Risk Being a Fool: A 12 Rules for Life Lecture

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 28 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's Daughter and Collaborator.

[2] This is a podcast from Westbury, New York, recorded on September 6th, 2018.

[3] We're going to get back to interviews as quickly as possible.

[4] We're still having some health trickiness.

[5] I'm currently in New York visiting my dad, who has checked himself into rehab to get off of a prescribed anti -anxiety drug that he started taking when mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

[6] Turns out it's very difficult to get off of without having physical withdrawal.

[7] If this recording doesn't sound ideal, it's because I'm in New York visiting my dad.

[8] So, interviews at the moment for the podcast are kind of out of the question.

[9] We should be back at it in a couple of months.

[10] If you want to hear how my mom is doing and how my dad is doing, please go to my YouTube page or type in Peterson Family Update September 2019 into YouTube.

[11] I go into why he's in rehab, how mom is doing.

[12] Don't worry, everything's fine, but there's more information on YouTube in that video.

[13] We're okay, we just need a bit of time to get back on our feet after all the stress that we had to deal with following mom's diagnosis.

[14] I've named this podcast, Risk Being a Fool.

[15] a 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[16] Well, this is a nice friendly place.

[17] It's sort of like the anti -Twitter, I would say.

[18] Yeah, so, well, thank you very much for the kind welcome.

[19] It's much appreciated.

[20] It's surreal to be here.

[21] Well, it's surreal to be doing all of this.

[22] It's surreal to have Dave Rubin introduce Eric Weinstein, the mathematician, so we can come out here and sing Ador's song to you and then play the harmonica.

[23] I don't know what universe that makes sense in, but apparently it's this one.

[24] So I don't know what to make of that, except it's very amusing, and it's very good that things can be musing from time to time.

[25] It's nice to have Dave along to add some levity to the situation in the Q &A as well, because I think that no matter how serious the topics that you're talking about, If you can't maintain a sense of humor about it, then something has gone seriously wrong, right?

[26] And I think something's gone seriously wrong, I suppose, to the degree that we are increasingly unable to tolerate comedians, and they won't come to speak at campuses, for example, and it's not really a very good thing, even mainstream comedians like Jerry Seinfeld.

[27] So, okay, so I use these opportunities.

[28] privileges, because it's a privilege to come here and speak to all of you, to further my thinking about whatever it is that I happen to be thinking about.

[29] And, you know, Dave was talking about ideas.

[30] And there's two things that are sort of relevant when you're talking about ideas.

[31] One is, I think, the ideas that you bring forward, but the other is the engagement in the process of generating ideas.

[32] And that's actually more important.

[33] And I really think that that that's what you need to do if you're speaking with people.

[34] I mean, you do that in a conversation.

[35] You don't want to just trot out the same old things you've been thinking about for the last 10 years, you know.

[36] There's something stale and dead about that.

[37] You want to be pushing the envelope with what you think.

[38] And that's a good hint, if you want to speak publicly or if you want to speak in a manner that's interesting, is you have to take a bit of a risk, you know.

[39] Otherwise, you fall back on your notes and then you're like your own tape recorder.

[40] Or it gets even worse, you might become your own parody, you know, because you keep imitating your past successes or your past lack of failure, which is even a worse thing to imitate.

[41] It's better to take a risk.

[42] And then that's kind of exciting because, well, it's exciting to be the speaker because you don't know what the hell is going to happen, because I never know.

[43] Backstage, I don't even really know what I'm going to talk about when I come out.

[44] Like, you know, I sit back in the dressing room for 45 minutes and I think about what it is that I'm thinking about.

[45] And I have some sense of the direction that I want to go in, but I don't know exactly how it's going to go when I come out on stage, and so that gives me some rather anxiety -provoking moments.

[46] I usually have at least one small panic attack before I come on stage.

[47] They don't last that long, but they're there.

[48] But I don't think you can do anything worthwhile without risk, and I can bloody well tell you that you can't think without risk.

[49] That's for sure, because if you're thinking without risk, then you're not thinking about anything important.

[50] And if you're not thinking about anything important, well, the first issue is, well, why the hell bother then?

[51] Why bother thinking?

[52] And second, you're not thinking if you're not thinking about something important.

[53] And if it's going to be important, it's going to be contentious.

[54] And you know, that's part of the reason why free speech is so important, because you have to be able to stumble around blindly like an idiot while you're trying to figure out difficult things, because otherwise you'll never get a chance to figure them out.

[55] Because you're not going to bloody well get it right the first time.

[56] That's for sure.

[57] And so there's a lot of idiocy on the way to wisdom and you have to be you have to understand that if you're going to allow your society to proceed with any degree of certainty you have to flail about you know I was writing the other day I've been writing the second volume I suppose of 12 rules for life which is provisionally called 12 more rules for life just took a long time to come up with that one I'll tell you and in the first chapter I have an image at the beginning of each chapter, and the image that I chose, the first image I chose was a yin -yang symbol, but I dispensed with that.

[58] The second image I chose was the fool card from the taro.

[59] It's a really interesting card, and it shows this kind of prince -looking like guy, a young guy.

[60] He's looking up in the clouds, and he's got a little dog with him, sun's shining behind him, and he's about to step off a cliff.

[61] And it's a very, and it's the fool, it's a very paradoxical image because he's a good -looking, kid and he looks like he knows what he's doing and the day is bright and so that that signifies consciousness and yet he's willing to step off the cliff and so he's the fool and the fool the fool is a complicated image you know the fool is the court jester who tells the truth even to the king because he's beneath contempt right so sometimes the jester is the only person that can tell the truth because he's beneath contempt and that's actually the role that comedians play is they can say what everyone else is thinking and that's why we We laugh, you know, because a good comedian says something that you think, but you'd never say, and the comedian says it, you go, yeah, we all think that.

[62] And so, and if you can tolerate that, well, then you have a reasonably free society, right?

[63] If you can tolerate people who poke at you, especially if you have a position of power.

[64] And so, Carl Jung regarded the fool as the precursor to the Savior.

[65] It was a really strange idea, right?

[66] One of his paradoxical ideas, and the reason is, is that you can't advance.

[67] unless you're willing to make a fool of yourself.

[68] Because in order to advance, you have to transform yourself into a beginner, right?

[69] Because you have to do something new in order to advance.

[70] And if it's new, then you're not good at it.

[71] And if you're not good at it, then you have to do it badly.

[72] And if you're going to do it badly, well, then you're going to be a bit of a fool.

[73] But if you're not willing to do things badly and be a bit of a fool, then you don't get any better.

[74] And so unless you're willing to be a fool, then you can't be redeemed.

[75] So that's a good thing to know whenever you're thinking about how foolish you're going to look when you try something new.

[76] It's like, well, you want to try something new because what there is of you right now isn't enough unless your life is perfect.

[77] And that's very unlikely.

[78] Unless the life of people around you that you love is perfect, you're not as, you're not everything you could be, and maybe you're not everything you should be.

[79] And so you have to be something new.

[80] And if you're going to be something new, then you have to risk being a fool.

[81] And then maybe that'll move you to the next stage.

[82] And so that's that perverse, perverse meeting of opposites, you know.

[83] So, so I'm willing to come out on stage in risk being a fool, I suppose, because at least to some degree, in principle, that's the pathway to wisdom.

[84] It's better to come out and see if you can discover some new truths rather than just reiterate truths you think you already know.

[85] I don't know if ever, if you're reiterating truth that you already know, I don't ever know if that's actually true.

[86] You know what I mean, because a state, whatever, whatever truth is is very difficult to get your hand handles on it, or your hands on.

[87] It's not like you can just write down the truth in a list and have the list be permanent.

[88] There's something alive about it and vital.

[89] And so it has to be delivered in a, I don't know what it is, it has to be delivered in a new fashion.

[90] I think it's something akin to writing the line between chaos and order, which is why I used the yin and yang symbol as well in that chapter.

[91] That was the first image, you know, because if you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, then you kind of have one foot, where you're secure and you know what you're doing and you have the other foot where you don't know what you're doing and that's pushing you to develop.

[92] And there's something about that that embodies the truth, even though it's not a final truth.

[93] It's more like a truth of process.

[94] And I think the deepest truth is actually a truth of process.

[95] Like it's the truth that you engage in when you sit down with someone that you love and you have a difficult discussion about something important when you're actually trying to solve a problem so that you could make things better.

[96] You know, now and then you have a discussion like that.

[97] Those aren't easy discussions, generally, because, well, first of all, you have to admit that you have a problem, and then you have to formulate the problem, then you have to agree on the problem, then you have to both actually want to work towards a solution, even if you're at odds with one another.

[98] I've seen this.

[99] I mean, this is where many marriages fail, unfortunately, because people aren't able to sit down and say what they think and risk the terrible conflict that goes along with actually saying who it is that you are and what you want, you know.

[100] But that's where you find the truth by doing that.

[101] And then maybe you can stay where that is, and that's where you should be.

[102] And maybe that's what keeps you going through life and keeps everyone going.

[103] It's something like that.

[104] Now, I was thinking backstage, I was thinking, what the hell am I doing?

[105] I've been wondering that a lot, you know, I'll tell you, I've been wondering that an awful lot.

[106] Because I can't really figure it out.

[107] I can't figure out, well, there's many, many things I can't figure out.

[108] But I can't figure out, for example, exactly why the book I wrote has become so popular, and I can't figure out why We developed all these new technologies in the last five years, thereabouts, and we have no idea how they work, or what they're doing, or what their implications are.

[109] You know, we launched these things on us like we're laboratory guinea pigs or laboratory rats, and we try these massive, large -scale social experiments.

[110] We have no idea where they're heading, you know.

[111] We have Twitter and Facebook and Google and, well, on YouTube and podcasts.

[112] I mean, YouTube itself is an absolutely staggering revolution, you know, and I'm.

[113] It took me a long time to realize that.

[114] It took about three years of playing with YouTube before I figured out that there was something absolutely fundamental shifted as a consequence of it and eventually figured it out.

[115] It was that YouTube allows the spoken word to have the same reach and permanence as the written word, but cheaper access, faster publication, and a wider audience.

[116] It's like, oh, I see, it's like, it's bigger than books.

[117] That actually turns out to be something pretty damn.

[118] Terrify.

[119] That's the right word for that.

[120] And then podcasts, maybe there are YouTube on steroids, they're more invisible, eh?

[121] It's like the podcast market is absolutely huge.

[122] You know, Rogan, from what I've been able to glean from my conversations with him, he gets 150 million downloads a month, right?

[123] So it's 1 .5 billion downloads a year, which I think probably makes him the most powerful interviewer who's ever lived.

[124] He's certainly up in the top two or three.

[125] And so, I don't know even, I don't know how to.

[126] understand quantities like that.

[127] I don't know what that means.

[128] I think it means that more people can listen than can read, which is highly probable, right?

[129] Because reading is a minority taste.

[130] Very few people read seriously and very few people buy books, but maybe five times as many, it's a guess, maybe five times as many people can listen as can read.

[131] And you can listen to a podcast when you're doing other things like driving or doing the dishes or exercising or whatever it might be.

[132] And so not only is the text, technology more accessible and very low cost and with infinite bandwidth, but it seems to have brought the possibility of engaging deeply with ideas to a much, much broader audience.

[133] And so God only knows how much of a revolution that is.

[134] Like, it's enough of a revolution to bring, we had 8 ,500 people in Dublin at our talk on the relationship between facts and values.

[135] It's like, oh, there's a big seller.

[136] It's like, line up for that, folks.

[137] two -and -a -half hours of discussion about the relationship between facts and values.

[138] It's like how the whole audience was basically silent, listening the whole time.

[139] And as far as we could tell, you know, on board and along for the ride.

[140] And, you know, it's like, wow, people are a lot smarter than we thought they were.

[141] You know, I mean, collectively, it looks like we're smarter than we thought we were.

[142] And maybe these new technologies are starting to show us that that's actually the case.

[143] We have longer attention spans than we thought.

[144] We're capable of thinking about deeper things than we imagined something you can't do with TV and maybe you couldn't do with radio either And that people are interested in serious ideas and so I think well part of What's happened?

[145] What's happening here?

[146] Why you're here is in part a consequence of That technological revolution that's bringing the possibility of Long -form complex sophisticated philosophical dialogue to a very very large number of people and there's a market for it.

[147] And I happened, fortunately enough.

[148] I think along with the other, I tried to figure out what might unite those of us in the so -called intellectual dark web to the degree that anything does, because there's a very diverse range of political opinions and personalities within that group.

[149] It's a very strange group.

[150] It's like a herd of cats or something like that.

[151] Not exactly cohesive, but I think that two things, maybe three, constitute the nexus, the union.

[152] One is early adopter of this new technology.

[153] So that's being in the right place at the right time.

[154] The second is independent platform, right?

[155] So none of us are the servants of any particular masters.

[156] Or if we are, we have other independent sources of support, financial and otherwise, that enable us to establish a certain amount of autonomy.

[157] And then I would say the final thing probably is, maybe there's two things.

[158] One is the desire to pursue truth in conversation rather than to merely state what the truths are.

[159] And the final thing might be belief that our audience.

[160] audiences are no stupider than we are, right?

[161] Which is, you know, that's certainly, I've always thought that with regards to the audiences I've talked to, students or otherwise, I always presumed that I could think as hard as I possibly could in real time, and people would follow, follow along, you know, and that's always worked.

[162] So, you know, I'm only always trying to talk about things that matter, because why the hell bother talking about something else?

[163] It's like, so, and so, so, well, so that's kind of how I've made sense of this.

[164] So, I thought what I would do today, I'd be puzzling away on something for a very long time.

[165] And I've got a little farther on it, I would say, in recent months, partly as a consequence of having to speak to Sam Harris for eight hours.

[166] Because Sam is, well, you know, I mean, it's not so bad to put yourself in a situation where you're forced to do something, right?

[167] And necessity can crush you, that's for sure, but it can also bring out the best in you, at least in principle.

[168] And so if you put yourself in a difficult situation, not too difficult, hopefully, then maybe you can rise to meet the challenge.

[169] And, you know, Sam's a pretty articulate defender of the rationalist atheist perspective, and I happen to think that that's an easier position to argue than the position that I've taken, by the way, but that might be my own prejudiced viewpoint.

[170] But it's certainly having to contend with him for eight hours certainly forced me to think through things more deeply than I had thought through them before.

[171] And so that process has continued.

[172] So I'm going to use rule one, mostly tonight, as the basis for this inquiry.

[173] And so rule one is stand up straight with your shoulders back.

[174] And it's an inquiry into, well, I would say two things.

[175] One is the structure of hierarchy, the existence of hierarchy, and then its relationship to the individual and to individual perception and ethical action.

[176] It's something like that.

[177] And it's such a complicated arrangement of topics that when I'm thinking about it often get lost because it spreads out to take in everything and then you can't think about it properly.

[178] You've got to narrow it.

[179] And so the other thing that I'm trying to understand is how the relationship between the hierarchy and the individual structures, human perception.

[180] And that's actually at the core of the argument that I've been having with Sam, because Harris presumes that there's a world of facts and that you can perceive them, and then you can derive the world of values directly from the world of facts.

[181] And I understand why he's doing that.

[182] He wants to do that because he's not, he's sick and tired of moral relativism.

[183] He's got a strong intuition that there's something wrong with moral relativism, and then there definitely is.

[184] The nihilism that it produces, I think, is evidence, at least psychological evidence, for the false, of its position, because I believe that a philosophy that makes people mentally ill is probably wrong.

[185] And so, well, it might not be, you know, because if you believe purely an objective truth, right?

[186] And you might say, well, if you knew the objective truth, it would drive you insane.

[187] It's possible that the universe is constructed so that that's the case.

[188] And, you know, I mean, it's not like there is any shortage of harsh objective truths.

[189] So, you know, Nietzsche said at one point that you could do.

[190] tell the character of a human being by how much truth he or she could tolerate, right?

[191] Which is, well, that's something to think about.

[192] It's a very frightening idea, but, you know, you can understand that.

[193] It's not like most things you learn that are true.

[194] It's like they come along and sock you a good one, you know, it's now and then you're lucky and you learn a truth that's comfortable, but that doesn't happen very often.

[195] So, all right, so what I've been, see, see, I don't believe that the idea that you can get from the world of facts to the world of values.

[196] Without intermediation is true.

[197] I don't think you'd need to have a brain if that was true.

[198] I think the world would just tell you what to do and you'd just do it reflexively and automatically.

[199] But that isn't how it works.

[200] You have to perceive the world.

[201] And I mean, with your senses, and like, you do that real easily.

[202] You just look at the world and bang, there it is.

[203] It seems like it's straightforward.

[204] It is not straightforward.

[205] We don't know how human beings perceive the world.

[206] It seems impossible because there's so many ways that you can perceive the world.

[207] it's not obvious at all how we can settle on the one that we use at any given moment.

[208] You know, like, if you are an artist, think about it this way, so maybe you're an artist, and for whatever reason, maybe you decide to take a photograph of this part of the stage, and then you decide to make a painting of it, and you think, well, that's easy, you painted white and black.

[209] It's like, no, you don't, because it's not white and black.

[210] And, like, I have a friend who's an artist, and he actually painted a picture of a stage like this.

[211] There was a bunch of actors and actresses on it, and it was lit in mullough, Like this stage is lit, you know, and he painted all the shadows and I here, for example, up here I can see probably 20 shadows of me from these lights and every shadow is multiple hues of maybe gray, but it's not even gray, it's complicated colors and kind of an infinite number of complicated colors and every surface around you is so complicated that, well, that you can sum it up by saying, well, it's black and white, but if you paint that that isn't going to work.

[212] It's just going to look like you don't know what you're doing.

[213] And that's because you don't know what you're doing.

[214] That's why.

[215] You know, I think that this is reflected sometimes for people in psychedelic experience, you know, because in psychedelic experience, people get lost in the detail, right?

[216] They lose their ability to see the vague generalities that they normally perceive, and they start to see how complicated things actually are, and they get absolutely lost in it, which is probably why we don't function like that all the time.

[217] It's like, well, you've got to.

[218] simplify the world, man, because if you're entranced by its complexity, you're to wander out in traffic and die, right?

[219] Well, you're not going to be able to focus on the one thing you need to focus on to survive or the two things or the ten things and ignore everything around you that's complex beyond comprehension.

[220] Right, so partly what you're doing when you're perceiving the world is you're filtering it like mad, right?

[221] And you know that.

[222] If you just have to think about it a little bit, you know that.

[223] Like if I look at any person, it's like, well, I can only see the front of you and I can only see you in two dimensions.

[224] And if I replaced you with a cartoon, that would actually work pretty well.

[225] And you know that, because if you watch cartoons on TV, like The Simpsons, that works.

[226] And they're clearly two -dimensional and flat, right?

[227] Highly, highly simplified.

[228] But if you watch a complex story played out by highly simplified cartoon characters, you don't care, right?

[229] It doesn't matter at all.

[230] It's just, you think about South Park.

[231] I mean, the animation could hardly be more primitive, right?

[232] It's basically cut out, but it doesn't matter at all, as long as the story's acceptable, and that's a good indication of how little you need to perceive in order to actually operate functionally in the world, and what you see of the world, when you're perceiving it normally, is something like a cartoon.

[233] It's a low -resolution representation of a very high -resolution background, and maybe, I've always been trying to figure out how it is that you determine how low a resolution you can get away.

[234] with.

[235] And it's something like, you don't want to perceive anything to be more complicated than you need to, in order to use it as a tool, or avoid it as an obstacle.

[236] It's something like that, so there's a functional element to it.

[237] You know, we tend to think we see objects in the world, factual objects, and then we assume what, we think about what they are, and we evaluate them, and then we decide how to act.

[238] And that's actually not how you perceive the world at all.

[239] That is not how your brain is set up.

[240] So you perceive function.

[241] You look at, you look for tools and obstacles.

[242] That's actually what you're what you see in the world.

[243] And so there's some mechanism that you use to simplify the world down to those things that you should focus on and those things that you should ignore.

[244] Now, this is subtle, it's subtle, and it affects things in ways that you can't really, you never really guess.

[245] So let me give you some examples.

[246] I was reading a scientific paper just before this talk on hierarchies.

[247] Because I remembered a graduate student had told me that she was pretty left -leaning my student.

[248] most kind of a social psychologist she was trained by social psychologists and she was kind of communitarian in her ethical orientation so she thought for example that if you set up an organization that if you set it up flat so that everybody had equal status that would be an organization in which people would be happiest and most content but then she went and looked at the literature on hierarchical organization and found that it was exactly the opposite people absolutely hate organizations like that part Partly because they're not organized.

[249] It's like, well, who mediates disputes?

[250] Well, no one, because it's a collective.

[251] So everyone has to mediate every dispute?

[252] Well, that's not going to work very well.

[253] Who decides?

[254] Well, we won't do anything unless everyone agrees.

[255] It's like, God, sometimes, how often have you been with five people trying to decide where you're going to go for lunch?

[256] It's like 20 minutes later, two of you are still in the bathroom, right?

[257] You haven't even got out of the hallway.

[258] So you can't even organize yourself to go for lunch if everyone's got an equal say.

[259] It's just a completely absurd proposition.

[260] It does turn out that people are much happier in hierarchical organizations, but happy isn't the right word.

[261] We function more effectively all things considered in hierarchical organizations, and we actually desire to be in them.

[262] And part of the reason for that is that hierarchical organizations specify what it is that you should be doing, and not only what you should be doing, but what you should be seeing, literally what you should be seeing.

[263] Because you need to know what to look at.

[264] And here are some examples of how much you need to know what to look at.

[265] And also how you figure out what to look at, which is how you figure out what's important, which is what a hierarchy is about.

[266] It's about what's important.

[267] So, here's an interesting little finding.

[268] If you show monkeys pictures of high status monkeys or low status monkeys, they spend more time looking at the high status monkeys.

[269] They're just like celebrities.

[270] It's like People magazine for monkeys.

[271] It's like, really, it's exactly how it works.

[272] They gaze with awe at the high status monkeys.

[273] And then if you test their memory, they remember the high status monkeys and they forget the low status monkeys.

[274] So, and then if you watch how monkeys interact with high and low status conspecifics, creatures of the same species, then a monkey will look at something that a high status monkey is looking at, in preface, to something that a low -status monkey is looking at.

[275] Now that's an interesting thing, eh, because you might think, well, how do you determine what it is that's important, which is maybe what you should focus your gaze on, or what you should focus your AMAT?

[276] And one of the clues to that might be, well, what do people who have a choice decide to focus on?

[277] And then the question there would be, well, who are the people that have a choice, and the answer to that would be, well, people who are higher in the status hierarchy.

[278] And so what you want to do is you want to look at the things that people who are high and status hierarchies look at because that's a clue to what's worth looking at.

[279] Why?

[280] Well, it's a clue because obviously they're looking at the right things or they wouldn't be high status.

[281] And it's also a clue because if they're high status and they're looking at something, then that's an indication that someone of high status values that thing.

[282] And even if the thing isn't intrinsically valuable, the hierarchy is determined that it's valuable and it'd probably be worth your time to pursue that thing.

[283] Because everyone else has decided that it's valuable.

[284] And what What are you going to do?

[285] You're going to pursue a bunch of things that everyone else doesn't think is valuable?

[286] What are you going to trade then?

[287] How are you going to be successful?

[288] And so this is part of the hint about the structure that structures perception.

[289] It's like, and this is how the marketplace in some sense, the marketplace of public opinion, is integrally associated with the structure that enables you to extract value from the facts of the world.

[290] I think they're the same thing.

[291] The hierarchy that we produce socially is the same as the hierarchy.

[292] that we use to perceive the world.

[293] They're integrally associated.

[294] And I think that part of the reason that people dislike having their belief structures disrupted so much, because we really hate having our belief structures disrupted, is because if your belief structure is disrupted, then it disrupts the structure that you use to perceive the world, and it disrupts the concordance between your perception and what everybody else is perceiving.

[295] And that's terribly dangerous, because you don't want to be wandering around in a world where no one else is looking at things, the way you are.

[296] Now, maybe you're a spectacular genius and you're on the cutting edge and all of that, but you're still going to suffer for that, but probably not.

[297] Probably you're just unbelievably alienated or edging towards psychosis.

[298] And even if you're correct and everybody else is wrong, it's not like that's going to be a comfortable place to be.

[299] That's for sure.

[300] And you can tell that by how fast people backtrack online when they're mobbed on Twitter.

[301] They put something forward and say, well, here's what I think, and there's, like, mob, and they go, whoa, no, I don't think that.

[302] Sorry, you know, I've also been fascinated by that, because one of the things I learned as a clinical psychologist is, you know, I often had clients who had been backed into a corner by people who were very malevolent, and we're trying to discredit them in various ways, and various, like, various subtle and intelligent and pernicious ways, right, to undermine them.

[303] And one of the things I noticed was that people were very bad at mounting their own defense.

[304] You know, so I spent two years with one client, someone I worked with in a consulting firm, and she had worked in a consulting firm, and she had moved in from another firm with a big client.

[305] And when she moved into the new firm, someone undermined her with her client and then took it, and then made up a story that she was neurotically insane, partly because she objected to the theft, right?

[306] And this person was very, very effective at doing this, and he was winning the battle.

[307] He was blackening her reputation in a very effective way, and it took like two years to mount a defense for her to get the story straightened back out, even in her own head, right?

[308] Because she wasn't sure what the reality was, because it had got so twisted.

[309] It was then that I realized that partly then how difficult it is to presume innocence instead of guilt, even on your own behalf.

[310] And then I also realized what an absolute bloody miracle it is that we have a legal system where the fundamental presumption is one of innocence.

[311] You think, well, that's self -evidence.

[312] Like, believe me, man, that is not self -evident.

[313] If 10 people go after you and they say you're guilty, you're going to have a hell of a time disagreeing with it.

[314] Now, maybe you're one ornery son of a bitch, and you can tell everybody to screw off, in which case you probably have your own problems.

[315] But, well, because that doesn't come without a cost.

[316] But the idea that you would just automatically rise to your own defense if you were attacked unfairly It's like I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't rely on that presupposition too hard because if you were put to the test You may find that that's not the case at all and that might even be a testament to your fundamentally socialized nature Right because like if if a hundred people come after you and shake their finger and say you're wrong You might be wrong and if you know what I mean it's like a pure psychopath would just say screw you people like I don't care what you think but but you know we're not really admiers of pure psychopaths and and your own your own sociability might doom you under those circumstances so anyways back to the back to the hierarchy idea now so here's something else that's really interesting about gays so not only do we have this interesting finding about the monkeys that look at higher status monkeys more often and look where higher status monkeys look which is unbelievably cool.

[317] It's such a...

[318] This is why I love animal experimentalists and ethologists.

[319] They come up with these weird little findings and you think, well, who cares if monkeys look where high -status monkeys look?

[320] It's like, no, you don't get it.

[321] You're a monkey, right?

[322] And you look where high -status monkeys look.

[323] And that means it's wired into your biology.

[324] And to look, and it bears directly on the question of how we determine what constitutes value.

[325] And it bears directly on the fact that One of the ways that we determine what constitutes value is by coming to a consensus about what's valuable, and then having people mark what's valuable by their gaze.

[326] So here's something else that's cool, particularly about human beings, so we can really see.

[327] We can see better than any other animal except predatory birds.

[328] So, and there's a variety of reasons for that.

[329] One of them seems to be that we evolved extremely high -resolution vision, comparatively speaking, to detect reptilian predators.

[330] That's one of the, it's not the leading theory, but it's one of the leading theories about how that was developed.

[331] So, I think that's extremely cool But here's something else So if you look at human beings eyes, they're very particular and peculiar because we have an iris that's marked out by the white of the sclera Right, so you know, you have a pupil and then you have an iris and then you have the white of your eyes Other animals don't have that.

[332] It's just us.

[333] What's the hypothesis?

[334] everybody, every one of your ancestors who had eyes that other people could not read, either got killed or did not reproduce.

[335] Because one of the things we absolutely want to know about everyone that's around us all the time is what the hell are they doing with their eyes.

[336] And why do we want to know that?

[337] It's like, well, think about it.

[338] When you look at someone, where do you look?

[339] You know, you don't look at their neck, right?

[340] You don't look at their shoulder.

[341] You don't even really look at their face.

[342] You look at their eyes, you look at their eyebrows, and your face is a emotional display unit, right?

[343] It's unbelievably subtle.

[344] You know Your facial musculature is so heavily innervated that you can learn to move one neuron in your face.

[345] That's how high resolution your face is, and so we're looking at faces to find out what people are interested in and we're looking at what people are interested in so we can figure out what the hell they're up to and so that's how we understand that people.

[346] It's so cool.

[347] So the way you understand someone fundamentally is you look at what they're looking at and then you look at it so you're mimicking them with your body, right?

[348] So if I'm looking at what you're looking at, we're sharing gaze, then we put ourselves in the same psychophysiological position.

[349] We're after the same thing and so then our emotions line up.

[350] So imagine that you're playing monopoly with someone, for example.

[351] So you share an aim, right?

[352] Which is to win.

[353] And because you share the aim, then you know what everybody is going to do from a motivational and emotional perspective because you know that if they raise it roll a double six that they're going to be happy and if they land on go to jail that they're going to be unhappy and and so the fact that the goal is shared and the vision is shared and the gaze is shared means the emotions line up and the motivations line up and as soon as the motions emotions and motivations line up then the other people will act like you'll act and then you can understand them and so that's also why we need a common goal you know in our in my country and and increasingly in yours, and you better look the hell out about this.

[354] I can tell you, we've fallen prey in Canada to the doctrine of multiculturalism, which has been the official doctrine in Canada since about 1968.

[355] And it sounds real nice, you know, that everybody can come to Canada and maintain their culture and live in peace and harmony until you realize that people around the world have maintained their culture everywhere, and it's not exactly like they've been living in peace and harmony.

[356] And so why that would transition out of that tribal state of warfare, just, you know, despite its advantages in terms of diversity, merely because you're now living in the frigid tundra of the northern wasteland is beyond me, you know, to the degree that people can bring their cultures to a new culture and live harmoniously, there's a relationship between them, between that ability to live in peace and to adopt a common framework.

[357] right, a common vision, a common purpose, a common set of goals, because that is actually what unites people in peace.

[358] It's the definition of being united in peace.

[359] You know, if you have 20 people in a room and three of them want to play Monopoly and two of them want to play basketball and six of them want to have an orgy and so forth, you're just not going to have a coherent party, right?

[360] This might be exciting, but it's not going to be, it's not going to be coherent.

[361] There has to, and I think the politicians in my country have been so damn naive that they didn't understand that it was the fundamental Unifying structures of English common law among other things that provided the framework within which peace could be had if people brought the diverse beliefs of their various cultures and Subordinated them to that overarching framework.

[362] It's right.

[363] So yes, you can maintain your culture, but you have to act within the boundaries of constitutional belief at minimum and Something like that.

[364] You can't just throw that away and say it's nothing.

[365] It's like it's bloody well, not nothing.

[366] That's for sure.

[367] So you have to get your aim together and to get your aim together is the is the hallmark.

[368] It's the hallmark of peace and the hallmark also of productivity as far as I can tell.

[369] It's something like that.

[370] So okay.

[371] So all right, so that's a that's a bit of a discussion about about the idea of aim.

[372] Now, now I'm going to start from a different position.

[373] So I said, