words together, don't add up to the kinds of utterances that other people could understand. The fragments of phrases and fragments of words, and it's like the words only mean what they mean to you and not to someone else anymore. And the crazier you are to speak untechnically, the more fragmented your thinking gets. So if you're manic, and you can be pretty off the rails,

if you're manic, you can usually manage sentences and paragraphs pretty well. But anything above that isn't very coherent, but if your schizophrenic, it's like even the words. You've got the words. Schizophrenics very seldomly invent whole new words, but they often don't mean what other people think they mean. Certainly the phrases don't.

I could see her put herself back together a bit. By bit, phrases started to make sense, the sentences started to make sense, paragraphs started to make sense, and she started to make sense out of what this person was like. And not only that, what people were like, you know? Not just this person that went after her, because it could have been some other person.

It's a part of human nature that that sort of thing can happen. And she was too young and too naive to understand that anyone could go out to purposefully hurt someone. And that is a hell of a thing to encounter. And it's amazing it doesn't break all of us. I think it does to some degree, you know, because when we're young, we're naive, and we think, well, we think at least to some degree, that everybody's good,

and the world is a good place, and then we're betrayed, and then maybe we get cynical and bitter and we think, well, you can't trust anyone, which is true. It's true. Well, it is true because everyone has the capacity to lie and deceive and betray and hurt. Everyone has that capacity and so including you. And so then you might think, well, only a fool would trust. And that actually makes you wiser than the naive person, because the naive person thinks, you know, they're friendly, and they'll open themselves up, and maybe they'll engage

in relationships and all that. But they're naive. So what the hell do they know? It's not like there's any mark of moral virtue there. It's just foolishness. I mean, it's a necessary foolishness and it's an understandable foolishness, but there's nothing virtuous about naive optimism.

And all it is is the viewpoint of an overprotected child. And then you get hurt, betrayed, Dante, when he wrote his book on hell, right? The inferno, it's a journey into Hell, levels of evil. Because that's what Donte was trying to do. He was trying to map out the structure of evil. It's a very interesting book if you understand it in that light. It's like, well, here's minor sins. Here's ways you can act that, well, they're kind of everyday terrible.

But the deeper you go, the worse it gets. And for Dante, the worse was the betrayers. He had them right in the lowest level of hell, right beside Satan himself, who was encased in ice and unable to move, stubborn and arrogant and vicious and resentful, surrounded by the betrayers. And I think that's good.

I think it's very accurate poetically because when you betray someone, what you do is they trust you and trust is a necessary, pre-conditioned for human interaction, right? We can't, you and I can't interact together unless we trust each other because I don't know what the hell you're up to. And you don't know what I'm up to. And I could be up to anything if you don't know what I'm up to and vice versa. And so that means if I don't trust you, I have to be sitting there paranoid, thinking about which set of demonic snakes happens to be taking possession of your action right now, and you have to be doing the same to me and it's unbelievably effortful and difficult and damaging and and

and demoralizing and in interferes completely with any useful cooperation. It's just a bloody catastrophe. So what you have to do is trust and you think think, well, why can you trust when people are capable of all the terrible things they're capable of? And that's a hard question to answer when you've been hurt, and everyone's been hurt. And so then you might ask, well, why should you trust? Because that's for fools. And the answer is, because it's what you do if you're courageous once you're past

cynicism, naivety, first, hurt, second, cynicism, third, trust, courage, fourth. You say, okay, look, the probability that you're any better than me is low and that's not so good. But you know, that doesn't define you entirely. It doesn't define me entirely. And so how is it that we can call the best out of each other instead of the worst? And the answer is, well, you put your hand forward and trust and say, well, here's what I'm going to do and I'm going to act that out. And here's what you're going to do and we have a mutually negotiated solution and we're going to assume that we can do it. And with our eyes open, right, knowing that that could be a faulty solution and that we're both laying ourselves open to further betrayal.

But the upside is, it usually works. You know, it's very, very common that the way you get the best out of someone, even if they're not good people, even if they've made many mistakes, is to trust them with your eyes open. And that seems to call the best out of them, so you say, okay, well, you have a duty to trust, it's duty of courage.

And it's not because you're naive or foolish, and it's because you've decided to dispense with your cynicism. And you're going to lay yourself open to the possibility of betrayal, because that's the best way of putting the world back into order. And I think that's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. I think too. And there's lots of moral actions that seem to me to be associated with courage, that we don't associate with courage, because we don't understand them very well. Trust is one. Think, well, you can trust people because they're trustworthy.

No. If you trust them, they might become trustworthy. That's a whole different thing. Gratitude is the same way. You should be grateful. First of all, it beats the hell out of being bitter. Even though you have your reasons to be bitter. Because bitter is a bad road.

It takes you to a bad place. Whatever you're bitter about, you can bloody well be sure you're going to be much more bitter about the consequences of you being bitter, right? It's a, you know, that's it. It's not a game that's an improvement. So you have your reasons. I was hurt, you know, you say that. I was hurt and really terribly, unforgivably, let's say, and I'm bitter about it.

And so I'm going to withdraw from people and I'm going to be cynical and I'm going to be hurt and I'm going to it. And so I'm going to withdraw from people, and I'm going to be cynical, and I'm going to be hurt, and I'm going to seek revenge as a consequence. It's like, well, go ahead. What happens? You end up in the same place that you were when everything that happened to you that hurt you happened, except worse.

So that just seems like a non-starter. And so you replace bitterness with gratitude. And the reason you do that is because you're courageous and brave, not because you're naive and foolish. It's like you look and you think, no matter how bad your life is, and life can be pretty damn brutal. There are things to be many things to be grateful about. You see people in dire straits and you'll be in dire straits and your family members will be in dire straits.

When my daughter was ill because she was ill for a long time, we used to take her to the sick kids hospital in Toronto. It was a nice hospital as far as a hospital full of sick kids could be. The staff had done everything they could to make it the least amount of hell possible. We were taking her there for pretty damn serious reasons. But then we passed the multiple organ transplant ward and think, God, this is bad, but that. This was hell, but there's some hells underneath that. You know, and then there's the hell of the multiple transplant word for your child while your marriage is falling apart. There's that hell too.

And maybe while you're losing your job, you know, and maybe losing your sanity at the same time, it's like the bottom is a very long way down, man. And so there's reasons to be grateful and you have to find them. And there's a moral necessity to manifest them. And the reason for that is because it's better if you do. It works better. And it is courageous to do that. All right, so I'm going to put all that off to the side for a minute and then I'm going to start with something that's sort of simple and I'm going to build it into something that's complicated and I hope I can manage this properly. So when you're a psychologist, like one of the things

you do is you expose people voluntarily to the things that they're afraid of or disgusted by and avoid that are in their way. You know, you don't just teach people to go play in traffic because it's dangerous. But it isn't merely a matter of confronting danger. That's foolish. It's confronting those things that frighten you and stop you that are obstacles on your way to getting to somewhere that you need to go. So, for example, let's say that you want to move up your career and you're terrified of public speaking. It's like, okay, well, if it's a sophisticated career or any career for that matter and you're terrified of public speaking, well then that's an obstacle. Like, you're not gonna get there. And so then that's something that you have to face.

And if you're a good psychologist, you break it down, you know, you say, okay, well you're afraid of public speaking. What are you afraid of exactly? Can you talk to one person? public speaking, what are you afraid of exactly? Can you talk to one person? You know, can you talk to three people? Could you talk to three people for two minutes? Could you talk to three people for 30 seconds about what you did this morning? Like you can usually find some, first of all,

almost everyone can talk to some other person. So it's not a matter of like elective mutism. It isn't, I just can't speak. It's something other than that. It's like, well, I can't stand seeing all those eyes. One of the things I do when I'm public speaking, is I just never talk to the crowd. So you never talk to a crowd.

It crowds an illusion. Anyways, you just talk to people. I can talk to you. We can sit and have a conversation. No, it's what we're doing right now. So I'm always looking at single people in the crowd, and then there's no crowd. It works way better that way. Anyways, you help people break down their fears into smaller and smaller and smaller fears

until you find a fear that's manageable. It's a dragon that's shriveled to manageable size. See, I could stomp on that thing, no problem. And, you know, and then you do, you move forward towards it and you overcome it and, and, you know, maybe what you do if you're afraid of public speaking is you're at a meeting and you have some question that you need to have answered. And it's an actual question because you want to play this straight and your first task is just ask a damn question at the meeting, you know? And maybe you practice that with the therapist a little bit. What might you say and how would you look at people?

You don't look down at the table, you know, you look at person's eyes generally speaking and you know maybe you put your hands like this so that they're not rattling around or doing all these things they might be doing while you're being nervous, you practice it. And then all of a sudden, you find you can do it. And then you've picked the next most difficult thing that you can manage and you practice that. And pretty soon, you get OK at it. I had another client who, when I first met her,

couldn't go and have coffee with me at a coffee shop downstairs where I had my clinic, even though I was her therapist. That was out of her realm of capability. And by 10 years after that, it took 10 years. It's a long time. She was doing stand-up comedy. That's pretty good, you know? I mean, I don't know if she was any good at it, she had plenty of horrible stories to tell about her life and everyone knows that's always funny. But it was one step at a time for her and she got an unbelievable, long way. You can get an unbelievably long way if you take things one small bit at a time. That's part of humility too.

It's another virtue that we don't talk much about. Humility is try not taking on a task that's bigger than you can manage. And so if you have an ambition, I'm not saying don't be ambitious, you should be ambitious. I think you should be insanely ambitious in some sense and we'll get to that, but that doesn't mean you get to go

from here to saving the world without any intervening effort. You've got to develop some skill. And so you have to think, well, if I'm going to get from here to here, from point A to point B, and I have this thing in my way, I'm afraid of public speaking. I'm embarrassed about that. Then I'm embarrassed about the fact that I have to do something so unbelievably trivial to overcome it that I have to do something so unbelievably trivial

to overcome it that I don't even want to talk to anyone about it because it's so embarrassing to admit that I'm that afraid. It's like, well, you're just dead in the water, then you're stopped. You have to think, yeah, I really do have this problem. It's really that serious and I'm only capable of taking this tiny step forward. You know, and that's humility. That's the best I can do. It's like, it's okay though, because it turns out that if you start doing things right in the direction of facing the things that you're avoiding, it's really good to think about this in terms of what you avoid. If you start to face the things that you're avoiding, you get better and better

at it faster and faster in like a geometrical progression. It's not linear. You get a little better and then you get a little better and then you get a lot better and then you get way better. And it's quite quick. So that's cool. You start slow but it tends to accelerate. And so that's a worthwhile thing to know too. So even if you have to start, you know, with some, sometimes I was training people to not be afraid of elevators, you know, they had an agroaphobia. And it was really a fear of death. And public humiliation is at the bottom of agrophobia. So typical agrophobic fantasy is that you'll go out somewhere a mall or a theater. This is a good one. You'll get trapped in the theater and you'll start having a heart attack. And well, then you're

going to die. And so, you know, that's not so good. And but worse, there's going to be all these people around you watching. And so, while you die, you're going to make a fool of yourself. And so, and that's kind of the two big human fears, right? There's fear of mortality. And so that would be the heart attack itself. And then there's fear of public exposure. And if you're agro-phobic, then you get both at once. It's like you're going to die and you're going to die

like an idiot. So, you know, and it isn't even obvious to people necessarily which of those two are worse, you know, but it doesn't matter. And, well, you can, you end up avoiding then places where you think something bad might happen to you and because something bad might happen to you anywhere, like you could just have a heart attack. You could just have a heart attack right now if you wanted to, right where you're sitting.

You could have a heart attack wherever you are. And so then you start avoiding places where you might have a heart attack, but that's not very helpful because like where are you not going to have a heart attack? And so what ends up is you're at home in your bed, and you might have a heart attack there too, but like where are you? Where are you going to go? You know, you're at home in your bed bad. You can't escape from that. That's it. You've run away as much as you can. And so then you have to go back out into the world and people get afraid of elevators, for example,

because they think they'll get stuck in an elevator. And you might. And then you'll have a heart attack. And then you won't be able to call a doctor. And then you'll die. And so I remember one client, when I was doing exposure therapy with her, the door is open and she looked and she said, that's a tomb. And I thought, that's exactly it.

And that's so interesting too, because that's kind of a place where you see the dream and the reality manifest itself at the same point in the world, hey, because for an ordinary person, well, the elevator's just a way of getting from one floor to another, but when that dream pops up, that dream of death and mortality, then the elevator becomes a tomb, and the thing is the world's a tomb. She was never a mystery to me.

It's like, well, why are you afraid of dying? That's it, it's her, she's afraid of dying. It's like, well, why are you afraid of dying? That's her. She's afraid of dying. It's like, I never asked her, well, why are you afraid of dying? It's like, well, of course, you're bloody well afraid of dying. Who isn't afraid of dying? What's really weird is that we're all not so petrified of dying every second of our lives that we just, everybody should be immobile on their their bed not moving. Why? Well, I might

die. It's like, well, yeah, it's true. You might die. It's like, well, how are you supposed to cope with that? And the answer is people don't know. They just don't think about it. And so the ordinary person is the mysterious person. It's like, well, there you are going about your business. Thoughts of death are generally not entering your mind, even though it could be your day to day. It's like, so why aren't you petrified, and answer is you don't know. You have no idea how it is that you manage that emotional regulation. Whereas someone who's developed agrophobia, they've had all that protective layer peeled

off, and all of a sudden they're seeing the world in its stark reality and they just can't handle it. And they were never mysterious to me. It's like, oh, you're terrified out of your skull. Well, that makes perfect sense. I can understand that. It's like, it's these normal people going about their business day to day. It's like, how can they manage that? Anyways, for her, it was a tomb and I thought, yeah, well fair enough, you know, it's a low probability tomb, but what are you going to do? Does someone you say, look, you're probably not going to die in the elevator. And they think, no, you don't get it.

Infinite threat times tiny probability still constitutes far too much threat. And so you can never argue someone out of a phobia or a fear for exactly that reason. It's like, I don't care how small the probability that I might die in the next 15 minutes is. That's not the point. The point is that I might die. It's not the probability issue. So, so what do you do is someone like that, because in some sense they've realized the truth of the world, but they've only realized part of the truth, that's the thing that's so interesting about doing exposure therapy

in psychotherapy, it's so interesting about people in general, because you re-socialize them in some sense, you say, well, look, you're afraid of elevators. Let's see. Let's see if we can play with that a little bit. We can play with your fear. It's like, how do you feel about sitting? Well, how do we sit at my computer screen and we just call a type of elevator on Google

and get a bunch of images of elevators? And we just sit here and look at them for a while. And the person thinks, I'd rather not. And we say, well, I'd rather not look at a bunch of bloody elevator pictures, either. It's not really the point, you know? But could you do it? Could you do it?

Could you look at one? Could we see what would happen if you looked at one? It's like, well, yeah, I could do that. So then you pop up a picture of an elevator and you say to the person, how are you feeling about this? And they say, well, I can feel my heart rate start to pound, because that's a symptom of agrophobia. And you say, well, just look at the damn thing for a while and see what happens.

Just watch it, just look at it. It's important to look at it because you're searching it out with your eyes. You're exploring with your eyes because your eyes are always moving constantly. They're exploratory organs. They're not just flat. What would you call automatic processors of the world. They're very, they're like fingers. You're feeling the world with They're very, they're like fingers. You're feeling the world with your eyes and looking at things. Just really look at that damn picture. Look at the doors and don't avoid, just look at it.

And they do that. And maybe for two or three minutes, and then you say, well, how are you doing? And they say, well, I'm feeling better about this. You say, well, why don't you just look at the damn thing till you're bored? And that, because that feeling better about this. You say, well, why don't you just look at the damn thing till you're bored? And that's because that's what you want. You go in a hallway and you see an elevator,

you're bored. Well, congratulations, you're healthy. It's like you're not terrified of the elevator. It's like it's just, you don't even see it. It's a memory icon actually to you. It doesn't bother you. And for the person who's terrified of it, it's no longer a memory icon.

It's like a tomb. It's like, okay, I'm bored. Okay, well, how about we look at like five other pictures of elevators? It's like, okay, and you do the same thing, and they do that. And at the end of the session, they're bored of looking at elevator pictures. And that's good. It's like that's a successful session. And there's a bunch of reasons.

One is, well, they're no longer, they're less afraid of something than they were. That's cool. But once even more cool, then this is way more important than the fact that they're no longer afraid, is that they're braver. Because that's the thing about therapy. And this is the thing about human learning, you see,

is you don't learn, except if you're naive, you don't learn to not be afraid. You learn that you can cope and be brave. And those are way different things because to be not afraid means there's no danger. Well, that's not wisdom. There's danger, man. There's you. You're dangerous enough. That's bloody well for sure.

Everyone who knows you knows that. And if you don't know they know that, that just means you don't know that they know you, or they don't tell you. And your partner's dangerous, and other people are dangerous, and nature's dangerous, and society is an oppressive patriarchy, and it's dangerous, and it's bloody well, danger everywhere. And so it's dangerous and it's like it's bloody well danger everywhere. And so being not afraid, it's like that's just foolishness, but being brave, that's a whole

different thing because then maybe it doesn't matter that it's danger, that the danger is there. And maybe what you learn is that despite the fact that the danger is there, there's something in you that gives you enough courage so that no matter how much danger there is, you can actually manage it. And then the question then would be, well, what do you mean manage? And it's like, well, that's a good question. It might mean more than merely tolerate. You know, I mean, we mastered fire, human beings.

You know, that was no trivial thing. Fire's very dangerous. can merely tolerate. I mean, we mastered fire, human beings. That was no trivial thing. Fire is very dangerous. You can be sure that there were a lot of singed African apes playing with fire for thousands of years before they got it right. And fire is extraordinarily dangerous. And it's so attractive to us, in part,

because it's danger that we can't even not look at it. We're all descendants of arsonist apes, obviously, because you know what it's like to sit around a campfire? It's like it beats the hell out of television. You sit around a campfire, there's five or six of you. You're not really doing anything, maybe you're drinking some beer. It's like you're watching the campfire and you're thinking, man, that's so interesting. I could just watch that campfire forever. And it's a neurological issue. You don't get habituated to a campfire. It never becomes boring. It's always interesting.

And it's because you're fascinated right to the core by fire. And it's because we mastered fire maybe two million years ago. It completely transformed us. Transformed our diet, transformed everything. And it's because, well, we're the descendants of creatures that just could not stop looking at fire. And so we mastered it. Something unbelievably dangerous, right?

It's not just fire, it's explosions. It's smelting, it's foundries, it's munitions, it's gunpowder, it's bloody hydrogen bombs, it's like it's a big deal to master that sort of explosive force. And we did it, and so we're not afraid of it, even though the danger hasn't disappeared, we've mastered it. Well, that's better, that's better than no fear, mastery. And so the person looks at the pictures of the elevators,

and they walk away and they think, hey, I could do that. That's so cool. Here I thought I was so afraid and turns out that I just put myself out a little bit and I could do it. And so they walk away knowing that there's more to them than they thought because they thought they were the sort of thing

that had to run away when they were afraid. But now, suddenly they learn that they're not necessarily the sort of thing that had to run away when they were afraid. But now, suddenly, they learn that they're not necessarily the sort of thing that has to run away when they're afraid. They're the sort of thing that can turn around and look. It's like my friend looked when he was looking at his dreams. He could turn around and look. And that would change, because he could discover that he was the sort of thing that could turn around and confront what was frightening.

And so then the next time the person comes in, you say, OK, well, you looked at a bunch of pictures. Maybe you do a couple pictures again, just to warm them up, because now they're a little nervous again. And then you take them out in the hallway where there's an elevator, and you say, OK, well, you know, there's an elevator out there in the hallway. And you say, yeah, yeah, I know.

I took the stairs. It's like, how about if we go look at the elevator? You think you could do that? It's like, well, I don't want to get too close. It's like, yeah, okay, I don't carry. 100 feet away, man. You know, maybe you barely see the elevator. Could you do that? Or could you just imagine the elevator? Well, they can do that. So, yeah, I can look at the damn elevator from 100 feet away. So, well, you go in the hallway and you're 100 feet away or 10 feet away or 30 feet away. You say, well, how are you doing? And they're thinking, well, I'm a little nervous and you think, well, just think about

the elevator door is opening. And I don't want to think about that. So, just think about it for a minute. You're 100 feet away, whatever. You know, they open, some people get out, they close. That's that. Think about that a few times. And they calm down. Say, well, how about if we go like 20 feet closer to the elevator? And they think, yeah, I think I can do that. So they get, you know, 10 feet away from the elevator. They're kind of nervous. And you get them to stand there until they're

sort of bored of the whole elevator thing, is good because now they're starting to replace that horrible tomb with a memory icon and maybe the doors open and they kind of start All and and and you have them do that a couple of times so they calm back down and you say Well, is that enough for today? Or do you think you can go a little further and it could be enough for maybe they want to go a little further So well, how about if you just go and put your hand on on the elevator and and we'll call it a day So they do that put their hand on their elevator and they're pretty damn happy about that because maybe it's the first time They've done it in 10 years and they've been in their bloody bedroom for 10 years, you know They haven't been able to get out. It's no joke and so they put their hand on death

They think I can do that and they leave and then the next time they come back You say, okay, well, this is what we're gonna do we're gonna We're gonna go up to the elevator and I'm not planning tricks on you So you don't play tricks on your clients if you're a psychotherapist if you have any sense at all say I'm just gonna The doors are gonna open. I'm gonna hold them open and You're just gonna to look inside. And it might buzz, so be prepared for that, because that might startle you. It might buzz, but I'm not letting them go.

And there's no tricks. But what you have to do is just poke your head in. But when you poke your head in, don't just look at the ground. Don't avoid. Look inside. Look in the corners. Look up. Look around. see that it's an elevator, it's not a place full of snakes and rats and poisonous spiders, right?

Because that's the dream that would be manifesting itself as threat. So they look in and they look around and they see that it's, you know, it's just a box. And maybe it's a box that you could die in like you could die anywhere, but it's, it's just a box. And maybe it's a box that you could die in, like you could die anywhere, but it's just a box. And then maybe by the end of that, you get them to step in the elevator and look around and step out. And maybe if you're lucky, you actually get them to go down one floor. Say, I'll come down one floor with you.

Doors are open. They say, well, what'll come down one floor with you, doors are open. They say, well, what if we get trapped in here? It's like, well, what if we get trapped in here? What are we going to do? We're going to sit down, we're going to phone, we're going to sit down, we're going to calm ourselves down. It's not going to be too big a catastrophe. I'll be here with you, we're going to cope with, we're going to cope with it. You don't say, well, the chances of getting trapped in the elevator are very low. It's like, that's not the point. The point is, what do you do if the bad thing happens? That's the point.

And so then, you know, they can take the elevator. And then next week, maybe you take it ten times till they're bored of taking the damn elevator. And then they come to therapy and they take the elevator all the time. And so that's good. And then they start taking taxis and then they start going out and into theaters again, because agriphobic people tend not to like theaters because they don't like being trapped in the middle of the audience, for example.

And then maybe they have a terrible fight with their husband. That's very common. Often agriphobic people are women, not always, but often men or more often alcoholic and anti-social women are more likely to have anxiety disorders. But then maybe the woman has a fight with her husband. And maybe she hasn't had a fight with him for like 10 years. And the reason for that was there's no damn way she wanted him to leave. And the reason for that was she was really dependent on him. And she needed to be dependent on him because she was too afraid.

And so now all of a sudden she's not so afraid because she's braver. She's got some more courage. And you know, maybe sometimes you even get resistance from the family members while improvement is going on because sometimes there's some utility in heaven, someone who's absolutely passive around, right? They're not going to threaten you or push you in any possible way because, well, for obvious reasons, and now all of a sudden they're standing up straight with their shoulders back, you know? They've got a little bit of courage in the world and they're able to and willing to say some things that they might not have been willing to say

because one of the things that's so cool about courage is that it generalizes, you know, bravery generalizes and the more you practice it, the better you get at it. And that's part of that. That's part of that. What would you call a deep story of the world? You know, let me see if I can put it together this way. If you have a child and you want the child to clean up his room, maybe he's two and a half or three. And you know, if you have a two and a half year old and you put them in a room, unless everything's

behind doors, the bloody place is a disaster in 15 seconds because they just pull everything off the shelves. It's like they're the legions of chaos, right? Order child chaos. You say, well, could you clean up the room? Because you're not very smart as a parent. And you go away for 10 minutes and you come back and it's like, it's not anymore orderly. In fact, it's probably worse

than the child is sitting there, I don't know, playing with something and looks at you when you come in and nothing's changed and you think, what the hell's wrong with you? Stupid child. It's like, I told you to clean up this room. It's no better. It's like, well, it's the adult that's stupid.

It's not the child in that circumstance. Not the child children can't be stupid. If you've had children, you know perfectly well that they can be stupid. You were children and you were stupid when you were children. And your children were stupid when they were children and it's just the way of life. But you know, if you have a two and a half year old, you can say, all right, kiddo.

You see that teddy bear? And by that time they know what a teddy bear is. So that works. You're using your words to signify something the child understands. And so they're pretty happy about that because children are happy when you say something to them and they understand it. And they're always trying to communicate in a way that gets adults to understand. It's part of the way they check the world out for truth. And so if you could say something to a child and they understand, unless it's like a baby thing with that they're tired of, they're happy.

It's like, yeah, I know what the Petetti bear is. It's like so good. Pat them on the head. You want to pick up that teddy bear? It's like, oh yeah, I know I can do that. I pick up the teddy bear. They show it to you. You think, good, that's good.

You picked up the teddy bear. Good work. That's positive reinforcement, right? that and pick up the teddy bear and show it to you and think, this is good, you picked up the teddy bear, good work, that's positive reinforcement, right? You say, you see the shelf over there? Yes, I see the shelf. You see there's a hole in the shelf, a space, maybe you have to walk over and say, see the space in the shelf, it's beside your favorite book.

It says, yes, do you think you could take that teddy bear and you could pick it up and you could walk over there and you could put the teddy bear in the hole on the shelf by the book? And they think, you know, I think I could do that. So they go over and they put the teddy bear in there and then they look at you. And the reason they're looking at you

is they're thinking, what's the emotional significance of that event? And if you're smiling, what's the emotional significance of that event? And if you're smiling, then they think, oh, that was a good thing. And if you're frowning, then they think, oh, something's wrong or I must have done something wrong. So this is a good thing to know if you're a parent or if you're a human being.

If you know people and you do, and the person that you're talking to to does something, I'm telling you, if this is all you remember from tonight, this is worth the admission and the trouble. If the person you're talking to does something that you want them to do, don't punish them for it, right? Don't punish them for it, right? Don't punish them for it, you might think, well of course you should have done that. I've seen people do this at mealtimes all the time,

you know, somebody makes a nice meal and no one says thank you and you pointed out, say, well why didn't you say thank you? So, well you're, that's just what you're supposed to do. It's like, look, you want like miserable, wretched, burnt garbage for the rest of your life delivered with hatred and contempt? Or yeah, because that would justify my cynicism.

It's like, or do you want meals to be innovative, delicious, prepared properly, and served with a certain amount of love? How would that be since you're going to do it three times a day for the rest of your life? How would that be if you could have that? That's like our day. So that's, or an hour a meal, that's three hours a day. It's 21 hours a week. So that's half a work week per week of meal time.

So that's in a year, that's six months of work days. Fixed for the rest of your life. All you have to do is say, you know, you have to use your head, you have to think, okay, what went right with this meal that I would like to have duplicated. And could I call some attention to it in an honest way and say, you know, you did that really well. Thank you. The person thinks, oh, thank you.

Wow, man, God, who knows? Maybe I'll repeat that. You know, or something approximating. You do that a hundred times, you know, and then you can have that little part of your life, which is not so little. You can have that thing working pretty in a pretty pristine way. And it wouldn't be so bad to have like a lifetime of decent carrying meals laid out in front of you. You know, that take care of about 10 meals laid out in front of you. You know, that take care of about 10% of your miserable life right there. So, many, it's so important to get these things right, man, you know, because your days are made up of small, everyday things that you repeat.

You know, it's like, it's like, too, you come home at night from your job and you meet your family at the door and that could be good or not good and it's like 20 minutes, say, or 15 minutes, whatever, but it happens every day. So again, in a week it's happened seven times, so let's call that an hour and so in a month that's four hours and it's a year, it's 48 hours, so it's a whole week, work week, it's 1, it's 2% of your life. All you have to do is fix 50 things like that, and your whole life is fixed, you think, okay, well,

how would I want it to be when I come home at work? What would make me happy, you know? And being met by angry, bitter people, apart from your dog, you know, who at least hopefully is happy to see you, that's not a good way. And so maybe you think about it and you practice a little bit, you say, well, when one of us comes home, this is how we're going to do it.

And then you've got the whole coming home thing down. And now you've got the meal thing down. And maybe you can get the how to put your children to bed without having a goddamn war about it every night thing down. That'll take care of another 10 years of hatred and hassle. And, you know, there's a variety of things you can do at a low level like that. Well anyways, you have your kid, you say, all right, teddy bear in the shelf. Good work.

Then maybe you do that with three or four more things. And like you scaffold cleaning up, you say, well, that's how you clean up your room. You find things that you know one thing, and then you figure out where the thing goes, and then you put the thing there, and then you repeat that. And so, and you can't just tell a child to clean up the room unless they know that. They have to have those elementary behavioral units mastered before they can compile them together into the abstraction that you would label, clean up your room. And so you practice that. It's kind of a pain because, you know, it'd be a lot easier for you just to go in there and clean up.

It wouldn't because it'd make you bitter and angry that you always have to clean up after your damn ungrateful child. But instead, you could take the time and lay out the microprocesses and reward each of them and scaffold them. See, and this is how you scaffold the development of someone. It's how you scaffold the development of your own character. It's how people are built. We have these little micro-routines, they're little micro-moral actions,

like putting your toy away in the right place, and then putting all 50 toys in the right place, and then making your bed, and then your room is clean, and then, well, maybe outside of that, you can learn to set the table. And so what you do is you take the child, and you say, well, picking up teddy bear, putting teddy bear away,

cleaning up room, taking some charge of household chores, being a relatively responsible child. Well, let's move one down. Doing a certain degree of school work when that becomes necessary, learning how to play with your friends properly and taking turns, being a reasonably responsible child, turning into a reasonably responsible teenager,

making your way in the world as a responsible adult, being a good person. Right? That's the hierarchy. That's the hierarchy. And that's how you look, that's how you look at the world. So you look at the world with those micro routines, you know, because say right now I'm thirsty, which I am, and so I'm gonna go over here and I can recognize this, and I know how to do this.

Yes, well thank you. Thank you. Now I'm much more likely to do it again. Ah. B.F. Skinner was a famous psychologist. He was very interested in reinforcement strategies, eh? And he told people these stories. You could reinforce people for behavior.

And so his class played a trick on him, which was that they never paid attention to him if he was on the left side of the room. And like, a month into the class, they had them damn near out the door or lecturing. So yeah, it's very funny. So you know, you get this scaffolding process built, you build all these little micro routines and you get the person up to be a good person. And being a good person isn't an abstraction because it's composed of all these little micro routines, right?

So it's an abstraction when you say be a good person, but it's not an abstraction when you decompose it. And when your child's two and a half and they didn't clean up their room, you don't go in there and say, you're a horrible child, you know, because the abstraction level's wrong. You could say, well, you're not very good at looking at the teddy bear and the child might build a tolerate that. I mean, it's unnecessary, but at least it's not a devastating assault on their entire character, which I would also recommend against if you're having a discussion with your wife or your husband. You're a terrible husband.

You've always been a terrible husband and the probability that you're going to change is very low. It's like, that's a war. Like, what the hell are you supposed to do with that? Agree? Well, you could. Then you really with it. It's like, you're right, man.

I am that terrible. And you ain't seen nothing yet. So, that's not good. And instead, you decompose it, you think, okay, well, I'm irritated at this person. And so, and maybe that's me, so you could say, well, I'm irritated at you. But that's maybe me, because maybe there's something wrong with me today. So why don't we find out who's to cause of the irritation here first?

We could have that conversation, and then maybe we could figure out, well, there is something a bit wrong in our communication. And then we could think, well, what's the smallest thing we could do to set that right that would make both of us happy that we could just try for like a day just to see if it would work? And that's also unbelievably useful. It's so useful, that information. It's like if you're having a fight, shrink the damn thing.

Use the smallest weapon you possibly can to enter into the argument with, and then find the minimal unit of improvement that you would accept. It's like, we have a rule in our house. We're having a fight. What can I do to make you happy? Well, you have to tell me. Well, if you loved me, you'd figure it out. It's like, no, I'm not that smart, or I don't love you that much. I don't know what you're doing. But you have the problem, please offer me a solution. What if you tried this?

I don't think I could go that far. Is there something a little less? What if you try? Okay, I'll try that. We'll try that and see how it goes. Okay, you won. Now you don't get to bother me about this anymore. That's another rule.

You win arguments over. That's annoying, eh, because if you're arguing with someone and then they admit that you're right, it's really annoying because you don't want just to be right. You want to be right and stomp them a good one. And so, and then if they're annoying and they just let you win and admit you're right, then they've deprived you of all the pleasure

of being able to stomp them. And so it's very rude of them. But in any case, this process of decomposition is unbelievably useful. It's like, take the problem apart until you hit the smallest possible unit of improvement and then see if you can implement that as a solution. And you don't have to do that very many times. You have to think, what am I unhappy about in my relationship? Okay, that's the first thing and that I'm with the wrong person. It's like no, sorry no vague

Besides if you're with the wrong person now and you leave the person you're with you will be with another person And they will also be the wrong person because you're probably the wrong person. And so, and what makes you think you're going to trade up anyways? It's not like you're any better than you were five years ago, you know, you're older and uglier at least. So, all right. So you get your child now. And you've got the micro routines down,

and you've reinforced them, and you're trying to do that with yourself, and you're trying to do that with the people you love. And then what's on the outer most edges of that? Well, that's where the courage comes. It's like, well, to be a good person, well, what does it mean when you get, when you get, when you start to,

you're cleaning your room, you're interacting with your family properly, you're interacting with your family properly, you're interacting with your friends properly, right? You're bearing your responsibility, you're truthful, that's starting to become abstract, you're a good person. Okay, what does it mean that you're a good person? What's outside of that in some sense? Well, then that's when the big story starts to kick in.

It's like, okay, that's when the big story starts to kick in. It's like, okay, what's the world like at the biggest level, the biggest conceptual level? Well, there's the absolute unknown that surrounds us, right? The fact that we're all finite, ignorant creatures. And there's much we don't understand. And so we could say, well, here's one thing that's about being a good person. It's like, forthrightly confront that which you do not understand. That's a good thing. You wake up in the morning.

You've got the day laid out in front of you with all of its possibility. All of the things you could do with it for better or worse. You think, I'm going to confront my obligations. I'm going to set what I need to do. I'm going to set right what need to do, I'm going to set right what I can set right for the day, right? Frightening as it might be, I'm going to confront that dragon that constitutes the possibility

of the day and I'm going to take from it and distribute what I can. It's like, hey, that's good, that's a good thing. That's the core of positive humanity. Might say, well, and you can decompose that, that unknown, you say, well, there's the unknown of the natural world, right? You know, maybe you're taking care of someone with Alzheimer's disease, and that's bloody rough. And so you're confronting the terror of the natural world in that sense. And you think, well, I'm going to get up up and I'm going to try to make this day, I'm going to make the sacrifices that are necessary and take on the responsibility that I have to

to make this day the least amount of hell possible and to improve what I can. And so then you've construed yourself as that which can courageously confront the horrors of the natural world, right? And it's most elemental form. So that's good. And then you might think, well, there's the social world. Maybe you have a job and you're working for someone who's somewhat of a tyrant, and it's a problem that you're wrestling with,

it's keeping you up at night, and you wake up in the morning and you think, you know, I've got a few things that I need to get off my chest. I've got a few things that I need to say, I have to think this through strategically because I'm not happy at my job, and the reason for that is I'm not being treated properly, and things aren't oriented in the right direction

I've got to stand up for myself. You think well, I got to start planning this Maybe I need a lateral escape route, right? Because maybe I'll get fired and I can't just be fired and have no job So I have to have an escape route ready and so I've got a plan that I got to get my CV ready I've got to get my education up to scratch so that I could move laterally have to be prepared for that I have to not be afraid of an interview. I have to be willing to put out some resumes. Maybe I should be doing that now if I have something to say to my boss.

And now I have to think through what it is that I have to say, and I need to say it in the most, in the minimally possible true manner. And so then you're confronting the tyrannical element of the social world. And you can do that too, so you can confront the tyrannical element of the social world. And you can do that too. So you can confront the unknown and you can confront the natural world and you can confront the social world.

And you can set those things in better order. And then you might also think, well, there's me. I'm not at everything I could be. I'm chock full of bad habits. You know, there are lots of things I'm avoiding and not doing, sins of omission. Things I know I should be doing, that I could be doing, that I'm not doing. I'm not talking about the things that are beyond you. That's for later. I'm talking about the things that you bloody well know you could do, but you're just two, what would you call it? Self-sabotaging, arrogant, and deceitful to do it. You think, well, I'm gonna try to look at a picture

of an elevator today, you know? I'm gonna tackle this thing that I've been avoiding. I'm gonna negotiate with myself until I can find the smallest unit of that problem that I would be willing to confront, and I'm gonna do it. And then, so you've got that, you're confronting the negative part of yourself.

And you might think, well, I can be kind of malevolent. I've got a cruel streak. And there's lots of things about me that could be calmed down to some degree and matured and made a bit more sophisticated. And here's one of those things that's bothering me. And here's a tiny thing I might be able to do to humiliate it. And so then you've got the person who can, you know, they can put their teddy bear on the shelf,

and they can take care of their room, and they can take care of their house, and they can take care of themselves, and they can take care of their family. They can be a good person. And you think, well, what does it mean to be a good person? Oh, it means that you can courageously confront the unknown and change it. You can make it better.

You can confront the terrible part of nature, and you can make it less horrible than it needs to be. You can confront the tyrannical aspect of society, which is always there, and you can make it less tyrannical than it would be. And you can confront the devil that lives in your own heart and what would you call, and learn to properly prevail. And that's the fundamental religious story. That's what people are like.

That's our consciousness. We're thrown into the world, into the unknown. It's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing. It's a terrible thing. It's mortally dangerous. And we're subsumed by our ignorance. But with courage and truth, we can confront it and we can make it better.

And we can do it at all those levels. We can make it better at the natural level. We can make it better at the societal level. And we can make it better at the individual level. And that's what we're called forth to do. You know? And then when you're thinking about life, and it's meaning, you think,

well, what's the meaning of life? Well, the meaning of life is to be a good person, and why is that exactly? It's like, well, that seems like a bit melee-mouth to naive. It's like, it's none of those things, because there's nothing about being good that's weak. It's completely the opposite.

It's a matter of adopting the most difficult burden that you can possibly comprehend. You're going to face the unknown forthrightly with your consciousness, to confront the potential of being and to try to transform into something that's more like heaven and less that like hell. And that's your job all the time. That's what you do with your conscious awareness, and how you do it matters. If you do it badly, things actually get worse, and they can get really worse, or they can get really much, much better. And then you can decompose it into these elements,

man against nature, man against society, man against himself. It goes for women as well, and to make things better, and to discover in the horror of life, and the pessimism and darkness and mortality of life, the fact that despite all that darkness, there's something in you that's so light, and so powerful, and so courageous, and so possessed by the spirit of truth that's indomitable truth is indomitable that you can take all of that that's terrible and transmute it into what is good and that's what we need to do. Thank you very much. I suspect you guys could feel it, but you got serious prime Peterson right there. He is really enjoying Australia.

And actually one of the amazing things is that everyone's incorporating these things into their lives. For me, for example, I actually put my Teddy bear away now. And Jordan nods approvingly, so it's pretty good. All right, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a little Q&A right now, and you guys submitted a ton of questions here. This is actually Jordan's computer, and I have the password these days. He's logged into Twitter right now.

I could end it all here in Adelaide. That's a lot of power. Alright guys, make some noise for Jordan. You're feeling good in Australia, I can see it. There's like a pep in your step and you're enjoying this. When I left Toronto, it was 35 below and there was blowing snow and the whole city was a parking lot. And so now I'm here and like I was on the beach and perth like for two days and today I went outside and I didn't die. So that's good, yeah. Pretty good. All right, here we go. What can I do to keep myself from becoming complacent when things go well?

It's a good follow-up. Yeah, it's a good question. when things go well. That's a good follow-up. Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I would say that you should read your two, your two shallow. And I don't mean that as an insult, although maybe it's an insult. I don't know how shallow you are. It might be an insult. I don't know how shallow you are. It might be an insult.

Your horizons are too limited. That's the thing. It's like, you haven't picked a big enough problem. And you don't want to be complacent. It's like, there's, what's a complacent is like a neutered Tomcat laying on top of a warm TV. You know, it's, it's, you know, it's not. It's not. Say where do you don't do that anymore do they?

It's like when you lay on a flat screen, you can't be a complacent cat laying on top of a flat screen. Yeah, that's the reverse of a complacent cat. That's an impressive cat. It's a bit of a challenge there. Yeah. Set your sights higher, man. That's the thing. You know, I have this program online called the Future Authoring Program, which I would recommend if you're miserable or if you're complacent or to anyone for that matter, because I think it's an unbelievably useful program. And what it asks you to do is to think, it's to ask you to set your sights high. So, you know, we went through this idea today

that the way you look at the world is nested, right? Now, these little micro routines that you manage and then they're amalgamated into more complicated behaviors and more complicated behaviors and so on, that include more people and more phenomena and more of the world as you move outward until you reach the outer limits, which is to contend with nature and to contend with society and to contend with the individual.

And I said those are religious ideas in some senses. Like one of the oldest stories we have is there's two fundamental creation story types. And one is a deity, a conscious being and a where being, usually someone with great vision and great ability to articulate, takes apart a feminine figure that constitutes chaos and makes the world out of the pieces. And that's what we do. We confront chaos and we make order out of the pieces. And that's what we do. We confront chaos and we make order out of it.

And the spirit in us that does that is associated in our stories with divinity. And that's really worth thinking about because that's what consciousness does. And we're all conscious and we don't bloody well understand consciousness. It's a very strange phenomena. And but we're conscious and we do confront the unknown, and we do make the world out of it. And so there's something to that. And a second story is that, here, again, someone with vision, someone articulate, someone brave, confronts an ogre or a tyrannical giant of some sort and cuts them into pieces and makes the world out of his pieces.

And it's the same story. It's like, you know, if you work for a corrupt corporation and you're trying to fix it, what you do is you break it into pieces and you destroy the corruption and then you reconstitute it into something new. And you're doing that with yourself, you know, because you need some work and you need some work, we all need some work. You take the tyrannical giant that you are and you break it up and you reorganize the pieces and hopefully in the reorganization you come up with something better. And so that's the story. And

at the individual level, while you confront your own malevolence, let's say, or maybe your own complacency. And there's lots of problems in the world that need to be solved. And so you shouldn't limit your ambition. God only knows what magnitude of problem you could solve. It's not obvious because people, as unbounded as the world is in catastrophe, people are equally unbounded as the world is in catastrophe, people are equally unbounded in possibility. That's why it says, you know, if you have a modicum of faith, you can move a mountain. And it's, we move mountains all the time.

We can actually do that. I mean, you know, you need tractors and all that. You can't just wish the damn thing away, but it's amazing what we're capable of doing. And we're capable of doing. And we're not doing that good a job of it, right? Because we wander around like 40% bitter, miserable, cynical, twisted, and ignorant.

And we still manage fairly well. All right, so you're complacent. You have this program. Well, the program asks you to imagine. Okay, so imagine. This is how you set your aim. Imagine you could have what you want it. But it would have to be the sort of want that someone who is wise would want.

You know, so it would have to be like a rule too, is treat yourself like you're someone that you have the responsibility for helping. It's a responsibility. So you're going to treat yourself properly. So you think, well, if I was going to set up my life properly, I was going to take care of myself, what would that look like? And so the program asks you, well, if you could have the friends you wanted and the relationships with them that you wanted, what would that look like? Just hypothetically, you know, imagine you had a genie. That's the root word of genius, right? Genie.

A genie is this incredibly powerful divine like force that grants wishes that's constrained in a very tiny area. That's what you're like, right? Because you're constrained in a very tiny area, but you have this immense, genius possibility. It's like you can call on that. You have to do it in an intelligent and wise manner where backfires are on you. It's like, well, you can have the friends you want and the relationships you want. What would that look like? You can have the career you want it or the job. What would that look like? What

about an intimate relationship if you could have the one you wanted? What about your relationship with your kids and your parents? How could that be if you could have the one you wanted. But about your relationship with your kids and your parents, how could that be if it could be the way that it should be? What would you do with your life outside of work that would be productive and meaningful? How would you take care of yourself mentally and physically? That sort of thing. It's just have a vision of what could be like

three to five years down the road. Well, then make a plan. And then the program also asks you to do the contrary, which is also very useful, because you know, it's one thing to be motivated by the hope that things could be better. But while there is some danger and complacency there, because yeah, things could be better, but they're pretty good, so that's good enough. It's like, yeah, fair enough. You need some more motivation. There's this funny experiment, fair enough. You need some more motivation. There's this funny experiment that was done by animal experimentalists with rats.

The rats didn't think it was that funny, but the experimentalists thought it was funny. You can train a rat to run down a runway to get some cheese if he's hungry, and usually use hungry rats and experiments because they're more pliable because they'll work for food. And so if your rats hungry, they're often down to about three quarters of their normal

body weight, experimental rats. They'll zip down a runway pretty damn quick to nav a piece of cheese. And so, you know, they know the cheese is there, so a way they go. But if you take a cat and you put the cat behind the rat and you put a fan behind the cat and you wafed a little bit of cat odor over the rat before it runs down the runway, it will run down that runway way faster. Because it's kind of not so bad to be motivated by terror and by hope at the same time. Right? Well, you're a lot more motivated then, right?

And life is hard, and so having some extra motivation. That's not such a bad thing. It can get you out of bed. Terror can get you out of bed when mirror hope won't, and the combination of both might be optimal. So the other thing that we have people do in this program is like, OK, well, now you've outlined your future. What you could have, if things went well for you and for the

people around you because you should keep them in mind as well. But also, you've got a bunch of bad habits and you're not who you could be. And there's lots of ways that you would and might degenerate over the next five years. Everyone's aware of how they would do that if they were going to do it. Write that out too. It's like, okay, I let all my bad habits take the upper hand, and now I'm in my own personal brand of hell five years from now. What exactly does that look like? Good thing to do if you're toying with an addiction. And you're still sort of semi-functional. It's like, if you're toying with an addiction and it's getting worse,

you're semi-functional. You probably won't be in five years. It's not a pretty thing and people won't conceptualize and clarify it because it's too frightening and it would also stop them from being addicted and they don't want to stop from being addicted so they don't do it. You lay out the hell and you lay out the heaven and then you think, well I'm not going down because it's really not good there. And I would like to go up because I've created enough that's good enough so that it's worth the effort.

And so if you're complacent, it's like, think it through, man. You've got more to do. The world isn't in the shape, it could be it. By any stretch of the imagination. And there's plenty more for you to do. And I think that one of the rules of being, and this is one of the rules that the West has really done a great job of articulating is,

it's on you. That's why you have the right and the obligation to vote. You're the cornerstone of the state. If things are not good, it's your fault. You might think, well, I don't know what to do with it. It's like, about it. It's like, yeah, no kidding. What's your point?

Your ignorance is your excuse. Fair enough, you know. It's a real excuse, but it's no justification. If the world isn't the way it should be, then put it in order. If you're complacent, then you should open your eyes, because there's lots to be done, and you could do it, and then you'd have the adventure of your life. That's what you want. Everyone wins under those circumstances. You you'd have the adventure of your life. And that's what you want. And so everyone wins under those circumstances.

You get to have the adventure of your life, you get to have a meaning that comes with pursuing difficult things and avoiding terrible things, and you make things better for yourself and everyone else. There's no room for complacency there, and don't underestimate your capacity. You know, human beings are unbelievably remarkable creatures. And we don't exploit that fully. We exploit it minimally. And we're still pretty damn remarkable.

So. Applause. I don't think we're going to get to all the questions tonight. Well, I love this one because they've got possibly the leading public intellectual in the world on stage, and the question is, Jordan, how much can you bench press? It's there. The most I ever benched pressed was 225 pounds and I only did that once and I was about 24. It was like 20 pounds more than I ever managed in my life and it was 20 pounds more than

I ever managed again. So it was a good day. And now I don't know. I don't know. I would think maybe I might be able to manage 150. Because I haven't done a lot of bench pressing. I think I might be able to manage 150. But then again, it might just fall down and crush my neck too. So.

Well, actually, that's a decent segue. A lot of people tonight asked you about the carnivore diet. Yeah. Any thoughts up there just asking you how you're feeling and you think it's working, et cetera, et cetera. Well, it's definitely working. I mean, it's such a funny thing to talk about because it's not really my area of expertise.

You know, and I kind of stumbled into it by mistake or by accident. I mean, what happened, some of you know this story, is that my daughter, Michaela, has a very serious autoimmune disease. And they had diagnosed it as idiopathic, first of all, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which it wasn't because she didn't have the blood markers for rheumatoid arthritis. So then they called it idiopathic arthritis,

which means no one knows what causes it. Idiopathic is just a word that sounds like a diagnosis that means we don't know. So, and it was killing her. And in a bunch of ways, and all of them extraordinarily unpleasant. So she had 38 affected joints. And I don't know if you've ever had arthritis.

But one seriously arthritic joint can make your life pretty miserable. And so 38 of them can make your life very miserable. And along with that went a very crippling depression, which is also linked to autoimmune disorders in many cases. So some of you who are depressed, that's a useful thing to know. There's lots of evidence that certain forms of depression, because it's a catch-all category, are associated with inflammatory disorders and autoimmune dysfunction.

So if you are depressed, don't leap to the conclusion that it's necessarily psychological, even though it might be. There are endogenous depressions and exogenous depressions. Endogenous is caused by some internal factor that people don't understand. And exogenous is like grief-related, something terrible happened in your life

and took you out and you have reason to be depressed. But, so she had terrible, terrible depression. And her depression was bad enough so that when I asked her at one point, because I was curious, and this was when she had an ankle that was deteriorating to the point that it had to be replaced, and a hip that was deteriorating to the point that it had to be replaced. And she was walking around on both of them at the same time on very high doses of opiates to control the pain and taking riddling so that she could wake up for some periods of time in the morning. I asked her if she would rather have the arthritis or the depression and she said she would rather have the arthritis. So that gives you some sense of what depression can be like.

I wouldn't wish that on Hitler. I'll tell you, man, it's something brutal and inconceivable unless you've gone through it. And then she had narcolepsy and then like five other problems. And they were taken apart. And she caught on to the idea at one point that it was diet related. And my wife had been pushing that idea for a very long time, for like decades. But we could not, we could, we identified a few things that seemed to make her condition

worse, but we could never zero in on it exactly. But Michaela figured out that when she was studying at university, her symptoms got worse, and her skin, which also, she also had an autoimmune skin disorder that the doctors diagnosed as acne, which wasn't, it was something worse. And she figured that out as well. She figured out that when she was studying for exams, that got worse. And she figured that out as well. She figured out that when she was studying for exams,

that got worse. And then she thought, well, that was probably stress. And then she thought, well, wait. I eat a lot of sandwiches when I'm studying. She lived in Montreal. She was eating bagels all the time, because you know, they're quick. I said, maybe it was the bagels.

And she wasn't happy about the skin outbreaks. Like one of the things she had managed to do while she was trying to hold herself together, she learned to be kind of a semi-professional makeup artist because she could put herself together and go out and look like she was together. And that was really important to her. And then this skin problem started to take that apart.

And that was just too much for her. So anyway, she stopped eating wheat, and her skin problems went away. Like right away, we thought, well, that's interesting. And she thought, oh, well, skin problems went away. That's interesting. I wonder what happens if I cut out other foods. And so she experimented a lot using elimination diets. And there's a whole bunch of elimination diets.

And mostly they're stupid because there's 10 of them and they all tell you different things. And so how do you know? And then it's too many factors. Like if you're doing something scientifically, you want to reduce everything to a single variable and test the single variable. It's the only way you can get anywhere.

And so she experimented at one point, she was just eating chicken and broccoli. And then she got less depressed, and she started to wake up in the morning, and her joints started to get better. So those were good things. And then she just less depressed and she started to wake up in the morning and her joints started to get better. So those were good things. And then she just went to chicken and then she just went to beef. And when she just went to beef, then things really got better.

And all of her symptoms disappeared one by one, every single one of them. So, and that was just absolutely beyond belief. The first thing that happened, if I remember correctly, was that she started absolutely beyond belief. The, she, the first thing that happened, if I remember correctly, was that she started to wake up in the morning and she was sleeping about 18 hours a day and so all of a sudden she was waking up and was awake for like 16 hours and alert and then her mood improved

and her joints started to stop hurting and I don't know if I have this in the right order. And, and the downside was, well, she doing that, then if she had something that she shouldn't eat, she had a catastrophic reaction to it. All her symptoms would come back and worse, so there was some danger in it. But after several months of this, she was symptom-free. No medication, no pain killers, no riddle and no autoimmune disorder medication. No symptoms.

Thought, Jesus, what the hell? That's unbelievable. And she lost weight. She lost about 25 pounds, something like that, and looked good. And I have a fair number of autoimmune symptoms and so does my wife and so it looks like Michaela got all of them and so we started to experiment with the diet and so because I thought oh Jesus I can do that for a month what the hell you know and first it was just meat and greens and so I switched just to meat and greens. No carbohydrates, no sugar, nothing like that.

And I started to wake up in the morning and feel good, and that had never happened to be in my life. I always had a hard time waking up. I just wake up and I thought, hey, I'm awake! What the hell? Because I could always go back to sleep. And so that was weird. And I quit snoring in one week.

It just stopped. And I was snoring quite a lot. So that was weird. That was really weird. That really shocked me. And then I lost seven pounds the first month that I was on the diet. And I had not eaten sugar for a whole year

the year before that. I didn't lose any weight at all. It's like seven pounds. Like that's not noticeable. What the hell? Seven pounds. Like that's noticeable. I thought, what the hell? Seven pounds, that's a lot. So then I just kept doing it. I lost seven pounds the next month,

and the next month, and the next month, and the next month, I lost 50 pounds in six months. I went right back to my weight at 24. I thought, like I lost all my excess weight, every bit of it. I thought, what the hell, that's completely insane. And then I stopped taking antidepressants, and I'd been taking them for like 20 years.

I didn't need them anymore. They didn't have the same effect on me anymore. And then a lot of my mental acuity started to come back. And that was interesting because I noticed that as I got older, it was harder to concentrate when I was reading. Like it was more like there was kind of fog between me and the words and I would skip words and skip phrases. I couldn't focus like I used to be able to focus because I could focus on written material perfectly, you know, like I'd never miss a word and you could talk to me when I was reading and I wouldn't hear you. I was focused. That started to come back.

I thought, wow, floaters in my eyes started to clear up. So that was really interesting. I had numb legs. That went away. I had gastro, gastric reflex disorder. Sounded like I was gonna die, you know what I mean? But that went away really quickly. And so, well, you know, you can't ignore that. It's like, and my wife, she had arthritis near thumbs. That went away really quickly. And so, well, you know, you can't ignore that.

It's like, in my wife, she had arthritis in her thumbs. That went away. She had arthritis in her knees. That went away. She had a shoulder that had been bothering her since she was 17 and had it injured it, I think, playing baseball. So that was like 40 years ago. That went away.

So now she can do front crawl and swim. And she hadn't been able to do that for years, and she lost 20 pounds, something like that. So she's back to what she weighed when she was 19, 20 years old. That's very, very difficult to ignore. So what's the downside? It's a pain in the neck. That's the first thing.

I mean, Jesus, all I eat is beef. Like, that's it. Nothing else. Beef and salt. Oh, yes, and three kinds of water. Hot water. Cold water and sparkling water. It's like that, you know, that's not a lot of diversity.

And it's difficult to travel. And I'm a pain in the ass socially because like, what are you going to feed me? And it's dull, because it's... Mostly what I eat when I travel is steak, because I can always get a steak somewhere. I mean, it beats the hell out of gruel, so, you know, that's the gratitude part. And I'm physically stronger than I was. And so... I don't know what the hell to make of all that. I do know that one in three Americans is obese,

and another one in three is overweight. That's way too many. I know that diabetes is epidemic. I know that Alzheimer's is likely a fourth form of diabetes. We eat way too many carbohydrates. We ate way too many carbohydrates. We ate way too much sugar. There's something wrong with our diet. Now, that doesn't mean I would recommend

a cure this radical, but one thing I would suggest, and I've had lots of people come and talk to me about the carnivore diet. After these talks, they'll talk to me and people said, and one guy, he came up, he's about 24, he said, I've been on the carnivore diet. I lost 300 pounds in 18 months. I thought, he was still a pretty big guy.

He must have weighed like 530 pounds because he was still a big guy. And so, but I'll tell you, if you want to lose weight, man, that'll just take, that will take all your excess weight away, period. So that's something quite remarkable. But I wouldn't casually recommend it because, first of all, it's untried. You know, like there was an article in the Atlantic Monthly, six months ago about how I was

going to be dead by now because of what I was doing, because my blood chemistry would be completely disregulated and my gut biome would be half dead. And there was prognostications of how I would go out of control in 50 different ways. And none of that's happened. My daughter's had her blood work done and she's been on this diet for longer than me. And she's a little low in vitamin D,

but other than that, her blood work is way better than it's ever been. And there are stories that are credible of people surviving on nothing but meat for literally for decades. The Inuit used to do it, for example, in Canada. So I think what we know about diet, you could put in the thimble and have room for another thimble. So I wouldn't recommend it, because it's hard, you know, but I would say this, if there's

a bunch of things wrong with you and no one can figure out why, one of the things you could think about doing is eliminating everything in your diet but beef, everything, because that brings that gets rid of all those excess variables, right? Because you can think of every food as a variable. It gets rid of all the excess variables. It's much smarter than the elimination diet. Try it for a month. It has to be a month. The other thing that happens, too, is that your appetite declines by about 75%. So that's really interesting. If you don't get hungry, you don't have cravings

for other foods, although I really miss cappuccinos. They just kills me, not to have cappuccinos. But other than that, I don't really crave that much. So if you can stick it out for a month, your appetite declines precipitously, and you don't crave things anymore. And you don't get that weird hunger that not everyone gets, that makes you fuzzy-minded and makes it difficult

to concentrate and makes you irritable. That goes away, too. So try it for a month. If you feel better, well, then you feel better. And that's something. And so then try it for another month. And if it keeps helping, well, good, something helped. And then after a while, you could experiment and add something else that you want and see

what happens. But I'm not a nutritionist. I am a scientist and I'm very careful about these things, but I'm not a nutritionist. But that is what happened in our family. And my daughter is in remarkably good shape. It's absolutely unbelievable. She tells me that her mood is regularly at something approximating nine out of 10, like chronically.

She's happy virtually all the time. And so, and she doesn't have any symptoms. And like this was an incurable disease. Oh yes, the other thing that happened to me that's quite interesting is that I had gum disease, which is incurable. It's not, because I don't have it anymore. And my dentist verified that about four months ago. So, and you know gum disease is actually not a good illness. It's a it's a it's it's a marker of systemic inflammation, and it is a predictor of heart disease.

And so if you cannot have it, it's definitely better. So that's what's happened to me and my family. And as I said, I wouldn't casually recommend it, because it makes you a social pariah. And it's quite difficult. But if you're bloody desperate, and there's lots of. But if you're bloody desperate and there's lots of things wrong with you and nobody can figure out why and you know life's a bitch, then a month of just meat won right, well, unfortunately, we only

have time for one more, so I'll give you a little red meat here, so to speak. What's been your favorite part of Australia? I have to say that, don't I? Definitely out of the lead. We all we walked through the botanical gardens today. That was pretty nice. That was impressive.

I like Australia. You know, I was here six months ago, something like that. It's a pretty decent country. Like your cities are in pretty good shape. They're quite livable. They're quite beautiful. They're quite peaceful. You've got a remarkable civilization happening here. So it's very nice to be here. I think that the country looks better than Canada. I think it's a little richer. It might be that you don't have to put up with minus 40 for six months of the year,

which is pretty hard on the infrastructure, but it looks like you're doing a lot of things right. So it's quite a pleasure to be here. I enjoyed the beach at Perth a lot. It was very beautiful, and so it's nice to be somewhere warm and sunny. And so that was lovely. I suppose the best thing, though, altogether, is to come to these events fundamentally.

It's a real privilege to come here. And it's such a shock to me all the time to see what there's 2,500 of you here tonight. These are very serious conversations. I don't know what the hell you're doing here. Hopefully it's something good, despite what the protesters outside think. This is my favorite part of it. I'm hoping that it'll help a lot. You know, you can, that each of you will put your lives together to some slight degree more than might otherwise

have been the case. Because if enough of us do that, then things could get way better than they are. Because we're in a situation right now. We're at a time when we have tremendous technological power and unbelievable opportunity in front of us. And a lot of questions that are going to have to be answered by wise people in the next 10 years. Questions we can't even imagine now. And if each of us was a modicum more wise, then maybe we would make decisions that were just that much better, and things would go that much better. And I'm hoping that that's why everyone's here is to figure out how to do that.

And I think that's the case. And so that's my favorite thing about being here. And thank you very much all for coming tonight. Thank you guys very much. Thank you, Mr. Rubin. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books, maps of meaning and architecture of belief, or as newer bestseller, 12 rules for life and add it out to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the

Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See JordanB Peterson.com for audio ebook and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. Remember to check out JordanBeePeterson.com slash personality for information on his new E-course. Tag Jordan or I on Instagram to share your results from the Discovering Personality Course if you decide to give it a shot. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please leave a rating and Apple podcasts, a comment or review, or share this episode with a friend. Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next week. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.b. Peterson.

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