The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Value is Bound by Limitation

Episode Date: November 24, 2019

A 12 Rules for Life lecture from Vancouver in December of 2018. Thanks to our sponsors: https://eero.com/jordan https://www.butcherbox.com/jbp 

Welcome to season 2, episode 36 of the Jordan B Peterson podcast. I'm Mikayla Peterson, Dad's Daughter and Collaborator. Today's episode is a 12-rules-for-life lecture recorded in Vancouver on December 5, 2018. I've named it, Value is Bound by Limitation. No family updates this week. I hope everyone's Thanksgiving goes splendidly. I'm about to embark on an 11-day fast. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know I did a seven-day fast in September, which was easier than I thought it would be, but also rather intense. Turns out dad has

done a 10-day fast about 10 years ago, which I have no recollection of because of the hordes of medication I was on on and the autoimmune disorder, but my brother remembers it. So it's on, 11 days for me this time, because apparently everything is a contest. Enjoy the podcast. I'll keep people posted about the fast on YouTube at Michaela Peterson. The value is bound by limitation. A Jordan B Pearson 12 rules for life lecture.

Well, thank you very much. It's really nice to be back in Vancouver. I think I've spoken here more than in any other city. I don't know what it is. You guys don't have anybody to listen to, apparently. But I think I've done five talks here in the last two years, something like that. One of them with Sam Harris, which was I think in July. So anyways, so it's lovely to be back. I always enjoy it. I have a lot of family here too, which is quite nice out on Vancouver

Island and in Vancouver and there. Pote, nine of them are here tonight, so that's really nice. If an old friend here too, I think, from Fairview named Dale Billis, and I don't know where he is. You out there, Dale? Yeah. Come see me backstage, man. All right. You don't see people from fair view that often, you. So, all right, so I thought what I do tonight,

I'm, I use these lectures as an opportunity to think on my feet and to try out what I'm thinking about, you know, and to communicate it so I can see if it's working, you know, because if your thoughts are well formulated, then, well, then hopefully there's somewhat engrossing and pull people in. And so I thought what I do tonight is I just review the rules in 12 rules, a full set of rules. And because I've been talking about them so much now,

and also new ideas as well, because I have another book mostly sketched out now. It's going to be called Beyond Mirror Order, another 12 rules for life. Well, I figure white quit when you're ahead, you know? I mean, and I drive the original 12 rules from a longer list of 42 anyways. And so I've been working on that. But I thought I would take the opportunity tonight to think back on everything that's happened over the last year, all the lectures that I've done, and to see if I can zero in on the essential elements of the 12 rules and the body of thought that I've been developing to pull it down

to its essential elements and to understand a little bit more clearly what's the nature of the dialogue that we're engaged in and that that's also seems to be attracting an audience all around the world, which is kind of an incomprehensible thing in some sense. I don't exactly, I can't really wrap my head around it. I know I got, I have this Korean publisher named Maven and they contacted me two weeks ago. I made a little video for my Korean readers because it's been translated into Korean and that's been, I hope that's been subtitled by now, but they said they sold, I made a little video for my Korean readers, because it's been translated into Korean. I hope that's been subtitled by now, but they sold, I think they sold 100,000 copies

in Korea in like three weeks, which is just, and they're printing another 100,000 for January. I mean, it's quite a different culture, right? You wouldn't necessarily expect the ideas or the book to translate across those cultural barriers, but it seems to be. I was just in Europe with my wife and with Dave, we hit about 20 different cities throughout the UK, mostly up in Scandinavia, where there was quite a bit of scandal for reasons that I might go into a little bit tonight.

And again, there seems to be a very, there's a hunger or a thirst, a demand of some sort for something about what I'm talking about. And I mean, it doesn't surprise me in one sense, because one of the things that I've done with my lectures and also with 12 rules for life is distill what I regard as about 150 years of clinical wisdom and solid research psychology into the lectures in the book. And you'd hope, if you were the least bit optimistic

about clinical practice and about science, that one of the consequences of 150 years of continual effort on the part of a number of very great people and then a whole slew of researchers would be the provision of information that would actually be helpful and useful. And to ally that with the discussion of, I would say, relevant and, and practical philosophical ideas and maybe also theological ideas to make all that practical. It makes some sense that that would be useful to people, but it's still quite shocking the degree to which people find it useful. And so I'm going to reflect on that a little bit tonight and see if I can get a little bit clearer about why that

might be. So the first thing I'm going to do is just go through the rules and then I'm going to reflect on that a little bit tonight and see if I can get a little bit clearer about why that might be. So the first thing I'm going to do is just go through the rules and then I'm going to talk about each of them and perhaps I'll get to all 12 of them all the way. I seem to rarely manage that in the course of a lecture, but I'm going to see if I can do it tonight because that would be a nice way to close off the year. And as Dave said, this is the last lecture in this long tour series. Tammy, my wife and I are going to be going to Australia in February and maybe to Singapore and Hong Kong and Seoul as well, although those dates haven't been announced yet, but this is it for this long

stretch of traveling and so it's a good night to reflect. So the first rule is to stand up straight with your shoulders back. And the second rule is to treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. And the third rule is allied with that, I would say. And I tried to weave the rules together in the book so that each of them supported the other, you know, so that they weren't a collection of 12 independent essays, but interrelated, so, you know, every chapter supported, every other chapter and built on them. There's an understructure as well, a conceptual understructure that was based

in the first book that I wrote called Maps of Meaning, and I hope to continue that as well with the next book that I'm writing. The third rule is conceptually related to the second quite tightly, and that is to make friends with the people who want the best for you. And then the fourth rule, which is, what would you say, it's a rule that offers some protection against resentment, I would say, while also allowing you still to pause it an ideal and to pursue a goal. And that is to compare yourself to who you were yesterday

and not to who someone else is today. And the fifth rule, which is the one that I thought I would get in the most trouble for, actually, is don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. I thought for sure that I was going to get in trouble anything that makes you dislike them. I thought for sure that I was going to get in trouble for that, because you're not supposed to admit publicly that children can be dislikable, even though everyone absolutely knows that that's true.

And has known that ever since they were children and had people they didn't like. And so, and then the other taboo is, of course, that to admit ever that parents could dislike their own children. It's like, I mean, people know that, and experience it very frequently, sometimes all the time. And, but it's taboo to make that conscious in some sense. And which is a very strange thing, because, of course,

it's part and parcel of clinical lore in some sense that one of the problems that people have that cause psychological difficulty is his problems with their family members. I mean, even though those are the people hypothetically that you love and also hypothetically that you like and also hypothetically that are good for you, it's also a set of relationships that can be absolutely right with trouble, and it's very useful to know that forth rightly and to admit to it so that you can deal with it properly. And that's painful because you have to think about it, but that's not

as painful as having to act out the consequences of not thinking about it, which is of course why we think, at least in principle, when we do, which we rarely do. Rules six. I think it's the darkest chapter in the book, and I think in some sense it's the core of the dark element of 12 rules for life, and that's to put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And it's a discussion of people who've done terrible things, committed terrible crimes, and what their motivations might

be, and how you could avoid drifting in that direction, because it's a direction that has its temptations, which is why people drift in that direction. Rule 7 is to do what's meaningful and not what is expedient. And that's a lovely thing to know. And it's allied tightly with rule eight. The two go together, because you can't really do one without the other.

Rule eight is to tell the truth, or at least don't lie. And one of the things that I think I figured out is that if you're going to follow the instinct for meaning, and I truly believe that there is an instinct for meaning, and not only that there is an instinct for meaning, but that it's the most real thing that there is. And that it's an unerring guide, but it only works if you don't corrupt the structure of your psyche or your soul.

That's another way of thinking about it, in a more archaic sense. You can't trust your instincts if you corrupt the structure of your perceptions and your thoughts. How can you rely on yourself? If you've made the structure that you need to rely on dysfunctional because you've added noise and nonsense to it. And so if you're going to follow the instinct for meaning, then it's very important to tell the truth, or at least not to lie, which is easier than telling the truth,

because what do we know about the truth, not enough with our biases and our unalienable ignorance, but we can at least strive not to say and do things that we know to be false, which is a good start, and it's a safe start, let's say, especially compared to the alternative. Rule 9 is to assume that the person that you're listening to might know something you don't, and that's a useful rule. I think it's one of the things I loved about clinical practice because I got to listen to people

a lot, you know, for hours a day, for many, many years. And one of the things I learned about people was that they're unbearably interesting if you listen to them, which is often why you don't, because you don't actually want to talk to someone who's unbearably interesting, right? Because, well, the conversation becomes too strange, that's part of it, or too heavy, in some sense,

because, well, people, first of all, are idiosyncratic and peculiar if they actually tell you what they're like, and that's very interesting, but it's disconcerting, because it's kind of, what would you call reassuring to think that people are mostly like you and well they are, you know, we're all human and we share we share enough fundamental humanity so that we can communicate but the differences

aren't trivial and of course people take very different pathways in their lives and so listening to that, well, there's a real element of enjoyment in the same way that you might enjoy a novel, you know, because if you're engrossed in a novel, you're engrossed inside someone else's life in some sense. And that's very interesting, but it can also be too much. You know, one of the things Carl Rogers said was that most of us can't listen because we don't have the courage to put ourselves in someone else's.

We don't have the courage to enter someone else's perceptual frame and see what the world might look like to them because that poses a real challenge to the way that we look at the world and the way that we each look at the world holds our world together. And I'll talk about that a little bit as we return to the rule of the discussion progresses. So to listen to someone like they might know something you don't, it's frightening. But the thing is, if you don't know enough,

you can tell you don't know enough. You can tell if you don't know enough, if your life isn't everything it should be. I mean, if your life is everything that you'd want it to be in every possible way, then you know enough and you can sit there comfortably and you don't need to expose yourself to anything new. But if there's still problems that you have,

it's always the possibility that someone will have a little bit of a key, a little bit of a piece of the puzzle that they might be able to offer to you as a consequence of their own experience. If you have a little bit of a key, a little bit of a piece of the puzzle that they might be able to offer to you as a consequence of their own experience. If you have a genuine conversation with them, and that'll just, you know, that might provide you with that little piece that you need to make something click together that's of vital importance to you. And even if you have to filter out a tremendous amount of the conversation, which you also

have to do with your own thoughts, I mean, they have to be filtered so that you can keep what's wheat and throw away, what's chaff. Even if you have to throw 95% of it away, well, walking away with that additional 5% is something that's worth doing. And so rule 10 has to be precise in your speech. And I like that one because it's associated with the idea of aim. And that's an unbelievably important idea, a very, very fundamental idea because we're aiming creatures.

Our perceptions are oriented around our aims. This is one of the most important things you can possibly come to understand, I would say, is associated with that rule 10. Most important psychological facts that you can understand, this is something psychologists have really only worked out, I would say in the last three decades, something like that, is that we orient our perceptions around our moral aims. And that's really something to, it's like there's an old Buddhist

idea, you know, that the world is illusion. And that's true in a very complex way. It's not true in a simple way. But it's true in the complex way, in that your perceptions, the way that you, with the way that world manifests itself to you. And I'm not talking about your opinions. I'm not talking about what you think. I'm talking about the facts that make themselves manifest to you. The things that you see out there that appear to be self-evident are associated irretrievably

with your aims, with what you're attempting to accomplish. That's directly associated with your moral structure. You see the world through your moral structure. That is really, I tell you, man, you structure. And that is really a tell-you-man. You can meditate on that for about a decade. It's such a staggering realization to understand that the world lays itself out for you through the lens of your moral striving. And that that's technically true.

It's not hypothetically true. It's metaphysically true, and it's philosophically true, but it also turns out to be neurologically true. It's not hypothetically true. It's metaphysically true, and it's philosophically true, but it also turns out to be neurologically true. And it makes a certain amount of sense, because you are, after all, not just an information gathering creature. You're not just someone who's a machine that's designed to reflect or understand the structure of the objective world. That's not what a human being is. A human being is someone who's striving in the world to accomplish whatever it is that needs to be accomplished to stay alive and to propagate life, right? I mean, you've got a telos, you've got an orientation and an aim and a meaning.

And the fact that your perceptions would be tuned to help with that is somewhat of a truism in some sense. How could it be otherwise? It's not like you're objective, right? You're certainly interested in your own, well, let's say at least in your own lack of pain, if nothing else. And so why wouldn't your perceptions serve that?

But your perceptions serve that, and then your motivations fall in line, and then your emotional structure follows that, and so do your thoughts. And so all of that's nested inside, what's essentially a moral structure. And so, what are the things that implies is that the way the world manifests itself to you is directly a consequence of your morality. And if you know that, then that's a good thing to know that's terrifying. Because one of the things that you might also come to realize is that if you're overwhelmed

with bitterness and resentment and your life is a catastrophe in some ways, and I know that terrible, accidental things can happen to people. I'm perfectly aware of that, but that there is some possibility that all of that negativity that surrounds you and shrouds you is actually a consequence of errors in your moral reasoning. It's highly probable that that's the case, you know, barring random catastrophe,

which has to be taken into account. Because I'd never say to anyone, well, you know, if you're suffering, it's your fault. Because people have bad luck and they can suffer for all sorts of reasons but there is the possibility that there's some element of the misery that encompasses you when it does that's a consequence of an error in the way that you're progressing through life with regards to your to your to the aims that you're pursuing. It's highly probable and that that's another reason why rule six is relevant

to put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And so rule 11 is, don't bother children when they're skateboarding. You know, and that's, yeah, well that's an antidote, I would say, to some degree, to this idea that if you love someone you protect them. Because I don't believe that.

I mean, you protect people who are vulnerable. And you protect them in proportion to their vulnerability. But no more than that, ever, you want to pull back your protection as fast as you possibly can as children develop their autonomy. One of the things the psychoanalysts knew, and this is the Freudians in particular, was that the good mother necessarily fails. It's such a wise phrase, right? Because, well, and it's very problematic for mothers in particular, because of course,

when you have a newborn, the newborn is completely dependent and 100% correct, right? Because when a baby who's under six months cries, you don't blame the baby. You don't say, well, why don't you get your act together, pick yourself up off the damn ground and stand up on your own two feet. If a crying baby is always right, and so, but that's not the case for someone who's three who's crying, for example, you know, because that capacity for autonomy starts to develop. And so you have to make that an unbelievably difficult shift from full commitment to something that's entirely dependent to pull back constantly as the person becomes more and more autonomous. And it's very difficult moral task to manage that,

because it means that you have to expose yourself to the risk that's associated with the pain and anxiety that your child will necessarily encounter as they strive to become more competent in the world. And, you know, I think that a mother who's tightly bonded with an infant feels more pain on behalf of their child when the child is exploring and hurting him or herself during the exploration. Then the child, him or herself, feels.

And so it takes real courage to just stand back and say, you know, you go bump yourself up against the world because you have to get strong and competent because that's what's going to protect you across the longest span of time. And so, well, that's why you don't bother children with their skateboarding because it's obviously dangerous to skateboard it. And maybe it'd be nice if you could be wrapped in, you know, a bubble wrap and encased in styrofoam while you're plummeting down the hill. But in the short term, that's perfectly reasonable.

But as a medium to long-term strategy, it's a really bad one. And I think we're paying quite a large price. Societally, you see that reflected in the universities to a large degree for hyper-protecting our young people as they develop. And there's complex reasons for that. And then rule 12 is to pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. And I also opened that chapter with a discussion of dogs because, you know, if you talk about cats, then all the dog people instantly, they instantly hate you.

And so the mere fact that I mentioned cats meant that I had to put at least two pages of content in praising dogs. But it was okay because we had a dog and I actually liked them quite a bit. And he was my daughter's close friend. His name was Seiko. He died about two years ago. And so if you want to stop and pet a dog, then that's also fine. And I just thought I'd mention that so that the dog lovers wouldn't, you know, be too negatively predisposed towards me. And it's a bit of a meditation on the relationship between limitation and existence and love, because one of the things that I came to realize when I had children and I would say also as my parents have aged

is that you know the limitations that people have make their existence bounded by pain in some sense you know you see this with young children because, they're fragile, and you see this with people as they get older. And, you know, you also see your family members and you yourself for that matter. Have you have your peculiarities and your idiosyncrasies and, you know, maybe some of them are weaknesses, but they're also, in a perverse sense, also things that define you, you know, as the unique person that you are. And it's not so easy to disentangle the limitations and the idiosyncrasies from those elements about the person that you actually love. Because, well, part of what makes you unique is what you are, but part of it is also what you're not. And a very important part of it is what you're not. And so, one of the things that I considered when my kids were young

was that the fact that you love people and that you mourn for them, and that you feel their pain even when they're alive, and that you're also happy that they're around is it's your fundamental decision that life, despite its limitations, is worthwhile. That's what I think love for someone else actually represents, especially that familial love, you know, because it's kind of arbitrary who's in your family, where you're born, and you make these connections with the people,

your siblings, and your parents, and your children, and you see them in their limitation, in their idiosyncrasy, and if they depart, then you mourn, and what that seems to indicate is that despite at all, whatever that means, despite at all, it was a good thing that they were. That's a good thing to know, because it's easy to become nihilistic about life and to become hopeless, especially when things aren't going well, and you might think, well, what's the value? Why should I continue? hopeless, especially when things aren't going well. And you might think, well, what's the value?

Why should I continue? And that's the part of you that's thinking. And it has its purposes. But when you reflect more profoundly on how it is that you react to the world, the fact that you are capable of establishing these profound relationships with the people that you love does seem to indicate that in your soul of souls,

let's say, you decide that their being was worth celebrating despite everything. And because otherwise, why would you mourn or why would you feel someone else's pain if you didn't think that there was something of value there. And I do believe that value is intrinsically bound up with the limitations that also make life tragic and difficult, that you can't separate them. Maybe you can transcend them to some degree, but you can't separate them. And so it's useful to know, maybe, that when push comes to shove that the deepest part of you is in love with the fragility of life.

I think that's useful thing to know. And so that's part of the meditation that's part and parcel of rule 12. And that was hard won by knowledge, I would say, to some degree, because, you know, I wrote that chapter in part about my daughter who was very, very ill for a very long period of time. And so I had plenty of time to think about such things. And I mean, I know tragedy comes to everyone, and that that's not a unique story. I mean, you don't have to scratch below the surface in most people's lives before you come to some deep pocket of tragedy and sorrow because that's part and parcel of existence.

And it belies the notion of privilege, I would say, to a tremendous degree because even people who are very successful across one dimension or another dimension still have all of the full catastrophe of life's tragedy to contend with. Just not to say that some people don't have it harder at some times than others because they clearly do. But no one gets out of here alive, you know, and that's something to always think about

when you're feeling jealous or envious. You know, we all bump up against the same fundamental limitations, and they're quite deep and tragic. So rule one, stand up straight with your shoulders back. It's a funny rule, it's been funny to watch the reaction to it because that's the rule that has attracted the most criticism from the people who are inclined to criticize what I'm talking about.

And I think it's quite interesting because the criticisms are based on a complete misreading of the chapter, which I can't help but think is motivated. And also, it's interesting that it's only the first chapter that absorbs the criticism, but my sense is that that's because the people who are leveling those sorts of criticisms at me actually only read the first chapter. And they don't do a very good job of that.

And so, because... What I was trying to do in that chapter, especially with the infamous comparison to lobsters, let's say, and you would not believe how many crocheted lobsters I now possess. I think I have, have like the world's largest collection of multi-sized crocheted lobsters. I didn't and then people come to the shows too with like lobster apparel, ties and shirts and it's like I

didn't know there was so much crustacean themed clothing but it seems to be a thing. So I was trying to make a point in that chapter, a couple of points, the first chapter was that, the first point was it was actually weirdly enough, it was actually a point that was aimed at people on the left side of the political spectrum, and not in a negative way. So imagine that, here's a way of thinking

about the political landscape, okay? And I think this is extremely useful. And I think it's correct, is if you're a conservative type, say a centrist to conservative, if you're on the right wing end of the spectrum, you're basically someone who's inclined by temperament, so biologically, essentially, to be what, what most comfortable with hierarchies, what most comfortable with hierarchies.

You're comfortable with hierarchies. And because you're conscientious, you're inclined to adapt yourself to hierarchies and then to strive upward in them. And to sort of accept the idea of a hierarchical structure as a positive given. So that's why people on the right, for example, are more patriotic, you know, and are opposed to things like flag burning and so on. And this is useful, as far as I'm concerned, and necessary, because so imagine that human beings have

problems, that's easy enough to imagine, and then imagine that we would like to solve some of those problems, and that sometimes we actually manage to orient ourselves properly, so we are trying to solve some of those problems and that sometimes we actually manage to orient ourselves properly so we are trying to solve them and then imagine that we have to do that collectively, which we do, and then imagine that if you get together collectively to solve a problem, the consequence of that is going to be the construction of a hierarchy. And it is because if you're going to solve, you know what it's like, you get together and you're going to solve a problem,

the first thing you want to do is figure out, well, who in the group knows how to solve the problem? And the answer is, well, some people know how more than others and then the logical thing to do, if you have the least bit of sense, is to put the people who know how to solve the problem at the top of the hierarchy. And one of the, right, I mean, obviously.

So, you might only do that because those people are older, and they've been around more. So, you know, the younger people are at the bottom, and that is the case. Like, one of the best predictors of wealth distribution in Western societies is age. Older people have more money. It's like, well, that's not very fair.

It's like, well, yeah. Yeah, but they're also old. So it's not like they didn't trade something for it. Like they really traded something for it. So the bulk of the wealth soon is going to be in the hands of women who are over 75. Because of course, their husbands all die. And so that's right, that's right. And so they're old women and they're rich.

And that's an inequality. But they're old. And so they need some money to live. And most of them would trade it for being young again. So it's not obvious who has the advantage. But in any case, if you're sensible, you make a hierarchy because you're trying to solve a problem. And then you put competent people at the forefront of the hierarchy. And then if you're also

even more sensible, you allow people who develop competence in the hierarchy to rise, right? And one of the things that I've noticed about those who go out in the world and actually accomplish things in a positive way is that they're often extraordinarily committed to the idea of mentoring young people. And it's one of the positive pleasures that actually goes along with having a position of authority. You never hear the critics of the hierarchy ever discuss anything like that.

It's all exploitation and power. It's like it's such bloody rubbish. I've worked with graduate students for decades, and I've never thought about it as a power relationship. It's like, I don't want graduate student minions. It's like, some people do. Some people do, but they're usually not very confident in their intellectual ability,

and they feel threatened by the students. But if you have any sense what you want to do, just for your, even if you're self centered in a enlightened way, as you want to surround yourself with like young, brilliant, accomplished people who have the possibility of doing great things with their lives and open doors for them, because that's intrinsically motivating

to a huge degree, right? It's not that much different from the care that you'd have for children. You want them to do well if you have any sense. It's not like that's going to take away from you unless you're, you know, if that's how you think, well, there's something, there's many things that are seriously wrong with you. And you can't assume that that characterizes the whole damn hierarchy because it doesn't. And so what one of the things I was trying to point out

in that chapter is that hierarchies are necessary. And not only that, they're really ancient, right? That's why I associated them with crustaceans because that's old and the same neurochemical rules in some sense apply to these creatures from whom we diverge, you know, 350 million years ago that apply to us. And so hierarchies are ancient.

They're so ancient that our brains actually react to them as if they're a permanent part of the world. More permanent than trees. More permanent than the material objects that we take for granted. In fact, your emotional stability is dependent to large degree on how the serotonergic system in your brain computes your position in a hierarchy.

Because it assumes that if you're near the top of a hierarchy, that things that you're pretty competent and that your life is pretty stable. And so you can afford not to be completely overwhelmed with anxiety. Because things are not that likely to fall apart for you instantly. But if you're at the bottom of a hierarchy

and barely struggling to hold on, then your negative emotions are massively elevated, which is partly why people don't like to be pushed down hierarchies, right? Because it dysregulates their emotional structure. And so, which is a very useful thing to know, which is why people don't like to lose face, right? Because it dysregulates their emotional structure. But if you're on the left, you know, you're a critic of hierarchies. And the reason for that is, the left, you're a critic of hierarchies. And the reason for that is, well, when you arrange a hierarchy, it does dispossess people at the bottom,

because people tend to stack up at the bottom of hierarchies. And sometimes the hierarchies are corrupt, and they tend towards a tyrannical structure. And so you need people on the left who are concerned about the dispossessed and keeping an eye on the hierarchies, so they don't get corrupt and stagnant and only focused on power. And so what I was trying to say in chapter one in part was that, look, if you're on the left and you're compassionate and you're concerned about people who are dispossessed by hierarchies, don't take the idiotic, simplistic root of assuming that the reason that hierarchies exist is because of the West and capitalism, which is the Marxist perspective, because that's

just wrong, and it's wrong in a way that isn't going to be helpful to the people that you're trying to serve because the problem of dispossession is way deeper than the problem of capitalism in the West. And we know that. 100 percent, you see hierarchical structures everywhere in the animal kingdom, but even more importantly, there aren't human societies that lack that hierarchical structure, even if they're not

capitalist or Western. It's like you think what? You think the Soviet Union wasn't a hierarchical system? It was hierarchical to the ends degree. It just wasn't based on competence, or honesty, or transparency, or utility. But it wasn't as if there wasn't the one tenth of 1% who had everything, and the 99.9% who had mostly death and misery. And so the fact that it was no longer a capitalist system

had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the hierarchical structure, except to make it steeper and less functional. And so that was the point I was trying to make in that chapter. And it had nothing to do with how you manifest your own personal power so you can bloody well climb up the tyrannical dominance hierarchy. Quite the contrary, the other point I was trying to make and making this throughout 12 rules for life is that

power is actually a very unstable means of attaining hierarchical position. You even see that in animals like chimpanzees who are closest biological relatives, the tyrannical chimps, because they do have fundamentally a male dominant structure among chimpanzees. The tyrannical male can climb to the top, surely as a consequence of what would you call it, oppressor, oppression, physical oppression. But the probability that he's going to meet a bloody end at the hand of two subordinates who cooperate to take him down

is extraordinarily high. And so, friends, DeWal, who's a great primatologist, has established quite clearly that power is an unstable basis for the establishment of chimpanzee hierarchies. And that's an incredibly important discovery. I mean, what DeWal has pointed out, he's written books about the origins of morality in higher order primates, like it's proto-murality. You know, it's got the beginnings of morality, like chimpanzees have the origins of morality in higher order primates. Like it's proto-murality. You know, it's got the beginnings of morality, like chimpanzees have the beginnings of language

and the beginnings of self-awareness. And the chimpanzee males who are able to engage in reciprocal relationships across time. So let's say something like friendships and that extend a reasonable hand to the females and to the infants are much more likely to stay in their positions of relative hierarchical authority for longer periods of time and not to meet a spectacularly

bloody end. And so those sorts of things are really very much worth attending to. It's like, well, what's a stable, if you want to position yourself properly in a hierarchy, in a hierarchy of competence rather than one of power, because I think most of our functional Western hierarchies are hierarchies of competence, then it isn't power and tyranny and oppression that's going to position you most appropriately.

You can do that, especially if you're psychopathic, and that's the psychopathic mode of being, but it is by no means an optimal strategy. A much more appropriate strategy is one of courage and truthfulness and the capacity to engage in reciprocal interactions to build trust in yourself, to be trustworthy, and then to build trusting relationships with other people. And if you don't understand that, then you don't know very much about how sociological structures work. Because every hierarchy I've ever seen that was functional, that performed the important

task that it was designed to perform, that was trying to solve important problems, that everybody agreed were problems, were predicated on competence and trust. And not 100% because, of course, nothing is perfect. Our selection methods aren't perfect. And once you build an organization, you can get people inside it who are exploiting it for their own purposes that have say nothing to do with the function of the hierarchy.

But those are hierarchical structures that have become, that's not in the essence of the hierarchical structure. That's a consequence of corruption. And so, you're supposed to keep your damn eyes open if you're a sovereign individual and a reasonable citizen and someone who's concerned with solving important problems and with truth and responsibility. You're supposed to keep your eyes open so that the hierarchy that you're in doesn't become corrupt And that's really your function as a sovereign citizen and our whole culture of

Individual responsibility because I think that's what our culture is essentially is predicated on the idea that It's your responsibility as a sovereign individual to keep your damn eyes open so that the hierarchy doesn't descend into tyranny That's why you vote that's that's why that sovereignty and hairs within the individual and so that the hierarchy doesn't descend into tyranny. That's why you vote. That's why that sovereignty inheres within the individual. And so that's what chapter one was about. And it has nothing to do with justifying the power tyranny and encouraging young men to manifest domination so that they can take over the patriarch. It's God damn stupid, that it's just painful. You know, I mean, really it's so annoying.

And I don't just mean that the criticisms that are leveled at the chapter because, you know, I can take that or leave it, but the idea, there's this idea that has become something that we're like forced to agree with at the cost of our own reputation, that the proper way to view our culture is as a patriarchal tyranny, and that that's to be insisted upon, or there's something bigoted about you, and that the right way of construing the relationship between men and women across the centuries is that of one of fundamental oppression. All of that is so, so resentful and so narrow-minded and so ignorant that you have to suspect malevolence.

