The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - The Necessity of Aim

Episode Date: December 15, 2019

A 12 Rules for Life lecture recorded in Riverside on Jan. 24, 2019. Thanks to our sponsors: https://linkedin.com/jordan https://www.butcherbox.com/jbp https://www.uber.com http://trybasis.com/jordan/

Welcome to season 2, episode 39 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator, mother of a toddler who is continually infecting her with a cold. This podcast is a 12 rules for life podcast recorded in Riverside on January 24, 2019, called The Necessity of Aim. Updates on the Peterson fam? Not a lot, I'm swamped, but dad is still taking a break, a much needed break. If you guys haven't checked out Dad's very first e-course, Discovering Personality with

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, I helped design the course. I love the topic of personality and think everyone would be helped if they learned about the big 5 personality traits. It comes with a code to understand myself.com for dads scientifically backed personality quiz. We're currently offering a presale for a 15% discount on the course at $120. If you're interested, this is a great opportunity to get it at a lower price or buy it for someone for Christmas. Check it out at jordanbeepeterson.com slash personality. What else? I survived my eight day fast.

It was supposed to be longer, but I couldn't do it. I do not recommend fasting that long, unless you have a lot of weight to lose. And even then, I find the sweet spot is 36 hours. I'm doing one of those fast weekly from Sunday night to Tuesday morning if you want to join. I comment on it mainly on Instagram, Michaela Peterson.

There are a lot of health benefits to letting your body go hungry. It's a serious way to clean up damage tissue with ettoffogy, which I probably have enough of. So, Weekly 36-hour fast for me, intermittent fasting, which is basically skipping breakfast, but no more super long ones. Enjoy the podcast. The necessity of aim, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 rules for life lecture. Thank you very much. Now I just have to take a few seconds and remind myself what a privilege it is to come here and talk to

all of you. It's much appreciated that you take time out and come and listen to this. So I was thinking backstage about what I'm doing tonight and I want to talk about values. And really I'm going to produce a set of variations, I would say, on rule one, which is stand up straight with your shoulders back in rule 10, which is to be precise in your speech. I want to dig underneath those and elaborate on them. And I wanna do that. I was thinking about a good metaphor for how I wanna do that because I've been thinking about it all day. Got this complicated problem that I'm trying to solve.

And it's like there's a target that I'm aiming at. I wanna send like seven armies marching toward the target all at the same time. So I'm going to line them up and hopefully I'll be able to pull that all together. That's the plan and something will emerge out of it that will take my thinking farther than it's gone along these lines. It's a very important issue, the issue of value. So I'll tell you, first, a little story, I think. No, I'll do something else. So in rule 10, I talk about the necessity for precision in speech.

And partly, the reason for that is to discuss the importance of precision of aim, or even more fundamentally, to discuss the necessity of aim. You have to aim at something. And the question might be, well, why do you have to aim at something? And there's a variety of ways to answer that. But I like to answer it biologically to begin with because it's solid.

It's a good solid answer. And it's, what would you say? It's useful knowledge. It helps you understand what you're like and how you have to function in the world. And you can learn a lot very quickly about yourself and about human psychology by knowing this. I derived most of this knowledge from a book by a man named Jeffrey Gray and the book is called

Neurosycology of Anxiety. And it's a really, really difficult book. I read it when I was in graduate school and took me like eight months to read it, and he cited like 2000 papers, something like that, and he read all of them, and he understood all of them, and a lot of it was hard-going neuroscience, psychobiology, neuropsychopharmacology, animal behavioral psychology, the animal behaviors were very good psychologists. And it was all also heavily influenced by early thinking about computation

that was derived by a man named Norbert Wiener who wrote a book called, Book on Cybernetics, he was the founder of Cybernetics. And so it tangled all of that together. It's a brilliant book. I think the best book on neuroscience written in the 20th century. There's one other contender, but I think it's the best.

And so reading that book helped me understand the relationship between perception and emotion and at a really fundamental level. And so here's how it works essentially. So, when you aren't yourself in any sort of landscape wherever you happen to be, in order to act in any coherent manner, you have to orient yourself towards a destination. So that's the first thing to know. That's the first thing to know is that in order to respond coherently to the world, you have to orient yourself to a destination. And so there's some, there's, there's, there's, that has implications. One,

one implication is that the question of what your destination needs to be arises. If you have to orient yourself towards a destination, what should your destination be. And then the second consequence is, well, what, or the second question that arises might be, well, what happens if you don't orient yourself towards anything, and the third question might be, well, what happens if you do? So we can look at it simply. So this is how your brain works biologically. And you can experience that. I'd say that I wanna do something simple. I orient myself towards a direction. I just wanna walk across the stage.

And so I've made a decision of value. That's another emergent consequence of this. I've made a decision of value. and the decision is that going across the stage is better than staying where I am. So that's the answer to the old question about the chicken. You know, why did the chicken cross the road? And the reason was, was the chicken thought the other side of the road was better? Because why else would you cross the road?

So now you know, that's why the chicken crossed the road. And so one of the things this implies is that if you establish a destination, you've already established something like a hierarchy of value. It's a very simple hierarchy. But you're acting out the presupposition that where you're headed is better than where you are,

because otherwise, why would you put in the time and effort necessary to transform your current situation into that hypothetical future situation? You've instantly entered a world of value where one thing is more important than another, and you can't act without that. And you can't orient yourself in the world without that. So there's no orienting yourself in the world without establishing a hierarchy of value. That's a really useful thing to

know. So now you decide that you're going to walk across the stage. And then your emotions kick in. And the kick in right away, they kick in right with a very active perception. So for example, if I stand here, a little bit backstage, and I look across, there's a clear vista, there's nothing in the way, and that actually produces a little bit of positive emotion on my part, because I see a destination that I'd like to pursue, and there's nothing in my way, and the fact that there's nothing but clear sailing in front of me produces a little bit of positive emotion.

If I stand here by contrast, and then I look at the same, if I look at this, look, if I want myself in the same direction, then that chairs or that stool's in the way. And like, that's not a catastrophe, you know? And that's because I know how to walk around a stool. But that's the only reason, because otherwise, you know, it would be in the way.

And whenever you observe a pathway, and it's cluttered with, it's cluttered in a manner that would interfere with your movement forward, then that produces negative emotion. And so that's part of the reason why it's so useful. It's useful to know this if you're thinking about how to set up your house. It's part of the reason that I've suggested to people that they clean up their rooms because your room is a place of pathways. And if it's cluttered, then you experience chaos and negative emotion in relationship to your goals. It's not a clearly laid out vista. And if it's clearly laid out, then you look at it, new experience, positive emotion, and it's cluttered, and the traveling is difficult, then you experience negative emotion. And it's logical that that would be the case,

because if your pathway forward is cluttered, then it's more difficult to get where you want to go. And if it's more difficult, that takes more time and energy. And that should be signaled by something biological, because it's costly. And so that's exactly what happens. And that's actually how we look at the world. That's how the world manifests itself to us, not only emotionally, but also even perceptually, because we don't exactly appear to perceive objects that, you know, the way we think about how we think is we think we look at the world and we see objects and then we evaluate the

we think about the objects and we evaluate them and then we make decisions about them but that isn't actually how you perceive the world at all. That's just wrong. The way you perceive your world is a place of obstacles and and obstacles things that get in your way and things that move you forward. And you want things that move you forward and they produce positive emotion and you don't want things that get in the way and they produce negative emotion. And you don't look at the objects and then decide if they're obstacles or facilitators, let's say, is that you see obstacles and facilitators. That's how your brain is set up. And so that emotional perception is part of direct perception. It's

not a secondary consequence of thinking. So when you orient yourself towards some aim and then you start to implement the actions necessary to undertake that aim to make it manifest itself in the world, and then you observe the consequences of that, and if the consequences are that, as you implement your plan, you move towards the goal, then that produces positive emotion. And that positive emotion is of a very particular type.

We understand this very well. The neurology of this is laid out very well. The system that produces positive emotion when you're moving towards a valued goal runs on a neurochemical known as dopamine. And it's technically known as the incentive reward system. It's different. Often people think of a reward as, you know, you're hungry and you have Thanksgiving dinner

and then you're sort of complacent and satiated after that, and that's the reward. That's consumatory reward. You actually aren't that motivated by consumatory reward. It actually shuts you down, right? If you're hungry and you eat, then you're no longer hungry. Incentive reward is a different thing. Incentive reward is what pulls you along towards a goal. And almost all the positive emotion that people really value in their lives is incentive reward. That's the feeling that you're engaged in something important. And it's so important, it's so vital that incentive reward system, that it can be hijacked

by different kinds of chemicals. And so almost all the drugs that people abuse, like cocaine and methamphetamine and opiates, all the really, all the drugs that really hook people, hook people because they activate the incentive reward system. And so they produce the facsimile of purposeful engagement. And they can do that in a very, very potent way, in an exaggerated way. But the reason that people experience them as positive

is because the drugs hijack the system that actually does indicate what constitutes positive. And so you need an aim in order to experience what's positive. That's really an incredible thing to know, you know, is that there's a direct relationship between having an aim and experiencing the sort of positive emotion that engages you meaningfully in life. And there's more to it than that, too, because the neurochemical system that's activated as a consequence of the observation that you're moving towards a valued goal also is analgesic. And so cocaine is an incentive reward drug, and it's also analgesic.

It's something useful to know. If you ever know somebody who's suffering from intractable cancer pain, for example, you can use a drug like an opiate, which is a direct analgesic, and you can use a drug, a psychomotor stimulant, a cocaine analogue to increase the potency of the opiate. So if you ever know someone who can't have their pain managed,

it's a very useful thing to know if someone's approaching the end of their life If you give them a combination of riddle and an opiates, that's much more effective than just opiates And it also helps people be alert. So that's a you know a useful side effect of knowing something about Well, it's a useful side effect of knowing something about the underlying neurochemistry. So in any case of knowing something about the underlying neurochemistry. So, in any case, in order to activate the systems that produces the sense of positive and meaningful engagement in life, you have to be pursuing an aim. You have to have an aim and you have to be pursuing it. And then I would also say, at least to some degree, you have to be pursuing it successfully,

because otherwise it just gets too complicated and too chaotic. So no aim, no purpose, no meaning, no positive emotion. And so that's a good thing. Now part of the reason for that, there's a bunch of reasons for it. But one reason is that we're actually active creatures where we have to make our way through the world.

We don't just stand there, we're not rooted in one spot like plants. We have to negotiate our way through the world. We have to navigate. We're navigating creatures, you know? And we're also hunting creatures. We specify targets and lock on them and we throw things at the targets

and we chase the targets and we're very, very much goal oriented. You can't even look at the world without a goal because you can't focus your eyes unless you pick something out as the thing that you're aiming your perception at. You literally can't see the world without having an aim in mind. So you're nested inside a system of aims. The question is, well, what do you aim at? Well, maybe you want to walk across the stage.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other night and he's trying to restructure a big company that isn't doing very well. And he's quite a deep thinker and he was, and he's done this before. He's restructured other companies and that's worked. He's a very honest person and the way he restructures companies is he tries to figure out what it is that they should be doing and then tries to figure out why they're not doing it and then tries to set that right. And he sort of starts at the bottom to find out

why things aren't working and he gets obstacles out of the way of the people who want to be productive and he establishes a set of goals and he puts in a system of rewards and punishments that are commensurate with those goals and he gets everybody pointed in the same direction. And so he said to me, well, this particular company said, well, we make computers that are gonna change the world,

we're gonna change the lives of billions of people and that's what we're doing, that's what this company does. And so that means that if that's communicated properly within the company, then the secretary who's doing nothing in principle but shuffling paper isn't exactly just doing nothing in principle but shuffling paper. She's part of a process that's got as a name the creation of computational technology that can transform the world. It's always an open question what you're doing.

So we're talking about that. Remember watching this video a while back. I can't remember the guy, the name of the guy who made it, but he's some guy who goes out in the bush and he makes houses out of nothing. He just goes out there with nothing shorts on and then he, this is literally true. And then he like, he tears down a tree and he ties it to a sharp rock and now he has an axe and then he goes and cuts down a bunch of other little trees and then he makes a little wall out of the trees and he takes mud and he makes a foundation and then he bakes it and then he has this nice hot-tony mix, little bricks for the top of it.

And it's just absolutely amazing watching him to create out of nothing. It's really something to watch someone create out of nothing. There's something absolutely profound about it. And so I was thinking about that. I watched him make bricks and so he'd go dig in the mud in the clay and come up with a like a massive clay. And then he made this little frame out of sticks that was rectangular and he packed the clay in the frame and then pulled the frame off and then he'd have a nice square brick.

Then he'd do that over and over and then he was baking the bricks. It's interesting to watch him do that. So I was thinking about brick layers and I was thinking of talking to that, talking to my friend do that. And so I was thinking about brick layers, and I was thinking of talking to that, talking to my friend about that, and he was thinking about brick layers in medieval Europe, and you say, well, you know, you might get kind of nihilistic about

making bricks, because it's kind of a local activity, and you might get kind of nihilistic about laying bricks, and you might wonder what it is that you're up to and why that's worthwhile and what place that has in the world. But imagine that you're making bricks and the bricks make a wall and the wall is part of a great building and the building is a cathedral and the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of God, let's say. So you have a hierarchy of aims there, right? It's the local is attached to the transcendent, and that means that the local activity partakes in the transcendent,

and that there's a justification for the action in some sense at every relevant level of the, what would you say? Of every, at every relevant layer of the world? And so if someone's a brick layer and they're working on a medieval cathedral, the question, the real question might be, well, what exactly are they doing? Are they laying bricks? Are they building a cathedral? And if they're building a cathedral, what then are they doing?

What are they participating in by building that cathedral? And I think it's a good question. I've been in Europe a lot, and lots of people go to Europe. It's unbelievably packed with tourists, and the reason they go there is because there's an unbelievable amount of beauty in Europe. There's these amazing central cities,

and they're usually surround a cathedral, and there was something There was something deeply aesthetic going on in Europe for hundreds of years that produced this absolute outpouring of staggering beauty and all the people who who worked hard for hundreds of years building those buildings because some of the Cathedral's took hundreds of years to build we're all participating in whatever that was and right and so they had their local were all participating in whatever that was, right? And so they had their local activity, their trivial activity, their day-to-day activity, but it was associated with something transcendent.

And it gave everything, it imbued everything with deep meaning, and the reason it did that, because there was a deep aim, and having a deep aim imbues things with a deep meaning. That's how it works, It works that way, technically. Then you don't need a substitute. I was writing about this a little bit today and something I cut out, I think, of what I was writing,

but it's relevant. I studied addictive drugs for a long time when I was a graduate student and learned some of the things that I was telling you tonight. And animal experimentalists who studied addictive drugs, the psychomotor stimulants that I was talking about, that affect the system that produces engaged engagement with the world, positive emotion engagement with the world. You can study the effects of those drugs on animals, on rats, say, rats are typical laboratory

animal. It actually turns out that those drugs are so addictive there, and the addictive process that's associated with those positive emotion circuits is so deep that you can get animals as primordial as crustaceans addicted to the same drugs that human beings get addicted to. That's interesting because it tells you how deep those systems of meaning are right there. Hundreds of millions of years old, they're unbelievable, unbelievably profound in ancient systems that manifest themselves within you as emotions and grip you. So it's not a trivial thing to talk about the relationship

between him and emotion. In any case, if you want to get a rat addicted to cocaine, you have to, well, that's your goal as your behavioral scientist. I know, it's pretty weird. It's like, what do you do? I get rats addicted to drugs. It's like, well, how do you get a rat addicted to drugs? Well, you have to be rather mean to the rat as it turns out.

So imagine there's two ways that you can have rats in your lab. You can have rats one by one inside a cage, or you can have rats in a sort of naturalistic rat environment. Rats are actually pretty social. They have rat families and they have a lot of communities. They have rat hierarchies. And they communicate with one another. And they're quite social.

They play. They actually laugh. Yacht Panks'ep, who recently died, unfortunately, a great emotional neurosciencecientist he discovered that rats laugh. If you tickle them with an eraser at the end of a pencil, you can get them to laugh, but you can't tell because they laugh ultrasonically like bats.

And so you have to slow down the recording in order to hear them. And so now you know that too. You know, and it's funny because you think, we really were paying scientists to tickle rats with racers. It's like, yeah, but I'll tell you something that came out of that. It's not trivial. You know, if you take a rat, this is a bit of a sideways venture,

but whatever, if you take a rat, pop away, rat, pop away from its mother, it'll just die. Even if you feed rat pup away from its mother, it'll just die. Even if you feed it and you give it water, it'll just die. Same with human infants, by the way, and like nourishment and shelter is not enough. You need tactile stimulation. It's a primary need. It's without a small mammals die. And with baby rats, if you massage them with the

end of a pencil eraser, which is kind of soft, but firm, then they'll live. But you have to do that massaging. And they enjoy that and will giggle away while you're doing that. But you have to tape them ultrasonically. And anyways, so it turns out to be of crucial importance. One of the derivations of that was a woman named Tiffany Fields took Yacht Panksepp's work on massaging baby rats and transformed it into massaging premature infants in incubators in hospitals. You know, because what happens if you have a premature infant, is he put it in an incubator, usually loses weight for a while, which is not good,

because a baby, especially one that shouldn't be born yet, should be gaining weight like mad. And so any weight loss is not good. If you take a premature infant and you massage it three times a day for 10 minutes, then it gains weight as fast as it does in utero, and you can detect the positive effects of that six months later, which is a very long time, right,

in human developmental terms. So that's just a good example of how basic biological science can echo upward and have very practical consequences, in any case, back to the aim idea. And so my friend who's trying to restructure this company is trying to get the story straight. It's like, well, what are we doing? We're providing the computers that will change the world.

Well, how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to do it in a way that will make the world a better place. And he's actually serious about that, partly because he's dead paranoid about how computers might be used to make the world a really not better place. And he's very, very cognizant of that. And so it's an important issue. And if you get that story right, then you can talk to everybody in the company and say, look, you've got important things to do here.

You've got your little part in it. And maybe it just seems like a tiny fraction of the whole, but it's integrally associated with the whole. And how you do your job, how you do your job in your local environment there is going to have an effect on the total function of the system in a non-trivial way and in a way that's more important than you think. I think that's exactly right. That's exactly, that's a very important thing to know. Okay, so that's a bunch of armies marching towards one destination.

Here's another one. I built this program a while back called the Future Authoring Program, and I built that partly because I had been working with my students, and in this class called Maps of Meaning, and some of you might have watched some of the Maps of Meaning lectures, and it's the first book I wrote, and it's out in audio, by the way, which makes it more accessible. It's a very hard book.

But if you're interested in 12 rules for life and you'd like to know more, then you could read maps of meaning because it goes way underneath and much deeper. And that's more difficult, but potentially more worthwhile. Anyways, maps of meaning is a book about the importance of aim and the importance of direction and the importance of value among other things.

And the importance of stories, because stories lay out a pathway in a name. They're actually a form of communication that we use to describe the world in terms of value. And I had my students do some practical exercises while they were studying maps of meaning and learning about stories and how they orient us in the world. And I had them write an autobiography. So there's kind of a rule, this is a good rule to know too. If you have a memory that's more than about 18 months old,

and when the memory comes to mind, it still produces negative emotion. It means that you haven't fully delved into or understood all the significance of the events that are encapsulated in that emotion for reconstructing the aims of your life. And so something bad happens to you and it froze you. It turned you into a prey animal and produced a powerful emotional response and the emotional response is to freeze into avoid and to not go there again.

But that's not a very sophisticated response. Really, what you want to do if something terrible happens to you is you want to figure out exactly why that terrible thing happened, right? You want to figure out how you conducted yourself such that you increased your susceptibility to that terrible event. That has nothing to do with whether or not it's your fault. That's not the issue. The issue is, if something terrible happened to you, you do not want it to happen again. And so what you want to do is you want to untangle the terrible event until you reconstitute the way that you

map the world so that you don't walk down that path again. And the reason for that, at least in part, is because the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past. The purpose of memory is to at least in part so that you don't repeat the same errors that you repeated in the past going forward, right? You learn from the past so you don't repeat it. That's the purpose of memory. It's very, very practical. Now it also might be that the purpose of memory is to remember things that you did that worked and do them

again, that's fine. But that, you know, that doesn't cause undue suffering, undue suffering occurs when something terrible happened to you and you don't understand why. So I had students write an autobiography to bring themselves up to date, you know, to think about everything that had happened in their life and they're trying to map their way forward And if you want to map your way forward, you need to know two things, right? You need to know where you are and you need to know where you're going if you're Using a map to get from one place to another in an automobile and you don't know where you are

You can't figure out where you're going and likewise if you don't know where you're going Well, then you're directionless and so you need those two points of orientation. Where are you? You want to collect yourself and be in that place. And then you want to figure out where you're headed. And it's the case that we really don't help our students. It's quite a remarkable thing. We don't do a good job in our education systems

of helping our students figure out where they want to go strangely enough You know one of the things I realized over a number of years when I was teaching was that Students the students in my classes would have spent a certain amount of time Writing essays about a variety of topics mostly abstractions of one form or another, but almost never, never, not almost, just purely never, they never were sat down by someone who said, look, I want you to spend, I want you to write five pages about what in the world you're going to do with your life and why, like it's important, you know, it's like, what what do you amen at exactly?

What sort of character do you want to develop and how about some justification for it, right? And how about some thought about how you're gonna strategically approach that aim and how about some How about some strategizing about what'll happen if obstacles get in your way? How are you gonna overcome them? And that just never happens. And that, well, I've still not really recovered from that realization, because it's so absolutely absurd that we can educate people for 16 years, let's say, and never, ever have them face the problem of their aim and their character in any rigorous manner.

It's just beyond comprehension that that's the case. In any case, we built this program to help people do that. It was first a workbook in this class and then we could put it online and so that people could do it. And so that there was a bit of computational technology behind it to make it a little bit more sophisticated. And so basically what it does is this, as well look, first thing is, well, what do you wanna do with your life? Well, that's a hard question, right? It's too big that question.

And so it can just freeze you. And the reason it freezes you is because there's just too much to it, there's too many choices. And so you can't compute all that. And so you freeze and you avoid and it's difficult. And so you can break it down. That's what you do as a good behavioral psychologist. You know, if someone's got a problem and they can't solve it, then you break it down into subordinate problems. You know, like let's say someone's really shy, say,

well, I'm really shy. I can't talk to people. It's like, well, what do you mean you can't talk to people? That's pretty global. You can't talk to anyone ever. It's like, well, if I go to a party, I freeze up. It's like, well, do you know how to introduce yourself? You have no idea how many people don't know how to introduce themselves. You have to know how to shake hands.

You have to know how to put out your hand. You have to know how to take someone else's hand without offering them something approximating a dead carp. And you have to shake their hand in a friendly way, but not too friendly. And you don't pull them towards you like a certain person that we know. And you have to tell them your name and you have to do that in a sort of sophisticated way and you have to do it loud enough so they can hear you and then they have to tell

you their name and hopefully those two things don't happen at exactly the same time. You know, there's a bit of sophisticated and then you kind of have to remember the other person's name and you have to look at them. That's helpful instead of looking at your shoes. So there's a variety of important behavioral strategies that have to be implemented so that you can introduce yourself and then maybe once you introduce yourself, well you said something to someone and now they know who you are

and so maybe you can get the ball rolling with the conversation. Point is, is if you have a complicated problem, you can break it down into simple problems until you find a problem that's so simple that even someone as incompetent as you has a reasonable shot at solving it. And that's exactly what you do as a behavioral psychologist. You take the big problem and you say,

well, let's just figure out how you could make some progress and we'll just make the progress small enough so that at some point you'll say, well, I could do that. And then, away you go. And so, well, that's kind of what we did with the Future Authoring Program. We said, well, okay, the first thing is imagine that you could have the life that would be good for you, just, out of, just hypothetically, or at least one that's better, that would be something. But you could go all the way and think that you could have the life that would be good for you if you were taking care of yourself.

That's rule two, by the way, and 12 rules for life, that you should treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping. It doesn't mean to be nice to yourself. It doesn't mean to have self- yourself. It doesn't mean to have self-esteem. It's none of that nonsense. It means that you take responsibility for yourself, like you have some value, and then you try to construct a pathway that would be appropriate for someone that has value

that you would be taken care of. And so we ask people questions like, well, if you could have what you wanted from your family, what would that look like hypothetically? And everybody knows, because at least you know what you don't want from your family, right? So a fair bit of that still indicated with negative emotion. Well, I don't want this and I don't want that.

I don't want to fight all the time. I don't want everybody drinking and causing mischief and grief constantly. And I don't want wanna have the same old, stupid counterproductive conversations, but what happened 15 years ago, repeated constantly. I don't want Christmas to be never ending miserable concatenation of the foolishness

that we've encountered for the last 10 years. You know, you have some sense of what you don't want. And from that, you can derive some sense of what you might want if you could have what you wanted and so What do you want from your family? What do you want from your friends? If you could have what you wanted and You thought it through so that it wasn't just a random sequence of events

How might you plot your career or your job? Because not everybody has a career, but almost everybody has a job, but you know, jobs can be worth doing even if they're not careers. How do you educate yourself so that you're a little smarter tomorrow than you were yesterday? How might you take care of yourself physically and mentally? What could you do with your time outside of work that would be valuable and productive? That's not bad. Seven questions, like maybe it could be 20, but seven's not bad, and maybe that could be valuable and productive. That's not bad. Seven questions, like maybe it could be 20, but seven's not bad.

And maybe that could get the ball rolling. And I tell my students, you don't do it. Don't get all perfectionistic about this. You're not going to do a very good job of making your plan because what the hell do you know? And as you move, well, exactly. And as you move towards your goal, the way that you look at what you want is going to change. And that's OK, because as you move towards your goal, the way that you look at what you want is going to change.

And that's okay, because, you know, as you move forward through a landscape, then your view of the landscape changes and your plot and your trajectory has to shift. But you still have to get started and have a bad map is way better than having no map at all. And if you have a bad map and you start to use it and you learn more detail as you move forward in your sort of low resolution way, then you can improve the map and you can upgrade your plans. And so that's fine because part of having a good plan is to plan on having a better plan But you have to at least implement the stupid plan that you have before you're going to move to a better plan And then this is also an important thing to know because people tell me all the time

Especially young people. Well, I don't know what to do Well, so you ask well, what are you doing? Well nothing? Now that's a stupid plan Because all that happens is that you do nothing and then you get old. And the problem with getting old is that you're old when you get old. You know, it's so doing nothing doesn't work because you can't do nothing. The best you can do is sit there and degenerate. So that's not helpful.

And so it's better to make a bad plan and implement it and take the risk that's associated with it because at least you learn something. And so anyways, people answer these seven questions. And then we have them right for 15 minutes about what their life could be like three to five years down the road if they got what they needed, like they were taking care of themselves. So that's kind of cool.

And then we have them do a couple of other things. We have them do the reverse, which is, because here's another thing about rats. It's kind of interesting. So you've already learned how to get them addicted to cocaine. You got to isolate them in a cage, right? Because if they're isolated in a cage, you can get them addicted to cocaine.

But if they're in their families doing like rat things, you can't get them addicted to cocaine. But if they're in their families doing like rat things, you can't get them addicted to cocaine because they have better things to do. And so that's a useful thing to know, you know, is that one of the ways that you stop people from being susceptible to things that can addict them is by ensuring that they have better things to do. So how do you motivate a rat? Well, let's say you've taught a rat to run, you get him hungry,

and you teach him that there's food at the end of a runway, and you lift up the little door that stops him from getting to the food. So, so too soon, and he runs down the runway, sort of in proportionate, the speed is proportionate to hungry is. So hungry, Ratwell, if he's too hungry, doesn't run at all, he just lies there and dies, so that's the limit part of the experiment. So, but, you know, if he's still functional, Rat, he'll zip down there pretty quick to get the cheese. And so, you can tell the rats motivated by the hope of the food, but you can make them run even faster if you do something else. So rats don't like the smell of cats. It's instinctual. It's like rats don't like cats. We don't like snakes.

Rats don't like cats. It's a very similar thing. And so if you have your hungry rat and you want to really get them zipping down the cage, you want to wafth a little cat odor over him at the same time, because then he runs really fast down the runway because he gets to get the food and get the hell away from the cat. And so, it's good to be running away from something you don't want at the same time that you're running towards something you do want, and so we also have people write a little counter narrative, which is, well, imagine you took stock of your bad habits, and then they ordered you into the ground

over about a three to five year period. And everyone kind of has a vision of that, because all of you know which hand basket you would use to go to hell, and if you had your option, right? Some of you, it would be martyrdom, and some of you you it would be martyrdom and some of you it be addiction and some of it be obesity and some of it be bad physical health and some of you would be killed by relatives you know and so and probably justly so and So you know how you would degenerate if you allowed that to happen and it's actually how you would degenerate if you allowed that to happen. And it's actually unbelievably useful to sit down once in your life and think,

okay, if I let the things that I'm, that, if I let the temptations that I am prone to succumb to have the upper hand, just exactly what sort of hell would I inhabit in three to five years. It's really worth thinking that through, because then on those days when the thought of the cheese at the end of the runway isn't enough to get you out of bed, then the thought of the hell that you might be degenerating into if you just lay there might be enough impetus to get you moving, and to have both of those working for you is a big deal. And so anyways, with this future authoring program, we tested it out and we found, we did this

mostly with college and university students, but we found that people who completed this program, even if they did it badly, even if they only spent an hour doing it the day that they came into the college for orientation in the summer. So just an hour, right? It's nothing, man, to think about your future. It increased the probability that they would stay in university by almost 30 percent and had a very salutary effect on grades. And that was particularly true for men. There was particularly true for ethnic minority men, and it was particularly true for men Who had done badly in high school and who weren't aiming in college or university at something that was specifically associated with a career So that was quite cool because it had its best effect on on people who were doing the worst

Which is the opposite of most psychological interventions because what they usually do is help the people who are doing the worst, which is the opposite of most psychological interventions, because what they usually do is help the people who are doing well do even better. So, so what, why am I telling you all this? Well, it's because in order to be properly motivated, you have to have an aim. And maybe, and maybe the deeper the aim, the more well-elaborated the aim, the more articulated the aim, the more

justifiable the aim, the more you thought about the aim, the more comprehensive the aim, the more motivation is associated with it. And so, you know, if you have to ask why you're doing something difficult, and the answer is, well, if I pursue this property, then I'm going to have the friends I want, and I'm going to have the family I want, and I'm going to take care of myself properly, I'm going to have the friends I want, and I'm going to have the family I want, and I'm going to take care of myself properly. I'm going to have the career I want. I'm going to educate myself properly, and I'm not going to degenerate into the particular hell

that would otherwise be waiting for me. That's actually not a bad set of rationalizations to chase away the doubt that might otherwise be associated with what you're doing. And so that's pretty useful and pretty interesting to know. And so then the next issue might be, well, you should aim at something. And then the question is, well, what is it that you should aim at? And this is a profound question in my estimation, because that's really the question. That's really, that question is really something like,

what's the purpose of life? That's the question, what should you be aiming at? And one question might be that arises from that is that, is it even reasonable to pause it that there is something that you should be aiming at? That's kind of a, that's the question that a moral relativist might put forward or maybe a postmodernist might put forward,

that forward, say something like, well, there's a lot of ways of looking at the world, you know, and who's to say that any way is better than any other way? It's like, well, that's not helpful in my estimation. And I think it's not helpful in my estimation. And I think it's not helpful because it's actually wrong. The postmodern claim, there's an element of validity to it because the element of validity is that there is a very large number of ways of looking at the world.

That's the element of validity that characterizes the moral, relativist position as well. There's a very large number of ways of looking at the world. And then the question arises, well, how can you be sure that one way of looking at the world is preferable to another, turns out to be a difficult problem. However, if you're not sure that one way of looking at the world is better than another,

well then you don't have an aim, and if you don't have an aim, you don't have a goal, and if you don't have a goal, then you don't have any positive emotion. And that turns out to be a really bad thing. And part of the reason for that is, you don't have any positive emotion if you don't have a goal, but you've got plenty of negative emotion. So, this is partly why I've laid emphasis to a large degree in 12 rules for life on suffering, because you've got to know what's real. And I mean, I think there's a variety of things that are real, but there are two things that really stand out as real for me.

Experientially, one is pain. It's damn hard to argue yourself out of pain. And other is malevolence. I think malevolence is the willingness or the desire to produce pain when that's unnecessary. And it's very difficult for me to, to, to, to. I've never met anybody successfully, anybody who could successfully argue themselves out of a belief in those things.

Malevolence is a bit different because not everybody's encountered it. But let me tell you, if you've actually encountered it, you can't argue your way out of its existence because it will damage you. That's what happens to people who have post-traumatic stress disorder and they can't think their way out of its existence because it will damage you. That's what happens to people who have post-traumatic stress disorder. And they can't think their way out of it. It's too deep. And we all suffer. We're all susceptible to pain, we're susceptible to misery and to death.

All of that, life is very, very difficult. And so what happens to you if you adopt a viewpoint that deprives your life of any transcendent or superordinate meaning is that all the positive elements go away, all the engagement meaning vanishes. You can destroy that rationally, but the pain and the misery and the malevolence remains. And then what happens is that you suffer without hope of respite. And that makes you cruel and bitter and vengeful. And none of that seems to be good

unless you think that where you had when you were possessed by that sort of motivation is something that's desirable. And you know, you have to have gone a long ways towards the abyss before you start to think that. And so a higher order purpose in some sense isn't optional to discover if that's not optional because the alternative is that degeneration that comes along with being susceptible to

pointless suffering. And so, you know, we talked about the chicken who decided that crossing the road was a good idea because the other side of the road was better, at least as far as the chicken was concerned. And then, of course, you might question the chicken's moral knowledge and wonder philosophically why the other side of the road would be better than the side that you're already on. And that's a very profound and difficult question. But I actually think, I believe that that question is answerable. So I think, I believe that that question is answerable.

So I think that the reason that, so the postmodern types who pause it, that there's a very large number of ways of looking at the world are correct. But when they stretch that and say, there's no way of determining, there's no way of rank-ordering ways of looking at the world in terms of their validity, then they've made a mistake. Now, it's not like it's a conundrum that's easy to solve. What's worth doing? Well, that's a very difficult question,

but it's worthwhile attempting to answer it. So that's the next thing we're going to do is we're going to attempt to answer it. So I'll get another army in motion here. So I want to tell you something first about consciousness. That's quite interesting. And it's an argument against determinism. And I have to make this argument before I can make the next argument that I want to make. So, we don't know that much about consciousness.

It's a real mystery. It's probably the ultimate mystery as far as I can tell. Because we don't understand how it is that we can be aware, or even what awareness means, that we don't understand the relationship between the existence of things and the fact that there is something that's aware of those things, because it's not obvious what it would mean for things to exist if nothing was aware of them. So the problem of consciousness isn't merely the problem of awareness. It's even in some sense the problem of being because being without awareness seems, well, it's incomprehensible in some sense. There's something but no one registers it. Well, what sense is there something then? In any case, consciousness is a mystery, but one of the things we do know about it is that you're more likely to be conscious

when you do things that you don't know how to do. So for example, if you take a native language speaker, Danish, that was the language that was used for this study, and you put someone in a scanning machine and you compute how much glucose their brain is using and how many areas are active. If you play Danish forward to them, like in its proper order, a very small part of their brain is active and they don't use much glucose.

But if you play Danish backward, which is equivalent in phonic complexity, let's say, then huge parts of their brain light up. It's a way harder to listen to Danish backwards than it is to listen to Danish forward. And it turns out that under most circumstances, when you're doing something that you don't know how to do, then your brain is very, very active. And then as you practice, what happens is that

smaller and smaller part of your brain is activated until, and it kind of shifts like this. It's like your right and left hemispheres are activated when you're trying something new. And then the activity shifts over to the left as you practice and the amount of your brain that's active gets smaller and that continues to shrink until there's a small machine, let's your brain that's active gets smaller, and that continues to shrink until there's a small machine,

let's say, that's formulated in the back part of the left side of your brain, and it's specialized for that particular activity. And then you've become expert at it. You've built the machinery that enables you to undertake that task in a rather deterministic manner, and now you don't have to be conscious. And so when you drive to work, you're thinking about what you're going to do at work, you're not paying much, I mean, you're watching the road and all that, but you're not thinking

about the road the same way you were when you first gripped the steering wheel when you were 14 and you were learning to drive, right? And that was absolutely exhausting after 10 minutes because you've got all the circuitry built, you're looking 300 yards down the road, you know, exactly when to push the brake, you know, exactly how much you need to turn the wheel. That's all automatized and you've turned into something approximating a deterministic organism. But that doesn't happen when you don't know what you're doing.

And so that's what consciousness seems to be. That's what consciousness seems to be for in some sense. It seems to be the mechanism that's operative when you don't know what you're doing. And it can't be deterministic. And I think the reason for that is that in order for you to operate as a deterministic organism, all of the biological substructures that enable you

to undertake the activity have to be built, and you build them through practice. And then once they're built, they can run in in an automated manner and that is exactly how it works. I mean, you don't have to think much when you walk, that's automated. You don't have to think much when you ride a bike. You don't have to think much when you're playing the piano if you're playing a piece that you've practiced a tremendous amount. But if you stumble over a phrase, then you get conscious of where you stumbled and

then you go back and you practice stumbled, and then you go back and you practice, you practice, you practice, you practice, and you build yourself a new automatic circuit that will run automatically, and then you can continue with the music. And maybe your consciousness, when you're playing the music, is, you know, it's bounced up above what you've practiced, and you can concentrate consciously on how you phrase the music, and how you twist it and turn it, consciously on how you phrase the music and how you twist it and turn it and on the higher-order elements of their performance, consciousness is still operating, but a lot of it's running on automatic.

And so consciousness is there when you can't run on automatic. Consciousness is what confronts the novel or what confronts the unknown as such. And I think that's right, that's what consciousness does. And so you're a deterministic organism in some ways when you're running through your practice and habitual routines, but when you're facing what you've never encountered before, then consciousness is operating.

And it's the thing that faces the unknown and builds new structure. All right, so that's what we're thinking about. And it's a good way of thinking about what a human being is like. And so, okay, so now let's play that out a little bit. So imagine, we're trying to figure out how it is that you're interacting with the world and what constitutes your mode of interacting with the world. And so you wake up in the morning and what do you face consciously?

Now you're conscious, you weren't because you were asleep, but now you're conscious. And what you seem to face in the world in the morning are the possibilities of the world. You wake up and you think about all the things that you could do that day. And you could think, well, there's a very large number of pathways that lie there in front of you, that you could conceivably walk down. And maybe you're worried about it, because, well, there's too much on your plate, right? There's too many decisions to make, and that's kind of overwhelming.

Or maybe you're excited about it, because there's a landscape of new potential that you can explore. Maybe there's some balance there. But in any case, you wake up in the morning, and you confront what's coming at you that you have not yet mastered. And that's the rule of your consciousness, is to confront what's novel. All right. So you think about that for a minute, you see if you think.

So that's the world that you confront as a conscious being. It's the world of possibility and potential. It's those things that you could do. You know, and you might play it without in your imagination, well, here's some things I need to do and here's some things I could do. And here's what might happen. If I don't do the things that I know I should today,

for example, there's various cliffs that you might fall off. If you don't do the things that I know I should today, for example, there's various cliffs that you might fall off if you don't manifest your responsibilities. And so you're toying with that field of potential that's in front of you. I think that's a good way of thinking about the reality that human beings occupy. We are in some sense deterministic creatures, but only once we've been transformed into, well, only once we've established our habits and only then in an environment that's stable. But what we confront with the conscious part of our being

is that territory which is as of yet unmapped. And consciousness is the attempt to map that territory and to plot our way through it and to establish the proper aims and then maybe to become expert at it across time. But the consciousness is confronting the potential. That's what we do, where the consciousness that confronts the potential.

All right, now I'm gonna put another army in operation here to talk about the first part of Genesis. So there's this, and the reason for this is, well, I'm very interested in stories. I think they sit at the basis of our cognitive structure. In fact, I think the evidence for that is overwhelming, that we really look at the world through stories. And there's hierarchies of stories.

Some stories are more fundamental than others. Some stories are deeper than others. And you know that because you know that there's great literature and there's cheap novels. And you know there's a difference between them. And the great literature is deep, whatever the hell that means. And the cheap novels are art. They're shallow. Right? And we understand that metaphor. And deep means affecting many things simultaneously or something like that. And the deepest of narratives are the ones that are at the base of our culture, that everything in our culture depends on.

Among those deep narratives is the narrative, say, that's outlined in Genesis. Genesis posits a particular structure to the world, and the structure is this. So there's a potential, that's the Tohu Vabohu, that's the unformed chaos that exists, that co-exist with God. That's one way of looking at it. And that word Tohu Vabohu, that comes from an older word, from a mess of Tamiy that word, Tohu Vaba, who that comes from an older word from a Mesopotamian word, Tiamat, and Tiamat was a particular kind of Mesopotamian goddess, and she was the goddess of chaos, and the originator of part of the structure that gave rise to the phenomenal

to the phenomenal world. And so the Tohu Vabo, who isn't nothingness exactly, it's not the right way to think about it, it's potential. And so there's this hypothesis in Genesis about the nature of, well, about the nature of reality, that reality manifests itself in part as potential, and part as the structure that confronts potential. And that's laid out in Genesis as God. It's laid out as God the Father actually.

And the idea there is that it's the same idea that I just laid out with regards to how you're operating in the morning. You wake up and the potential of the world is sitting there in front of you. The question is how do you encounter that potential? And the answer is, well, not with nothing, I mean, there you are. And you're a deeply structured thing. Now, you're not structured enough so that that structure can just operate deterministically

and transform the potential into actuality. You still have to make decisions, whatever that means. You have to make choices. You have to contend and wrestle with the potential before it manifests itself as reality, but it does do that. I mean, at least that's how we seem to treat ourselves, right? You get up in the morning, you know that there's decisions you have to make, and why does it matter

whether you make those decisions? And the answer is, well, the way the world lays itself out actually depends on the decisions that you make. And you know, you're not omniscient enough to know with perfect certainty that if you make decision X that event Y is going to occur, but you're not completely blind and stumbling about either. And you often know perfectly well

that if there's something important that needs to be done that you don't do, that some little bit of hellish chaos will definitely manifest itself, right? You're certain enough of that. And so you do react to yourself and treat yourself like you're a structure of structure, what would you say? You're a dynamic structure of ability, something like that that can contend with potential and transform it into reality. And that's exactly what's

laid out sort of writ large in Genesis. You have God who's the representation of the structure that interacts with potential. That's two things. And then there's a third factor which is the process that mediates the interaction. So the way that story is told in Genesis is that what God uses to confront potential and to transform it into habitable order is the word. And it's a separate thing.

It's a process. Well, it's the same thing. It's a kin as far as I can tell. It's a kin to your communicative consciousness. Again, but it's on the large scale. It's something like that. And you use that to form the chaos into the world. Now, there's an ethical dimension to that too, which is quite cool.

So, as the biblical corpus developed conceptually across time, the word was associated with the word is logos, and it was associated with a variety of virtues, let's say, and I would say the primary virtue that it's associated with is truth. And so there's this notion in Genesis that God uses truth to encounter potential, and the consequence of that is the emergence of habitable order. And so what happens, God does that, uses the word, creates things out of the potential, and then says repeatedly, and it was good. And so there's a moral hypothesis there too, which is absolutely crucial.

And the moral hypothesis is that which is extracted out of potential with truth is good. And that's a hypothesis. And so then you might think, well, what do you do when you're lying there in the morning, trying to figure out how you're going to wrestle with the potential that constitutes the day that confronts you? And part of the answer is, well, you make ethical decisions about how it is that you're going to interact with what's in front of you. You know, like, maybe you didn't do something at work that you should have done.

And so you're going to go give your boss a story about that isn't true about why it is that you didn't do it. You think, well, that'll set things right. And of course, you know, you don't believe that. You know, perfectly well, it won't set things right. But maybe it will stop you from being in trouble in that day. And maybe you feel guilty and ashamed about it if you have any bloody sense. And you know that the world that you're pulling into being as a consequence of your refusal to engage forthrightly with what's in front of you is damaging to you and it's damaging to the people around you and it undermines the integrity of the fabric of being itself. And you still might be inclined to do it because maybe you're deluded enough to think

that you can get away with it. But I can tell you one thing, this is my opinion, but it's something that I've derived as a consequence of my thousands of hours of practice as a clinical psychologist, and one thing I've learned, which I'm not necessarily that happy to have learned, is that no one ever gets away with anything, ever. It always comes back to haunt you.

And so if you take the easy way out, while you're contemplating how you're going to interact with the potential that's in front of you and you decide that you can warp part of the structure and you can hide something that's actually happened, you can hide it and you can deceive yourself about it and you can twist the structure of the world around so that that somehow no longer exists. It's like, that's not a strategy that's going anywhere. That is not going to work. And all you have to do is think it through to know that because first of all, you do know that when you do it because you wouldn't feel guilty and ashamed and low about it if

you didn't know that. And second, really, you think that you're capable of manipulating the structure of reality and transforming it into something that's false and that that's going to work. You think you can do that? It's like there's an arrogance in that that's, well, it's satanic, fundamentally. Well, I mean that technically, by the way, but it's not, it's a non-starter. So anyways, in the book of Genesis, the notion is that, well, God uses the word something roughly akin to consciousness, sort of, what would you say, something contemplated or conceptualized on the cosmic scale to interact with potential to produce habitable order and repeats the

observation that it's good. That's something seriously we're thinking about. For the rest of your life, it's the fundamental element of a certain kind of faith. And the faith is this, that whatever it is that you bring into being as a consequence of participating in the truth is by definition good. And that's a hell of a thing to know. Now, you can ask yourself, and maybe you should, if you believe that to be true, and maybe you don't. But if you do believe it to be true, if you believe that there's some possibility that it can be true, it's very, it puts a rock underneath

you, you know? It puts a foundation underneath you, because you can think, well, what do I have to do in order to interact with this potential properly? And the answer is, we just have to tell the truth. And you know, things will happen as a consequence of telling the truth, and some of them will be a little hard to bear in the short term, which is obviously why people lie, right? Why do you lie, so that you can reduce the short term consequences of your actions. Obviously, that's why you do it.

And so sometimes if you tell the truth, there's gonna be some rough going in the near future, but that doesn't mean that it's a bad medium to long-term strategy. And everybody knows that anyways, because if you have children or if you have people around you that you love, you don't tell them, look, here's a good strategy, kid.

It's like whenever you're in trouble, just lie your way out of it. That's what everybody else does. If everybody did that properly, the whole world would function perfectly. It's like, no one believes that, and no one ever uses it as advice. So, I'll close with this. So, I made this diagram once. I've not written about it, but I haven't published it. I've been writing about it for a very long time. I was trying to decompose the idea of ethical conduct into something that was fully differentiated. And so I drew this diagram. I said, well, imagine

that what one of the things you wanted, you want to be a good person. So what does it mean to be a good person? I was thinking about this as a behavioral psychologist. What might be, might mean being a good parent? That's not all it means because it might be being a good husband or it might be being a good wife, it might be being a good employee, you know, it might be being a good sibling. There's lots of sub-elements to being a good person. But being a good parent is a subset of being a good person. So it's a little more focal. And say, well, what do you have to do to be a good parent? Well, you might be a good father.

And what do you have to do to be a good father? It's like maybe you have to cook now and that. And hopefully something edible. And so not poisoned with hate and bitterness that you happen to be stuck in the kitchen. And so, well, that's you're gonna make a good meal. What do you decompose that? What do you have to do to make a good meal?

Well, you have to set the table and you have to cut up the vegetables and you have to saute the sausage. And so that's getting pretty focal, right? That's short-term, rather practical procedure. And you can decompose that even. You can say, well, you have to slice up the vegetables. How do you do that? Well, you move your hands back and forth, right?

And at that point, it's no longer conceptual, right? And so it's an interesting way of thinking about ethics because you can take something abstract, like be a good person, which is up in the air, right? It's an abstract virtue. It's an abstract conceptualization, but then you can decompose it and you find out that it's actually a sequence of actions. And that's how the mind meets the body. And so you cut up the vegetables properly and you do that properly so that you can make a good meal and you do that, make the good meal,

so you can be a good father, so you can be a good parent, so you can be a good person. And so the reason that you're cutting up the vegetables is so that you can be a good person, is the local partakes in the higher. It's just like the brick layer who's doing something locally, but participating in the higher at the same time. And you need that participation in the higher, because what imbues the quotidian things you do, the things that you do day to day with a deep

meaning is their association with the whole hierarchy of value, right? All the way up the chain, you want to be a good person, let's say, and that's why you're cutting up the vegetables carefully and properly. And you know, if you know about the connection between cutting up the vegetables and being a good person, then you're going to cut them up carefully, and you're going to cook them carefully, and you're going to make a meal that's good. And if you do that every day, well then you have a whole lifetime of pleasurable high-quality meals that you share with people that you love.

It's a non-trivial component of being a good person. So, even as you decompose virtues down into their practicalities, you don't lose the importance of what's being done. Well, what is it that's at the top of that hierarchy? The good person, well, what does that mean? Well, it can be decomposed into these practical processes, a myriad of them. And you want to practice all of them so you're good at them. You want to aggregate them into the staged levels of your being, but there's something at the top that beckons. I'll give you a little example of that in the movie, Pinocchio. Jepetto, who's God for all intents and purposes, makes this puppet, and the puppets of wooden headed, Marianette, with no experience,

something else is pulling its strings, and but there's a hope and a wish that's embedded in jupettos, motivations, and that is that the thing he creates can be autonomous and genuine. And what happens is that to catalyze that process, he lifts his eyes above the horizon, right? And he wishes on a star, very strange thing to do, but it's a symbolic thing. A star is a light that beckons in the darkness, and it's something that's

that's a transcendent object above the horizon. And so there's this idea that in order to catalyze the development of something autonomous and real, you have to lift your eyes above the horizon and establish a relationship with a transcendent goal. And that catalyzes the development of something that's autonomous and genuine. And Pinocchio has to learn, well he has to learn not to be a victim. That's part of what he learns. And he has to learn not to be a crook. And he has to learn not to be a shoman. And he has to learn to tell the truth, all of that. And then he has to learn to rescue his father

from the belly of the whale, to become completely and cultured and to face his darkest fears, and to discover within the structure of his darkest fears what it is that he could be in potential. And so there's courage associated with that as well. But it's the truth element that I wanted to concentrate on. It's like there's this deep idea and it's an idea that's correct. And it has to do with the reality of value. It's like the other thing that's stressed in Genesis after the description of how reality lays itself out

and the proposition that which is engendered out of potential by the truth is good, is the final proposition, which is that men and women alike are made in the image of God, which is staggering and miraculous claim, especially for that time, partly because of its unlikely hood, let's say, that that would be positive, that something as lowly as a human being and fragile and vulnerable and what would you say,

fatally corrupted, could still have that transcendent value, and then equally that it would be shared between men and women alike. It's remarkable that that emerged as a concept so long ago. It's so absolutely, well I think miraculous, this was exactly the right way to think about it. And it seems to be that the insistence that men and women are made in the image of God has something to do with the capacity of human beings to engage in the process of generating the world out of the potential that confronts them and that they can do that properly by using truth as the fundamental tool of engagement.

And it's that realization, I think, that constitutes the proper transcendent value that grounds our entire ethical systems. Oh, you're performing your mundane activities. Well, they scale upwards towards some transcendent goal. Well, what's the transcendent goal? What's to live in the truth so that you can confront the potential that is not yet realized as the world, and to transform it into the habitable

order that is good. And I'll close with this, and you can think about this. Look, we already accept this is true. Like our culture is predicated on the idea that this is true. And this is why. Like, you're all granted inalienable rights. Right? No, you all possess inalienable rights.

You're not granted them. They're intrinsic to you. Even the state has to stay away from you because of your inalienable value. That's the predicate of your culture, particularly true of the United States. Why? Well, because there's some realization

that you bring something to bear on the world, in your sovereign individuality. something to bear on the world, right, in your sovereign individuality. You're the bearer of the capacity to transform potential into actuality, right? There's something that's sufficiently divine about that to be the source of what is the source of the inalienable rights that even bound the authority of the state. And the story is that not only is this authority of the state bounded by that recognition and necessarily bounded and we bloody well know

what sort of hell is produced when states forget that, right? That's clearly evident. Is that the story is, is that the integrity of the state itself depends on that, which is partly why you have the responsibility as the sovereign citizen to choose the people that hypothetically lead you, right? Or more accurately follow you properly. And so our entire culture is predicated on the idea that the inalienable value that characterizes you constitutes the foundation of the free and just and productive and autonomous state. We all act that out. It's like, do we believe it?

And if we don't believe it, well, then what? And if we do believe it, well, maybe we should take it seriously. It seems like a serious thing. And I mean, it is the case. You know what's been, and I'll close with this, it's been so interesting for me over the last year, doing what I'm doing, because I've talked to so many people, and so many people have told me the same story. You know, they've been listening to what I've been, they've been listening to my YouTube've been, they've been listening to my YouTube lectures or they've been listening to my podcast

or they've been reading this book. And the book says, well, you know, take some bloody responsibility as much as you can bear and see if you can tell the truth because that's the pathway to a proper life. And so people come and tell me and they say, look, I've been trying to sort out my life. I've been trying some of these things.

I've been trying to just tell the truth or at least not to lie. And I've been taking more responsibility, you know? I've been trying to set things right with my family. And you know what? It's really working. And so that's what motivated me to continue traveling around like this and talking to everyone and something's motivating you all to come out and listen. It's not so obvious, it's not so easy

to put your finger on that, you know? But I, but this works, it's works because it's true. You know, you are made in the image of God for what that's worth, you know? It isn't obvious what that means. None of us are deep enough to fully comprehend that idea. And it's easy for us to lose it because it seems, well, it's not something that you can grip so straightforwardly.

But I don't see a flaw in the idea that your consciousness confronts the potential that's not yet manifested itself and that the manner in which that potential transforms itself into your world, in your family's world, and your community's world is directly a consequence of the quality, of the ethical choices that you make while you're interacting with what has not yet come to be. And so that means that the structure of the world, whether or not it's habitable, or uninhabitable, right? Heaven-like or hell-like is dependent on the ethics of the choices that you make in that encounter.

And I think if you, I think we all know that and I think we judge each other and ourselves on that basis, and that if we knew it consciously and we acted it out properly with intent that things would be much better than they would otherwise be, and if we didn't, they would be much worse. And so I'm hoping that we can become more conscious of what these sorts of things mean. We can understand them more deeply and that as a consequence, we're more motivated to take

ourselves seriously and to bear the burden of transforming the potential that surrounds us into the order that we would like to see, and that within that we could see and act out the destiny that, what would you say, the destinies that sustains us properly through the difficulties of our lives. Thank you very much. Well, my friend, you were not messing around tonight. Not that you ever do, but you really, I mean, I could feel it before the show back there, you were ready to bring it tonight. Good night, everybody. All right, here we go.

There's a ton of questions, and there's a lot about this first one. You guys left Patreon when and what can we expect from the new platform? Well, what is the first question. We're going to try to run it by rule of law, I guess, which means that if you don't break a law, you don't get kicked off. Right. What we hope to offer as well is a more comprehensive and civilized way of interacting online and perhaps a more mature way. We're trying to work out how to reward productive and civilized discussion. I mean, whenever you produce a new, you know, these, these, these, these, these internet systems are new societies, right? And they're kind of anarchic and, and, and frontier like to begin with and the problem with that there's great

freedom that goes along with that but the problem is is that they can be inhabited by people who misuse them and there are game in some sense that starts to become unplayable because people break the explicit and implicit rules and cheat and so we're trying to figure out how we can create a system that will allow for maximal freedom while maintaining the minimal requirements for civilized discourse. And it isn't obvious that we'll be able to manage that, but at least one of the rules is going to be, we're not going to arbitrarily dispense with your right to communicate because your views don't align with ours politically.

So. Applause Go ahead and anything to add to that? We got our work cut out for us, that's it, right? I mean, we're actually,'re actually trying to make internet too, and a mature level of it, and it ain't going to be easy. So, Dave and I put up, it's tough because it isn't the underlying technology shifts so damn fast that the problem that you're trying to solve might vanish as a problem by the time you move towards a solution and you know Dave and I when we went off-pature and we set up just simpler

funding services and they actually work quite well and so one of the Conundrums that we're facing now is like it isn't it isn't obvious that you can group a large number of creators together in a group without running into the sorts of problems that Patreon either ran into or produced you know and maybe the solution is that we don't need Patreon anymore because there's other ways that creators can arrange for public funding that makes each of them independent and much more difficult to take out as independent entities. But yeah, well, I use Bitcoin on my own service, just more out of curiosity than anything

else. But we're trying to make a collective platform, and we've got a long ways on it. We have a good team working on it, and we have the same vision, but software projects are mostly doomed to failure, and this is a very big problem to solve, but we're going to give it a crack anyway, so. Well, we've never gotten this one before. Have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons? No. I tried to play it once when I was a kid, like, you know, 40 years ago. But we just had a rule book and we didn't know, this is in this little town I grew up

in in northern Alberta. We didn't know anybody that knew how to play it. And we couldn't figure out how to play it just by looking at the rules. And so we got bored and I don't know, went and drank like ice-cold vodka and the Ellie instead. You're getting Peterson unplugged tonight. I have 14-age boys with me here tonight. What is the best piece of advice you can give them to get through the struggles they are going to face?

I guess that was actually sort of the theme of what you did here tonight. Where are these guys? Right here. Don't underestimate yourself. That's the first thing. Don't shy away from responsibility. That's a tough one to figure out, you know, because it's easy to consider responsibility a burden that you, and that's that kind of premature cynicism that often does teenagers in, and it's really not good. That responsibility, civic responsibility, familial responsibility, responsibility to yourself, responsibility to the people that you date, it's easy to get cynical about that,

and that's a big mistake, because in that responsibility is your destiny, and so if you get cynical about that, you corrupt yourself prematurely, and that's a terrible situation for someone young to be in. I've seen lots of young people who were prematurely cynical about participating properly in life.

And they're like, they're old and worn out way before their time. So aim at something and aim high and don't underestimate your possibilities. You know, if you're forthright and you're dedicated and you're honest, which is a very difficult thing to manage, then the problems in the world will disappear as you confront them. You can do that. You know, people can really be something and you could be one of those people disappear as you confront them. You can do that. People can really be something, and you could be one of those people, and you don't have

anything better to do, will you two smoke it? I didn't know a lot of musk was here. It's a highly tempting offer. What advice would you offer the citizens of Venezuela? We probably should have smoked the blunt. What happened today? I didn't look at the news today. What happened? What's going on in Venezuela? Is it degenerating into conflict? So did anything new actually happen today? I was traveling most of the day. Yeah, I know there's two competing presidents. No, I just wondered if that had degenerated into something closer to civil war. I just wondered if that had degenerated into something closer to civil war.

Seven dead, seven dead. Yeah. Well, I Hope they hold their ground, man, because Venezuela's been a rough place for a long time and I don't know when it's very difficult to give advice when you see people trapped in a situation that's gone so far that it's almost, it can't be straightforwardly fixed. The right advice is to not get yourself in a situation like that. I'm not trying to be flippant about that. What's Leonard Cohn, what did he say? The poet.

There's no decent place to stand in a massacre, like sometimes you're somewhere where there isn't anything but bad options. That's not a good thing. And Venezuela might be one of those places. Hopefully the current president will let go and disappear, but that seems highly unlikely to me, because he's not the sort of person who's likely to do that.

So best of luck to them, that's all I can say. I don't have any real advice. All right, well, let's go with another sort of topical one. What are your thoughts on the Coventry Catholic High School media debacle? Well, I think part of it, you know what You could say that those who criticize the kids jump to moral conclusions But then you could say that those who criticize those who criticize the kids jump to moral conclusions. But then you could say that those who criticize, those who criticize, the kids jump to moral conclusions. And look, here's something you learn as a

social scientist, as a psychologist, if you're a good psychologist. You learn that a lot of things that look psychological aren't their situational. And I would say what happened in that situation and what happens a lot online is actually a secondary consequence of the operation of technologies that we don't understand. Right? I mean, why is there so much online mobbing? Well do you think human nature has changed fundamentally in the last five years, or do you think there's something about the online technology that lends itself to online mobbing because we haven't figured out

how to regulate it appropriately? That's a much wiser suggestion. I mean, who knows how the hell Twitter works. I mean, all of a sudden, 100 million people can communicate with each other, but only with 140 or 280 characters. Well, that's a biological revolution. We have no idea what that's going to cause.

Well, we know if you go look at Twitter, and it's kind of ugly, because Twitter seems to reward impulsivity, and it can move impulsivity around very quickly. People are more likely to retweet things they're outraged by and outrage makes you impulsive. You know what, I mean, I've used Twitter lots and I can see in my reflected in my own behavior the propensity for it to magnify outrage. Well, you know, people, it would have been better had people not jump to the conclusions and reviewed all the evidence at hand, but these new media forms mitigate

against that in many circumstances, right? And outrage can spread in a flash. And so, and people get caught up in that, you say, well, you know, that's also motivated by the desire to morally posture and to be, to adopt the position of superordinate virtue and all of that. And that's a contributor, but I do think so much of this, including the polarization that characterizes our current political discourse, I really think a tremendous amount of that is a consequence of technological change that's so rapid that we can't keep up.

You see that traditional media degenerating very rapidly, and I'm talking about the degeneration as viable financial enterprises, right? TV stations are threatened, they're dead because of YouTube. Radio's dead because of podcasts, print journalism is dead because of blogs. And those are massive technological changes, but these old entities, the mainstream media

entities still exist. They're still running on empty. They're still running on inertia. But as they fall apart under the stress of competition, they can't tolerate. They're more and more desperate for clicks. And so they're more and more desperate and they have fewer and fewer people and they have fewer and fewer fact checkers. So it's easier to just chase after the outrage.

And so they're in a death spiral that's, and it manifests itself in competitive outrage. And you know, you could say, well, that's a consequence of the moral, the lack of moral rectitude on the part of the journalist, but I think that in some sense, they're caught up in something bigger. And we don't know how to regulate it well. And so I think that happened in this situation as well. You know, it's like the whole bloody country is one big junior high school class. If only two guys were working on a tech company that might be able to solve some of this. Well, we'll see about that.

These things are very hard to solve. When did you decide to become a middle-aged male-fashion icon. They love it. They love it. You never know what you should attend to. You know, like I would say that I've always worn a suit to lecture with and I experimented with buying relatively high-quality suits. I didn't know what I was doing really, so it took quite a long time to learn. I wouldn't say that fashion has been a preoccupation of mine, and I probably had the proclivity to consider it

something of somewhat lesser importance. And I'm not saying that that was justifiable. But then when I thought about this tour, you know, when I became aware that this tour was a possibility, I thought, well, and it was also the case for working on 12 rules for life and marketing it. I mean, my basic attitude, and it was the attitude that I shared with my publishers, was leave no stone unturned.

I was going to try to make this as I was going to do everything I could to make this work as well as possible. And so I thought, well, I'm going to go talk to 50,000 people or 100,000 people. Might as well buy a good suit. Well, you know what I mean? It didn't seem I was kind of guilty about it because some of the suits I bought were way more expensive

than I thought anyone sensible from Northern Alberta should ever spend on a suit. So I felt bad about it. And I thought it was sort of an unwarranted luxury, but by the same token I thought, well, I really am as I've indicated when I first came out on stage. I think it's a great privilege to speak to all of you. I think this has been an unbelievable gift for me to have this opportunity. And I wanted to do everything I possibly could to indicate that I was taking it with

due seriousness and attending to all the details. Because it's important if you're doing something that might be of significance to attend to all the details. And maybe it makes me 2% more effective or something like that to come out and be closed properly. And that's worth at that extra edge. And if there's 50 decisions like that, then that makes you 100% more effective.

And, you know, 50 decisions isn't that many. And so, that's the story of fashion icon. You know, one of the things that's happened is that lots of people who come to these lectures dress up. Lots of the young guys that come up when I meet people afterwards, and lots of them are wearing two piece or three piece suits. And they look pretty damn sharp. It's kind of nice to see young people dress like adults. And so I didn't expect that, but it's good.

And they're happy. And I say, look, you're looking good. And they smile. And they think, yeah, well, I put some effort into it. And it's nice to have at least one more avenue to encourage young people to grow the hell up because it's better than being an old child. So...

This is interesting. and can someone find true joy in a career that only provides income and no sense of purpose? Well, I would say there's an internal contradiction in that question, you know, because the second part of the question sort of negates the first. Can you find true joy if what's the end of it exactly? If the job only provides income and no sense of purpose. Yes, I would say no is the answer to that question, but then I would also, I'm going to answer it in a different way because I think the question, there's something else lurking in the question.

First of all, only income. Well, that's not so only if your family depends on it. And so sometimes something takes on a meaning because of, for a secondary reason, maybe you're working at a job that isn't as fulfilling for you existentially as it might be, but at the moment that's what you have to contend with because there are people depending on you and the fact that they're depending on you and that you're fulfilling that obligation can lend what you're doing meaning and that's perfectly reasonable, that it's lent meaning in that manner. So context matters, you know, as we discussed in detail

tonight. And it would be better if you could find something that had a certain amount of intrinsic meaning as well as paying the bills. But then I would also say, the questions are artificial in some sense, because there's almost, it's very difficult to find a job that's so shallow that you can't derive something profound from it.

And I had lots of working class jobs when I was younger. I really liked working in restaurants, and I was a dishwasher for a long time, and then I was a short order cook. And those are entry-level working-class jobs, well, perhaps not the cook part, but the dishwasher part, certainly. But there was some real satisfaction,

this is something I learned when I was about 13. There was some real satisfaction in doing that job properly. And the consequence of doing it properly, I worked with a real hard asshole, German chef, and his wife. He was a real son of a bitch when I first started working. Well, they'd get dishwashers in and they'd all quit after a couple of days. And so you come in as a new employee under those circumstances and you're kind of treated

with a bit of contempt like you're disposable. But I didn't quit. And God, I was there to like two in the morning trying to catch up on all the damn dishes because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And I struggled through that for about a week. I remember going home and talking to my father. I was about 13 or 14. I said, look, I don't know if I can do this damn job.

I'm working as hard as I can. I'm like, there are five hours after I'm supposed to be. And I'm still catching up. I said, I'm working as hard as I could. Well, after about a week, the chef took pity on me because he thought I wasn't going to run off. And he just showed me how to do it, how to organize all the dishes. And then like I was three hours ahead after that.

And then I got to know the cooks and I got to know the chef and I got to know the owners and they all treated me like I was an adult. And I got to have what were very high quality relationships when I was a teenager. That really helped me a lot, like looking back on my teenage life, the best thing I did was work. And so, even in a job that's trivial, there are things you can do if you pay attention that elevate it beyond the trivial, because you're almost always working with other people, and there's things that you can do to make that better or worse, and then all of a sudden

it's not trivial. And dishes have to be washed and meals have to be made and then if you work as a line cook, a shorter cook, there's a big difference between doing that right and doing it wrong. You can make one dismal and wretched meal, had one tonight as a matter of fact at the hotel I'm staying at. You know, they took this stake and just tortured the bloody thing to death. It was barely edible and very annoying, you know, because it could have been decent. And, you know, you can contribute your little hell to the world if you're bitter and resentful as a cook.

Or you can do so. I wouldn't, you know, there's this idea that Alexander Solzhenitsen talked about. It's an old, especially in Orthodox Christian idea, but it's a deep idea. And the idea is that, you know, each of us is a center of the world, which I believe that to be the case, and that wherever you are is at the center, and there are things that you can do in that position that are better than you think they could be. You're not as powerless in a powerless position

as you think you are. I mean, I know there's gradations of power. I'm not trying to be naively optimistic about this, but I've seen this time and time again, you know, that people in menial jobs, let's say in menial pointless jobs, start to do them well. And then all of a sudden, they're neither menial nor

pointless and they're springboards for their movement. Lots of young people have come up to me, often in restaurants, it's quite funny, because while I go to restaurants, and sometimes they recognize me and they say, I've been putting some of your ideas to an operation at this job, and I've had three promotions in the last six months.

It's like, yeah, no kidding, man, you've got a trajectory established. So that's not trivial. So I think it's a rare job that's so constraining that you can't find something profound and meaningful in it. And if it is that job, then you should leave. If you are in a situation where that can't happen, then you should leave. We've got time for one more, so I want to get the right one here.

Can one of you please ask Shapiro to speak slower? But I would just ruin it. You know, I've had the great fortune, I think, of meeting two of the world's fastest talkers, right, Shapiro being one, and Camille Pellia being the other. And it's one of my dreams to get them in the same room. So I've got to propose that, you know, because it'd be lovely to see,

because I don't know who would win. So because she's a force of see, because I don't know who would win. Yeah. So because she's a force of nature, that woman man, it's unbelievable. She's so fast verbally. And Shapiro, he's in the same sort of league. So yeah, no, you wouldn't want him to talk slower. That would just ruin the fun.

On that note, guys, I'm going to get out of the way, make some noise for Jordan Peterson, everybody. Thank you guys very much. Thank you very much. It was a great pleasure being here. I appreciate you all coming out. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning the architecture of belief, or as newer bestseller, 12 rules for life

and antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See JordanBeePeterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller. And check out JordanBeePeterson.com slash personality for information on his new course. I really hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next week. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.b.peterson. Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, jordanb.com.

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