Woo! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! with horror life truly is, you know, because it would be lovely, perhaps if your suffering could be laid at someone's feet, you know, that the reason that your life isn't everything, it could be, is because the social structure is pathological, or because people of the opposite sex aren't acting properly. I mean, because maybe there would be a simple solution to the problem, you could just fix the social structure and get those other people to act properly, and then you'd be fine. It's like, you know, it's not that's not the case, you could just fix the social structure and get those other people act properly, and then you'd be fine. It's like, no, it's not the case,

because your vulnerability is much deeper and more profound than that. There's no simple solution to it in that manner. And when I look at the historical, when I look at human interactions across the historical span of time, and what I see is, well, here's a fact. Before 1895, the average person in the Western world

lived on less than a dollar a day. That's half of what the UN now considers abject poverty. Now, it was in the richest part of the world. And so that was the lot of our ancestors 150 years ago. And that's not very long ago, right? That's two old men ago. It's not very long ago. And? That's two old men ago. It's not very long ago. And so what I see is that men and women cooperated

to the degree they could over the course of millennia to keep the damn wolf away from the door. And most of the time, they were only somewhat successful at that, right? Because the wolves were plentiful, and the doors weren't very solid. And to rewrite that and say, well, the fundamental way to look at history as the oppression of women by men is just, there's nothing but

hatefulness that's at the bottom of that. And the truth of the matter is that, the truth of the matter is that most human beings throughout the entire course of history had lives where they were oppressed by the forces of nature and culture and their own ignorance and malevolence to a degree that we can hardly imagine and that we struggle mightily to come out of that. A few people at a time to begin with were given some freedom and some autonomy, you know, a small percentage of the population, and as we got wealthier and more able to distribute those opportunities, we distributed them pretty damn rapidly.

And we've done a pretty good job of putting people in a situation now only 150 years later where we all have opportunities that would be completely unimaginable to people, that short century ago. And that's a little, there's a little bit of gratitude. We might have a little bit of gratitude for that instead of constantly attempting to undermine and displace

everything that we and the people who came before us have been able to manage. And so... So... So that's rule one. The moral of rule one, so to speak, was, well, how do you attain position and authority within a functional hierarchy?

And the answer to that is you be a good person. That's actually the best strategy, technically speaking. And so I believe that that, I truly believe that's the case. And that's partly even just thinking about it biologically, you know, thinking about it purely from an evolutionary perspective. One of the things that you have to do in order to be successful is to take your position properly in a hierarchy,

because that's one of the things that determines your reproductive success. It's a primary determinant, male or female. It's a primary determinant. And so the answer to the question is, imagine a set of hierarchies, right? Which could be the set of all the hierarchies that you could possibly be born into. Well, you want to develop a mode of being, part of part that's structured inside your biology, but that's also partly taught to you, that would ensure most probably that no matter where you ended up,

you know, those multiple hierarchies, that your probability of moving upward would be optimized. And so you can think about that as the set of all possible hierarchies, or the set of all possible games. That's another way of thinking about it. And then the question is, well, what do you need to do to be a winner at a game? But it's not the right question, exactly, because the right question is, what do you need to be,

what do you need to do to be the winner at the set of all games? And the answer to that is to be a good player, right? Is to play, not you say to your kids, doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It matters how you play the game. And you think, well, what are you saying to them? Because you actually don't know,

and if they ask you, well, what do you mean by that? Aren't I trying to win? You say, well, of are you saying to them? Because you actually don't know. And if they ask you, well, what do you mean by that? Aren't I trying to win? You say, well, of course, you're trying to win, but go away. You know? But it still matters more how you play than whether you win or lose. And what you're really telling them is, you're trying to play across a set of games, across the set of all possible games.

And you want to be the sort of winner that's constantly invited to play, because that's how you win. And so that's the sort of winner you want to be, and in order to be invited to play, then you have to be an honorable player, and that is the best way to move forward in life. And I think the reason that there's such a concentration on the ethical path in fundamental religious narratives is because there isn't a better strategy. Now, it's hard to imagine that in some sense because it's a medium to long-term strategy. It often means sacrifice in the present, right?

Because to act ethically, often means that you have to forego immediate gratification. You have to put the future ahead of the present. And that requires discipline and vision. And so it's a difficult path. And it's easy to be skeptical about it. But, you know, you can ask yourself, well, why else would the idea of an ethical pathway even emerge if such a thing wasn't probable and true? And, you know, and you can also ask yourself another question, which is, well, you know, you don't teach your children to lie and to cheat. Not unless you're, well, not unless there's something seriously wrong with you.

And even the people that there is something seriously wrong with know perfectly well that if they're teaching their children to lie and to cheat that that's wrong, they at least know that. And why would you have the intuition that was wrong? If you didn't also have the intuition that acting properly was actually the best way to carry you through life? We know that. And why would you call yourself out on your own moral shortcomings if that wasn't part of your instinctual nature?

And it's there for a reason. This idea of moral relativism, I think that goes along with the whole idea that human beings are blank slates. And we are not blank slates and moral relativism is incorrect. It's wrong. It doesn't even hold true among animals. Because there's plenty of evidence that animals, once they organize themselves into social communities, follow what appear to be moral behavior. They follow behavioral patterns that if you describe, you would see a proto-morality in them. So it isn't even true when you get out of the human world that morals are relative. It's certainly not true within the human world and we need to dispense with that because

that idea of moral relativism is making people nihilistic. It's not helpful, you know, especially if you will lie that with Idea Rule 10, which I mentioned to you already, that your aim determines your perceptions and that your aim is associated with your moral structure. And so if you flatten out the moral structure and you say, well, everything is the same as everything else, there isn't one aim or value that supersedes another, then you're left with no moral structure at all, and then you can't even see the world properly.

And you think, then that's not just not helpful, that's deadly, that kills people. You see people who are suicidal because they become hopeless, because all the meaning has been taken out of their life, except the suffering, because you can't get rid of that. So all the meaning has been taken out of their life, because their moral hierarchy has been demolished.

It's not like they're now free because they have no strictures, what they drown in chaos. And that's partly why I wrote the title as, you know, 12 rules as an antidote to chaos. And that's that chaos that pulls people down and drowns them. And these aren't optional. You know, they say, man, does not live by bread alone, and that's the literal truth. It's fine to have enough material provision and thank God for that, but that isn't enough to orient you in the world. The problem of morality has to be taken with dead seriousness. There isn't a more fundamental issue. To hand wave and say, well, there's multiple ways of being

in the world, which is certainly the case, just like there are multiple games. It's not the same thing to say is that all moral systems are equally arbitrary and equally replaceable and fundamentally imaginary. It's like, no, none of that's correct. We need to dispense with that. It's not helpful. So rule two, as treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. And this is an antidote, I would say, to casual self-esteem. Well, so much of psychology, pop psychology, sometimes social psychology has been devoted to the idea that really what you need is to have high self-esteem, and I think that's all complete bloody, rubbish, and dangerous to boot, especially for young people.

You know, because imagine you're talking to someone who's 18 or 19, and they're confused as can be, maybe you're talking to someone 30, it's the same thing, or maybe even 40, you know, and they haven't got their life oriented, and they don't know what they're doing, and they're kind of drowning and anxious and suffering because of it. That's very, very common, and maybe they're meditating with alcohol or drugs, or, you know, and they're bitter and they're lying, and, you know, their lives are seriously out of kilter, and you say to them,

you're okay the way you are. The way you are is perfect. It's like, that's supposed to be some manifestation of compassion. It's the last thing that someone in trouble wants to hear. What they want to hear is, man, you are seriously screwed up. But you wouldn't have to be. That'd be the next thing. It's like, you're in this state of abject misery and it isn't okay. And maybe you bear some responsibility and maybe some terrible things have happened to you, and that has to be sorted out very carefully.

But you're nowhere near what you could be. That's what you tell young people. You don't say you're okay the way you are and give them a little award. You say, look, you're 18. What the hell do you know? You don't know anything. And it's no wonder you're stupidly suffering,

because you're ignorant and wrong, and naive and immature. But think about who you could be. You know, you could be a world beater if you got your act together and that's going to take like some decades of striving and discipline, but it'll be worth it. You'll be able to pull yourself out of that position that you're in and move towards something that's truly worth attaining. And then they have a trajectory. And as soon as they have a trajectory, then they have some meaning. And as soon as they have some meaning, then they're not in that nihilistic catastrophe right away, even though they still may have 10,000 things to learn, like we all do. And so, well, chapter two is, well, treat yourself

like you're someone responsible for helping. It's like to take some responsibility for yourself as someone who's worthy of positive attention, despite your unarguable flaws and your malevolence. You're a deeply flawed creature. Everyone is. That's the doctrine of original sin, which is a necessary doctrine,

because it keeps us aware of the fact that we're not who we could be. But you can take responsibility for yourself, like you would for someone that you love and say, well, despite the fact that I have all these flaws, I'm still, I still have fundamental, irreducible value, right? Another presupposition of our culture.

It's a Judeo-Christian value that each person has an inalienable value that's associated in some sense with divinity and the structure of reality itself, which is something I truly believe to be true. I think it's an appropriate way of viewing. It's the only appropriate way of viewing each other. If you try to establish a relationship with someone yourself or anyone else that doesn't have that as a predicate, so you're inalienable value and your ability to make ethical decisions and your capacity for responsible choice. If I don't treat

you like that and vice versa, we will not have a functional relationship. And to me, that's good. Now, I don't know if that was a scream of delight or terror. So you treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping not because you want to let yourself off the hook at any way, not because you want to be flooded off the hook, and anyways, not because you want to be flooded by feelings of positive self-esteem, but because you have a moral responsibility to regard yourself as something that has intrinsic value, and that that value needs to be encouraged to manifest itself in the world.

And I believe, one of the things that I came to believe from studying totalitarianism in the 20th century was that the reason that totalitarian states flourished was because individual people abdicated their moral responsibility. That was the fundamental cause. There's other causes, of course, but when push came to shove,

that was the line. That once that's the line is crossed, then a society can deteriorate, and it can deteriorate on the right, and it can deteriorate on the left. It's up to you to bloody well be awake, you know, in the little businesses that you occupy and in your family and in broader society and to keep things straight and functioning. And so, and that's part of the reason why it's perfectly reasonable to view yourself as something that has intrinsic value, because your alert consciousness is, in in fact the mechanism that keeps society from degenerating into tyranny and keeps the wolf from the door. And so it's useful to know that.

And so you have to treat yourself like you have that value even though you might be ashamed of yourself for everything that you're not. And that's reasonable shame as well, but it shouldn't mount to the point where you have the kind of contempt for yourself or other people that you're not doing everything you can to allow the possibilities of the world to open up to you. And then the same thing is true of the choice of people that you associate with with your friends. And so Rule 3 is make friends with the people who want the best for you. And it's a harsh chapter too, because it involves the occasional necessity of leaving people behind. And you know, there's this rule, if you're a lifeguard and someone's drowning, you swim up to them like this.

And the reason you do that is because if they cling to you and stop you from being able to move and you both drown, that's not helpful. Then there's two dead people. And that's why I just went out there to help. It's like, well, good, now there's two dead people. It's like, it's not useful. And you tell the person, look, you're gonna have to calm down and I can help you, but we're not gonna both drown here. And the same thing applies, I would say,

to the relationships that you have. And it's a better way to think about it than to say you should make friends with people who want the best for you, is that you should make friends, you should have relations with ships with people, and the best in them should want the best for the best in you. That's a better way of thinking about it. And I sorted that out a little bit in my clinical practice because there was a psychologist named Carl Rogers who thought that you should have unconditional, positive regard for people. And never sit well, sat well with me. He didn't act like that, really, either when you analyze the way he acted.

It's not a bad formulation, but it's a bit imprecise because really what you want from a relationship is you're hoping that if you have a close relationship with someone Then the best in them calls to the best in you and those two things build each other, right? And that's what you hope if you have a marriage or a friendship if it's a real friendship That's what you're after and you also want the people around you to call you on your foolishness, right? And sometimes that can be really intense, you know If you have a family member that's degenerating in some appalling manner, there's sometimes you have to put up a real wall like us, and maybe a bunch of you have to put up a wall and say,

you cross this and there will be absolute hell to pay. And they're not, they don't believe that what they're doing is serious enough for that anyone actually cares until that harsh wall has been established. And then maybe they'll think, oh, what I'm doing is wrong, and people actually do care because they care enough to say, keep making mistakes, and there'll be things that happen that you will seriously not appreciate. And there's a terrible harshness about that, but it's way more merciful than a lack of daisicle attitude that says, yeah, well, you know, drink and lie yourself to death, and I'll just go along with it because I don't want the conflict. I just don't see anything useful in that at all. And so it's very helpful to make friends, I think it's a responsibility again.

It's not something to make your life easier to make friends with people who want the best for you. It's something to make your life more difficult in the proper way. Kierkegaard said years ago in the late 1800s when he was thinking about the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, you know, that there would come a time when everything had been made so easy from a material perspective

that what people would start to cry out for was voluntary difficulty. And I think that, yeah, because we actually are built for a load, you know, like we're load-bearing creatures, and unless we've got something heavy to carry, then we don't feel that we're justified in our existence. It's like you have to pay a price, you have to pay a price for the privilege of your existence.

It's something like that, and maybe that's part of your instinct for social reciprocity. There has to be a heavy load, and it looks to me like the heavier the load that you bear voluntarily, the better it is for you at everyone else And so and there's something that's deeply religious about that idea too that's associated for example with idea of Bearing the cross of your own mortality, which is a deeply Christian idea and a very intelligent one That's something that you do voluntarily and that that's partly how you actually cope with the fact of your own mortality Is to bear up under the load right and to move ahead uphill despite that with your eyes open

And then maybe that's the pathway to having some actual self-regard You know, you see yourself as a vulnerable and flawed creature that still has enough courage to stand up to the absolute Catastrophe of the world and try to make things better. That's a responsibility, and it's the one that gives meaning to your life. The rule for is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to to someone else's today. I was writing that because one of the things I learned from reading Carl Jung,

which is a very useful thing to learn, is that you can't have an ideal without having a judge. When you upgrade yourself morally, when you're guilty and you're feeling bad about something you've done, the reason you're doing that is you're comparing yourself in some way to some implicit ideal. Like you don't know what the ideal is actually, but you kind of feel out its contours because it's whatever you're lesser than.

And you wouldn't be feeling guilty and ashamed of what you've done or haven't done if that implicit ideal wasn't there. So one of the prices you pay for having an ideal is that you also have a judge. And that can be very bad because the higher the ideal and the lower you are in relationship to it, the more judgmental the judge becomes. And one of the things Jung pointed out, which is an absolutely staggering, brilliantly,

brilliant observation is he was trying to understand the structure of the New Testament. And he regarded Christ, for example, as an archetypal representation of the perfect person. This has nothing to do with metaphysics, by the way. It's a psychological observation. It's an image of perfection, and that the image that was in the Gospels was one of primarily of compassion. But that was incomplete, because if it's an ideal, it's also a judge.

And the reason that the book of Revelation was tacked on to the end of the New Testament was to flesh out the story because at the end of time during the apocalypse, right, you might say, during the times in your life where everything falls apart, the ideal appears as the judge. And EU in relationship to the judge are going to be judged very harshly, precisely in proportion to the elevation of the ideal. And so that's absolutely brilliant analyst of narrative. And that's one of the most intelligent things I've ever come across. That idea that an ideal is at the same time a judge.

And then something also to be somewhat terrified of because of course you're always insufficient in relationship to your ideal especially if it's the highest ideal of imaginable. Well, you might become crushed under the weight of that and you see other people in the world who are manifesting themselves in a manner that's more ideal than you are and the distance between you and that ideal is so large that it can make you better and resentful and hopeless and all of that. But you need the ideal because you need something to strive towards so the question might be, how can you have the ideal without crushing yourself

under the weight of your inadequacy and relationship to it, making you jealous and envious and bitter in all of that. And it seems to me, and this is a good technique from a behavioral perspective is, well, the right person to compare yourself to isn't who someone else is today, whoever that might be, whoever's better at whatever it is that you're trying to do or whoever it is that has more than you, but who you are now or who you were yesterday. Because it's the right comparison. You know, first of all, what you're trying to do is to be better than you are, and that's fair enough, and then you could be, so that's something else,

it's actually a positive thing, because you could at least be slightly better next week than you were this week, even if it was only like one-tenth of one percent, which is a really good initial percentage to aim at, and that compounds quite quickly across time, you know you don't have to make huge improvements if they're continual for your pathway to be up and to accelerate quite rapidly and so and you're also the proper comparison for yourself because you're the only person that has your particular set of peculiarities and limitations and tragedies and abilities and all of that. And so you can move towards the ideal

and you can compare yourself to yourself and you can work incrementally for improvement and then you can have the kind of humility that allows you to admit that you need to be improved without also suffering from too much resentment, bitterness, and too much moral weight because you're not yet everything you could be. And so that's basically rule four.

And rule five is, don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Now like that rule a lot, it outlines a philosophy of discipline which I think is very important because it's very hard to figure out how to discipline children. It's predicated on two ideas. Don't make too many rules and enforce the rules that you do make, which are very good legal and philosophical principles. And it's also based on a different idea of parenting than the one that you would normally hear in our culture, which is a very immature culture.

In many ways, your job as a parent isn't to make your children happier, to help them be happier, to be well adjusted, or to foster their creativity or any of that, which you probably can't do. Anyways. I thought maybe the protesters had something to do with one of their little tricks, right? They haven't got anything to say.

They can always make a lot of noise with a fire alarm. So your job as a parent is to fundamentally make your children attractive to other people, or to help them maintain that intrinsic attractiveness that draws people to young children anyways, because what you want them to do is to be welcomed by other children as playmates Because a lot of what happens to children when they're being socialized is that they're socialized through play with other children And so if they if they're not popular as playmates, then they don't get they don't get invited into the group

And then they get left farther and farther behind and the clinical literature not is very very clear So your job is to help them learn between the ages of two and four how to engage in reciprocal play. And men can play a very important role in that, especially with regards to rough and tumble play. But in any case, that's one of the things that you want to do. And another thing you want to do is to render them as attractive to as adults as possible,

because adults have knowledge and authority. And if you want your children to learn how to function in the world, then it's not so bad to teach them a little bit of respect for adults, well partly because they're going to become an adult, which is of crucial importance, right? It's like, why wouldn't you want to instill within your children the ultimate in respect

for what they're going to be? Why wouldn't you do that unless you didn't like them, unless you didn't want the best for them? If they come equipped with a certain amount of respect for valid authority, then adults will appreciate them because they'll behave properly around them and then they'll open doors for them. And so then what can you use as a guide for that?

Well, if you don't like your child, well, maybe there's something wrong with you because you're ornery and you're hungover and you had a bad day and your mother tortured you and you're full of faults. And so you're not a very good parent. But that's why there's two of you, hopefully, because your stupidity and your husband's stupidity

hopefully will cancel each other out, to hopefully, right? So that the idea is that the amalgam of you, too, imperfect creatures makes one reasonable being who's a decent proxy for society at large. That's the hope. And so that if you annoy that proxy, which is the parental unit as a child,

then you probably would annoy other people as well. And so that's when it's okay for the parents to step in and say, you should stop being so damn annoying, because other people won't like you, and then your life will be hell. And that's a really good, that's a really good reason. You say, why discipline children? Well, well, that's why, because you discipline them so that the world opens itself up to them and so that they have good lives, and so that you don't only love them, but you also like

them, and so that you can see when you take them to see other children, that they play right away and that they play happily and productively, and when you take them out in public to see adults, that the adults aren't pretending to like them, but actually, you know, with that fake smile that you see on the faces of people who really think, oh my god, not these brats again. You want them to be very happy that these cute, bouncy,

enthusiastic children who have some sense of the difference, who have some sense of their own limits have come to be around them. And then they can be positively regarded by their grandparents and by your family, friends, and all of that. And that's much better because then they're also surrounded by adults who are responding to them truthfully. And that's the sort of world that you want to open up for your children. And well, I'm not going to get through all 12 rules. But I'll go to rule six and maybe I'll stop with that one. Is that where I want to stop? Yeah, I think it's a good one to stop with.

That's to put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. And I like this. And so one of the things that, like I've been watching my audience, as I watch individuals all the time, because I've always talked to individuals in an audience. It's a good thing to know if you're a public speaker, by the way, is you only were afraid to talk to a group if you talk to the group. Well, you should never talk to the group.

You should just talk to people, because you know how to do that, probably, at least to some degree. And so you can pick people out in the audience one by one, and you can talk to the group, you should just talk to people. Because you know how to do that, probably, at least to some degree. And so you can pick people out in the audience, one by one, and you can talk to them. And then you can see if they're following. And if that person is following, then probably almost everyone else isn't. If they happen to be asleep, well, maybe they had a bad day.

And you can find someone who's awake and talk to them. And well, when a crowd, some people are going to have had a bad day. And so, anyway, so the other thing I do is listen to the whole theater and I'm always very curious about listening for silence because silence is an indication that everyone is focused on the same thing. And that focus, it has a neurological component, and the neurological component is the activation of whatever circuitry is allowing for that focus, and it inhibits everything else, if it's intense enough, so it inhibits movement, and it inhibits coffee, and it inhibits

watch-checking, and phone-looking, and all of that. And so if the concentration is intense enough, what you get is silence. And so if you listen to a whole theater when you're talking, you can tell when you strike a chord because the place goes completely silent. And so one of the most reliable motifs that I've noticed for rendering a crowd dead silent, it doesn't matter where,

and this is all around the world, is to have a discussion about the relationship between meaning and responsibility. And I think the reason for that is is that we haven't had that discussion in our society for like 50 years. And I don't know if we've ever had it with sufficient explicitness, you know,

because the relationship between meaning and responsibility isn't self-evident. You know, most of the people who talk about responsibility are conservative types, more orderly types, and they sort of do it in a finger-shaking way. You know, you should get your act together and you should act like this, and you should follow the rules. And, you know, there's a kind of rebellious spirit that rejects that sort of top-down, enforced morality. And there's something to be said for that rebellious spirit. But, and that isn't what I'm interested in.

I'm more interested in the fact that if you watch the people that you admire, let's say, because admiration is like a spontaneous manifestation of your psyche. It's part of the impulse to imitate, because you automatically admire people, and if you admire them, then you want to emulate them. And so you have an instinct for growth, and it manifests itself in the proclivity to admire and that motivates imitation. So then you think, well, who is it that you spontaneously admire?

And the answer to that is, well, it's generally people who at least take responsibility for themselves, right? I mean, one thing you want from a person, a friend, a family member, a partner, a child, is the ability to at least not be unnecessarily dependent on someone else, like if you're sick or if you're hurt, that's a whole different matter. But you want to be, you want to see someone who can stand up on their own two feet, at least in relationship to themselves, minimum. And you think that person's doing all right. And then maybe what you want a little bit past that is that you want that person to have

taken enough responsibility so that other people can rely on them too, so that not only are they a credit to themselves, let's say, but they're also someone who a family member can come to or a friend in the time of crisis and that will be there in a functional and productive way. So they're there for themselves, but they're there for their family and their friends. And then maybe beyond that, you want someone who's also there for the community, who's managed it for themselves

and managed it for their family, and then also managed it for the community, and is doing all those things at the same time in a kind of, in a mode of ethical being that's harmonious, like music is harmonious. That's the essential, that's an essential element, let's say, of what constitutes valid morality, a valid universal morality. And that's partly when you see that pattern manifested by someone, then you automatically admire it.

It's part of the heroic path through life. It's part of that ability to bear up under the tragedy of existence and to move forward. And we're automatically and religiously attracted to that in the most fundamental way. And it's necessary and correct. And rule six is get your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. It's like, well, there's lots of reason to criticize the world. Real reason, we've gone through some of it, you know, nature's very harsh, and we all suffer under the strictures of mortality and illness,

and culture can be tyrannical, and we're forced to deal with our own ignorance and malevolence and that of others. There's lots of reasons to be resentful about the structure of existence itself. And they're not trivial reasons, you know? But I read this very interesting exchange in a book called The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot, the American English poet, and in this play, because it's a screenplay, there's a female character,

and she's not having a good time of it. She's suffering madly, and it's really undermining her. And she talks to this psychiatrist just at the party. She's looking at her free medical advice, let's say. She says to him, she tells him that she's having a terrible time of it, and he listens, and she says, and I really, I'd like to talk to you because I really hope that there's something wrong with me.

And he says, well, what do you mean? Well, why do you hope that there's something wrong with you? And she says, well, look, this is how I look at it. I'm having a desperate time of it here and there's only two possibilities as far as I can tell. There's either something wrong with me or there's something wrong with the world. me or there's something wrong with the world. And if there's something wrong with the world,

well, then I'm done because like, what am I going to do about that? Like, if it's that catastrophe that's enveloped me is a function of the structure of the world, then I'm lost. But if there's something I'm doing wrong, well, then that's so positive because maybe I could figure out what it is and stop doing it. And, you know, there's this idea, again, it's deeply embedded inside the West that the thing that you should offer up as a sacrifice to keep the world functioning properly is yourself and not someone else.

It's a very fundamental idea. And that idea is really associated with the notion that you could let go of what's insufficient about you and let it die. And that if you did that enough, then what would you say? If you did it enough, you could at least test the hypothesis that the unnecessary misery and suffering that surrounds you and that characterizes your life and the life of other people isn't a consequence of urine action. And it's useful to assume to begin with that it is.

It's like, you got a problem? Are you doing everything you possibly could with everything that's at your disposal to fix it? And maybe the answer to that is yes, although that's highly unlikely. Right? Because it's, well, that's obviously a very high demand to place on anyone. But there's an optimism in that. It's like, well, how, even if you're dealing with someone who's quite unreasonable, like you're 90% reasonable and 10% unreasonable, and they're the reverse, which is pretty much the case in every marriage, for example. So, you know, you could probably

fix the 10% of you that's unreasonable. Maybe you could reduce that to 5%, and God only knows what effect that would have on the unreasonableness of the other person. Might reduce it by 50%, because a lot of it was just a delusion on your part to begin with, and was actually a consequence of your own moral inadequacy. And, like, I've studied people who do terrible things. You know, like the people who shot up the Columbine High School or the person who shot up the elementary school in Connecticut. He's absolutely the elementary school crime being

a particularly, what would you call it, a particularly vicious and vile crime because it was exactly designed to produce maximal suffering among the innocent, which is the worst kind of crime, right? It's one thing to punish the guilty. That's what vigilantes do in vigilante movies. But if you hate existence, you don't punish the guilty, you punish the innocent. Right? And so you can tell when someone's done that, where exactly they are. They're in something so close to hell that there's no point in making the distinction.

It's like, well, if you're bitter and miserable about your life and you start to think about the terrible catastrophe of the structure of reality, which is where your mind is logically going to go, how can things be so terrible and aimed at me? It's a common way for people to think when they're not bearing up very well under the catastrophe of existence and makes you bitter and resentful and makes you likely to take revenge on the world. All that does is make things worse.

As a better thing to do is to reverse that and think, and this is a moral duty, let's say, you know, in the New Testament there's an idea that the messianic figures, so that's the figure of redemption, does two things. One is to take the sins of the world on himself and the other is to confront malevolence, and so that's the meeting, say, with Satan in the desert. And you think, well what does that mean psychologically? Well it means that if things aren't how they should be, it's your fault, it's your responsibility. No matter what it is, Dostoevsky said, not only are you responsible for everything you do, you're responsible for everything that everyone else does.

And like there's a tinge of insanity about that remark, and then there's a tinge of insanity in Dostoevsky as well. But he was an absolute genius, and there's something about it that's right, is that things around you would be far better if you weren't less than you should be. And then the question is, and I think this is the adventure of your life. I truly believe that this is the adventure of your life, is how much better could things be if you were better than you are. And I think that, you know, the idea that we have that's

at the basis of our culture is that each of us has this undeniable divine worth. And that that worth is so significant that it's reasonable to attribute to each of us the sovereignty that makes us all the cornerstone of our societies. That's the idea of our culture. And underneath that is the idea that there's way more to you. There's so much more to you than you think that there's enough to deal with the catastrophe of existence if you would just have the courage in the

faith to allow that to manifest itself. And that's even if that's it's it's a hard to believe that that might be true, but you see people bearing up under unbelievable loads and acting in an incredibly beneficial and heroic way under circumstances that are absolutely dreadful, like you can see people doing that, even yourself from time to time. It's within the power of a human being to do that. And so there's an open question, and I think that's the open question of the future, is that how much better could things be if you got your act together? And how much less terrible would they be, which is even a more germane question. That was the question that sort of drove me when I had studied totalitarianism. It's not only that if you don't manifest what's within you,

that heaven doesn't make its appearance on earth, is that if you don't manifest what's within you, that you leave a hole in the structure of reality that's filled by something that approximates hell, and we just can't do that, enough of that. And so you take that responsibility onto yourself, and you say, well, I'm going to put my house in perfect order before I criticize the world.

And that's a good place to stop. So thank you very much. Applause All right, man, this is it for the year. What are you going to do with yourself? There's a long list of things. The first thing I'm going to do is to go over to Vancouver Island and spend some time with my wife's family, so I'm looking forward to that. They're all here tonight, so. Well, I can tell you a little bit. I guess I'll

just answer the question. I mean, I'm going to tape a series of lectures on Monday on personality for this company called Red Seat. And then I'm going to Washington. And I'm going to talk to a bunch of Republicans in Washington. And I've been talking to a bunch of Democrats in the United States. And I've been working with people who are trying to pull the Democrats back

to the sensible center. And that seems to be. APPLAUSE And that seems to be working. It actually seems to be working. A very large number of the candidates for the House in the United States that were elected in the midterms were sensible, centrist candidates. And that's partly a consequence of a calculated move on the part of people within and surrounding the Democrat party, the Democratic party, to do precisely that. And so it seems to be working. And so I'm hoping to go down to Washington to talk to these Republicans to see if they can find a way of interacting properly with the more centrist Democrats to stop this process or not to stop, but to make some progress towards halting this insane polarization that's dangerous and that we don't want to engage in any more than absolutely necessary. So that's... And then I'm going to Florida to talk to a group of young conservatives, that you're going there too.

That's what organization is. That's Turning Point USA student-atrement. So that's a group of young conservatives and what I'm trying to talk to them about and have already is about the relationship between meaning and responsibility because that's a very useful topic for young people who are politically oriented. And so that pretty much does in December. And then in January, I'm going to be working with a small team of people that I've already

hired on this, on an educational initiative. I announced yesterday with the business school, the creation of 50 fellowship positions, we're trying to produce a partnership with a business school in the US to help foster entrepreneurial activity. And the guy that runs that, Jeff Sandefer, also has a consortium of private schools,

for younger people. And we're going to test our educational software on them. And that's part of this idea about an online education system, and I've hired people to work on that, so I hope to be working on that in January. And then in February, I'm going to Australia, and you're coming, hopefully, and my wife is coming along, hopefully,

and maybe we'll go to Hong Kong and Singapore and Seoul, and that basically will take us to the end of February, wife is coming along, hopefully, and maybe we'll go to Hong Kong and Singapore and Seoul. And that basically will take us to the end of February, and then I won't tell you about anything else because that's enough. So what you're saying is you're retiring. Did I get that right? We're going to do two of the greatest hits that we get all the time. This one, of course, we have gotten in every city in Canada when you're running for Prime Minister.

Well, I can tell you one thing. It's certainly not until I learn a hell of a lot more about policy than I already know, you know, because it turns out that despite what you might think by observing our current Prime Minister, you actually have to know something about policy before you should. Yeah, I'm not very happy with him. I just went and talked to a bunch of people in Alberta, you know, and they're having a real hard time with their gas and oil industry there, and that's a real catastrophe for Alberta. And Trudeau's contribution to that seems to have been from what I could gather to insist to the people that he was talking about, that the number of women and men in the gas and oil

industry will be precisely equal by the year 2030. I'm not kidding, I'm not kidding. That was his contribution to the economic catastrophe in Alberta. So anyways, apart from all that, I'm doing some of these political things that I've already talked to you about, and I'm trying to learn a lot about what might constitute reasonable policy across a lot of different dimensions, and hopefully that'll prove useful in a variety of ways. I don't know about an overtly political career

because there's a conflict between that and what I'm doing now, whatever that is with all of you, people, because you're here for whatever that is too. I mean, I think what we're trying to do is have a serious discussion about the structure of the world and about how to act in it. And that's an important discussion to have, and as I already pointed out, that seems to be a real demand for that discussion everywhere in the world. And my sense is that the most important thing

that you can possibly do, and this is something that transcends political importance, is to do what you can to improve the resilience and strength of people at the individual level. And I'm not willing to forego that opportunity to do something political, because I think the political system can't operate properly without functional individuals.

And so... He... Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

Yeah! All right, here's the other greatest hit, and I'm only doing it because it's the last show of the year, and I'm not making it up. Do you wear tidy whiteies or boxers? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!? This has come up. I don't know why.

I don't know why either. We have that person. They must follow us around because it might be easier just to show it at one point just to have, which I'm not going to. That's the whole other show people. That's only for the meat and greek people. We've been... They got very excited in this front area right here.

We've been asked this question a lot, and I have a stock answer, which is I wear pants so I don't have to answer that question. Okay, let's change gears a little bit. Regarding the opioid problem in Vancouver, especially on the east side of the city, do you think that this problem is rooted in biology, the family, or something else? Well, it's definitely rooted in part in biology because there's lots of people. There are new opiates that are extraordinarily powerful and we don't know a lot about them. You know, they're new synthetic opioids.

And it's actually one of the unintended consequences of drug policy, you know, because what's happened over the last 30 years is that, of course, there's a whole variety of substances that are illegal, and there are reasons for that. But it isn't obvious that making those substances illegal constitutes the most effective way of dealing with their existence. Places like Portugal, for example, have legalized all drugs of abuse.

And now for quite a while, I think it's 10 years in Portugal. That's actually been quite effective. And one of the problems with making drugs illegal is that you push a tremendous amount of money into the hands of criminals. And pushing a tremendous amount of money into the hands of organized criminals over multiple decades is not a very wise policy decision. But one of the other unintended consequences

is that the criminal chemists are sort of at war with the bureaucrats, and the bureaucrats make a substance illegal, and then the criminal chemists modify the substance by one little molecular piece, and so it still has the same effects as the legal drug, but for a temporary period of time it's legal, and they produce now, like instead of the sort of 10 psychoactive addictive compounds that we had 30 years ago, we have like 300, and some of them are way more powerful than they were to begin with, and that's also the case with the synthetic opioids. And so partly, there's a technological and sociological problem, and then with opioid

abuse, there's also a biological component, because, you know, there are people who take opioids and really don't like them. Lots of people are like that. It's not like everyone who takes them will immediately become addicted, but some people are extremely sensitive to the sorts of opiate effects that produce addiction, just like some people are sensitive to the effects of alcohol that produce alcohol as a kind of friend. He was a cool guy. His name was Frank Irwin and he looked like Ernest Hemingway. He was quite a bit older than me. He was a cool guy, his name was Frank Irwin, and he looked like Ernest Hemingway. He was quite a bit older than me.

He was a professor of mine when I was at McGill, and he was interested in the biological basis of criminality and also of alcoholism. And he had a, believed or not, he had a monkey farm on St. Kits. And he was raising alcoholic monkeys. And his only person I ever met who actually did that, and it's not that surprising, because it's a real niche market.

And my wife and I actually went down to St. Kits about five years ago and met his wife there, Frank, unfortunately, it was ill at the time. And anyways, on St. Kits, they have green monkeys, vervots, and they also raise sugar cane there, and the monkeys get into the fermented sugar cane from time to time. And so anyways, they'd gather monkeys from the wild,

and then they would give them alcoholic beverages, and they had to sweeten them, because the monkeys didn't really like the taste of the alcohol, but 5% of the monkeys would drink to coma on first exposure. And Frank had footage of them, and looked just like a frat party. I mean, the monkeys were hanging upside down in the trees.

But most of the monkeys would have a sipper too and desist, and some of them would drink a reasonable social amount, and then go home, well, they were still able to drive. But 5% of them, the first time they tried it, they just couldn't stop, and they just passed out. That's a good example of the biological differences. The other thing that you see, I think that contributes to opioid abuse in particular, is opiates are good analgesics.

They're good at alleviating pain in particular. People who are in pain, grieving or disappointed or frustrated, suffering from an excess of pain-related emotions, and sometimes that's actually a physical pain itself. A fairly number of people who are seriously depressed, I think can't remember what it is, I think it's 40%, have a chronic pain condition as well because depression looks like it's a pain, a pathology of pain, opiate, seem particularly attractive to people who have that class of problems. So that's another biological contributor.

And so that kind of covers that territory. I'm still trying to picture you on an island with hundreds of drunken monkeys. That's like if you were a superhero, that's the Jordan Peterson origin story right there. I increasingly hear a talk of white privilege and microaggressions from coworkers. I'd love some advice on how to communicate

that these are not good ideas. Well, the problem with that is it's so specific. Like, to be able to answer that question with any degree of intelligence, I'd have to know a lot more about the person who's asking the question and the workplace because obviously the fact that these topics have come up means that the workplace has become politicized and the fact that the question is being asked also means that there's already an awkwardness in the discussion, in the territory for discussion, right, because otherwise it wouldn't be a concern. And it isn't obvious how to go about dealing with that sort of situation without inflamming it or causing more trouble than the good that might be produced.

And so I'll give a stand back and I'll give a more generic answer to what you have to do if you're in a situation that's starting to cause you resentment. This is useful thing to know because you're going to situation that's starting to cause you resentment. This is useful thing to know because you're going to be in situations that make you resentful. Resentment is a dreadful emotion. I think there's three motivations or emotions or states of being, let's say, that really take people out. There's resentment, there's deceit, and there's arrogance.

And if you get those three working together, then that really produces something that's hellish. It's one of the chapters that I'm writing in my next book. It's about the interaction between those three things. But resentment is also extremely useful. It's a really useful marker. And it's something that I spend a lot of time talking to my clinical clients about.

Because there's kind of two things, there's four things that you do really as a clinician. You help people get their stories together about the past and the present and the future. You help and you help them strategize. And so that would be one thing. You help them deal with anxiety and depression and other negative emotions. You help them formulate a plan for the future, that's a part of it. And then you also frequently help them become more assertive.

And that's really not quite the right terminology because really what you're trying to do is help them learn to integrate their aggression. And so people are often feeling resentful because they feel taken advantage of, and sometimes they feel taken advantage of because they're being taken advantage of. And so if you're resentful, but not always,

if you're resentful, you have to ask yourself two questions. You have to say, well, am I just immature and weak, and I'm feeling sorry for myself and allowing myself to drift down that path because I can't tolerate the responsibility. I'm unwilling to do that. And you have to think that through because resentment can devour you and it'll make you vicious in the final analysis as you seek for revenge. It's very bad pathway and it will come out in that manner. And so you might have to think that through

and you might have to talk to people that know you and that you love to see. Here's my situation. I'm feeling resentful about it. I'm being harassed at work. I'm not getting what I deserve, whatever. I feel that I'm not. Is there something wrong with the way I'm looking at this? And the answer might be, yeah, well, you've got a lot of growing up to do, you know, and so you should just chuck the hell up and take it because that's part of life. Or the other alternative is, no, no, there's really something that's not good going on. That you are entangled in something that's got a tyrannical aspect, and you are being subjugated by that, and you're starting to rebel against that, right?

You're feeling that life isn't tolerable under those conditions. And if it's the second, then you have something to say or do. What's the alternative? Right? You're either going to stay admired in resentment. That's a catastrophe and it's likely to get worse across time and that's going to make you better and it's going to take the joy out of your life and it's going to make you desirous of revenge. It's a very bad trajectory and you want to think that through or you might have to stand

up and say what you have to say. And like neither of those options are that pleasant, you know, but one of the things that's also useful to know about life is sometimes you screw both ways. I'm dead serious about that. It's unbelievably useful to know because you might suffer from the delusion that there's some easy way out that wouldn't require trouble and suffering on your part that you're not seeing and so you can forego the decision. Sometimes you're not in that situation and let's take this politicized workplace as an example. It's like you might already be in trouble. It might be that you cannot function in a healthy manner in that environment. It's already politicized to a too-graded degree. So now you have a problem.

What are you going to do about that? Well, the first thing I would say is prepare yourself. So how do you prepare yourself? Well, let's say your workplace has become untenable. Well, you can't just have a fit about it and get fired because then you're fired. And like, maybe you have a family and they depend on you. It's like that.

That's not helpful. Then you haven't fixed the workplace and you're just miserable and the people who depend on you and you're in more shape. As a war-like strategy, that's a really bad one. And so you might think, well, my workplace is becoming politicized. It's like, do I have some lateral options? You know, could I, if necessary, find a different position? And maybe I should start preparing for that. Put your CV in order, update your resume

if there's holes in it and shortcomings in it, fix them. Start looking for where else you might be able to move laterally or up because maybe you could also use it as a time to make a career change in a positive direction, but you better prepare yourself because you're not gonna be able to say what you have to say until you prepare yourself because you won't have the courage or the strength or the strategic intelligence necessary

to do that. So if you're going to stand up, you've got to position yourself so that you're not standing, you know, so that someone can't just push you over with a single finger. You have to be ready. And so you ready yourself. And then you start to think it through. It's like, okay, well, what the hell's your problem with the discussion of white privilege? Why is that bothering you?

Well, I just don't think it's right. It's like, yeah, but that argument's not gonna get you anywhere. You're gonna have to be a lot more sophisticated in your analysis of the problem than that in order to address it. Then you're gonna have to figure out who's bringing it up and what's their motivations and what's their power base

and are there other people that they're also annoying who aren't saying anything? You need a whole strategy for dealing with this. And it has to be intelligent, well thought through. And so, but it might be a moral demand on you to undergo all that effort, because what's the alternative? If your work's play starts to get politicized and you're starting to be genuinely oppressed by that,

which is the aim of a politicized workplace, by the way, then you have the option, here's your options. You can either submit to the slavery that goes along with that and become bitter and resentful and let all the joy be taken out of your workplace or you can stand up and figure out how to push back against it so that you can maintain a certain modicum of self-respect, and maybe your career along with it. And both of those are really hard, but you know, at least one has a certain amount of nobility and dignity associated with it. And so that's what I

would say about how to deal with that. It's really, really difficult. And it's, you know, the other thing that I learned from Carl Jung, which is really useful, I thought this was so brilliant. He said that complex social problems are solved by people who take their personal problems with extreme seriousness. So let's say now you're one of these people and you're in a politicized workplace. It's like, well, now you're kind of at the center

of the storm in some sense, because you know our whole discourse, our entire cultural discourse has become politicized. And that's sort of abstract, because it's out there in the political world. But it's not abstract for you, hope of sudden it's right there, it's part of your life. And so, and it's part of your life

right down to the particulars. And so, in order for you to address that, you're really gonna have to take that problem apart. Because now it's become part of your life. You're gonna have to learn how to make your case so that you're not the unwitting and resentful victim of a politicized process that is essentially aimed at something tyrannical.

That's a big way to take on, but if you figure out how to do it, then you know how to do it. You've actually generated, you know, you might think of it as just as a micro solution because it only applies to your case, but that's not the case. It won't just apply to your case. There'll be the fact that you've worked through that in the particulars of your own life will enable you to discover something of general value.

And it's those little battles that aren't little, the battle that we're talking about that's part and parcel that question, that's the sort of battle upon which the integrity of the state actually depends. When you read about how totalitarian states develop and maintain themselves, what you see when you break them down to the microprocess is that all the people that were in those totalitarian states were faced with that sort of conundrum and

decision all the time. And they didn't stop it. And because they didn't stop it, it got worse. Applause So you could take it on as a challenge and I think that is what you should do, especially if it's starting to poison your life. But I would take it with all due seriousness because it's the same thing that's manifesting itself in the political sphere as a whole, and you're going to be dealing with all of that complexity right there in your workplace. And so it's a real, tremendous challenge, but a challenge that's adopted voluntarily is much, you're much more likely to succeed both psychologically and practically, if you take it on voluntarily, rather than wait until it's chased you into a corner and then start to try to fight like a cornered rat, in which case you're very likely to lose and in a very painful way. So, better earlier than later.

So. All right, we only have time for one more. This is the last one of the year. So you ready? Go deep. You ready? Jesus, I don't even know what that means. It's an underwear question again. How did you become the Jordan Peters in that we're all watching here tonight? God, that's a weird question. That's an almost impossible question to answer without being,

like, unbearably egotistical, even by daring to consider that a reasonable question. So, to the degree that that's a reasonable question, I'm going to rephrase it a little bit, because one of the things that has been characteristic of my career is that I've been an engaging lecturer, you know, and so I lectured at Harvard for about six years and then I was at the University of Toronto for about 20 and I lectured at McGill a little bit before that. And the lectures were engaging and I think the reason for that is because I never discussed anything in my lectures that I didn't believe to be important. And important, what I meant by important, it's sort of, I had a kind of a technical assessment of it.

It's like, I really like abstract ideas and I like philosophical ideas and psychological ideas, scientific and theological, I like ideas, but I also like them to come to a point. So when I was lecturing to my students, the rule always was, well, here's a fact, but here's why knowing that fact is going to make a material difference in your life. Like, you need, here's the way that this fact is a tool. You know, and so I was always trying to communicate with my audience,

and with myself in a way that ensured that what I was talking about was relevant and informed as it should be from a research scientific and professional perspective but was also of practical significance. And I could tell if that was happening because the students were engaged. And so I practiced diligently for decades and to stay away from notes to the degree that that was possible too, so that I could attend to the audience, so that I was only concentrating on material that was meaningfully engaging. And so I would say that that's morphed into this.

The process is partly a technological one, because first of all, I just have my students, and the bigger classes were 200 people, and then I started using television a little bit in Ontario, and then YouTube, and then the audience size has grown. The message was working because of what I had practiced doing, and then the audience size has grown as a consequence of technological innovation and scaffolding.

And so it's that process. And then the other part of it is, that's part of it. The other part of it is, like, I spent a lot of time writing, you know, the first book I wrote, which was Maps of Meaning, that took me, I wrote that book for 15 years, and I worked on it for three hours a day, and I worked on it, come hell or high water, water fundamentally and it was kind of hard on my family because well you have to be mean to do something like that and I really mean that like you know I had my office and I had my job and I was a professor and also a clinical psychologist and so I had a lot of professional

responsibilities and I would close myself into my office for this time, all the time. And I would chase my family out. If they came in, my cute little kids or my wife who's a very reasonable person, it's like, what the hell are you doing in here? I'm writing, you cannot come in here and bother me. And the reason, and I was harsh about it,

and the reason for that was like, maybe I was thinking about something that took 45 minutes to think through. You know, and I had all that in my head, and then someone would interrupt me, and often, maybe because they wanted to see me, or they had a perfectly reasonable request, and, you know, then that would all disappear. And I couldn't have that and do the writing. And so I was like a junkyard dog, you know, I had barbed wire around my office, and if

you came in, I barked. But the advantage to that was that I spent those 15,000 hours, something like that, really thinking things through. And when I wrote that first book, I rewrote every sentence of it at least, I think 50 times. And usually what that meant is I'd write the sentence, and then I'd write like 10 variants of it. And then I'd pick the best variant.

And then I'd do that repeatedly over the 15 year period. And I learned to structure arguments in a very coherent way. And I learned a lot of things that I had at hand, that I can draw on when I lecture, for example, as a consequence of all that reading and all that writing. And so I think it's the combination of those two things. It's the reading and the writing that gave me a knowledge base that I can draw on, and then there's the continual practice at lecturing.

And so that seems to be what's produced, whatever it is that drew you to whatever it is that we're doing tonight, which is a serious discussion about, I would say, about serious matters. So that's it for 2018. I just want to get one more thing. John, are you back there? Would you come out? Oh, come on, John. I would like to introduce you to John O'Connell. John is my tour manager, and he has been unbelievably helpful to me for the last. So thank you very much.

Thank you. You bet. And thank you Mr. Rubin. As long as we're getting all emotional here, I've said it to you privately so I may as well say it in front of these couple thousand people. I am a better person than I was before we started this thing. So I know what it's like for these guys to be here. Truly, it's been an honor and a thrill. I love you, man. Kelly Steve.

On that note, I'm getting out of the way. Make some noise. 108 shows this year, guys. Incredible, incredible. Thank you, everyone. There's a pleasure to be here, lovely to talk with all of you, and so... Thank you. Thank you, good night. If you found this conversation interesting or meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos. Both of these 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. 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 and talk to you next week. Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B Peterson.

On Twitter, at Jordan B Peterson, on Facebook, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram, at Jordan.B. Peterson. Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanB. Peterson.com. My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their paths, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com.

From the Westwood One Podcast Network. from the Westwood One Podcast Network.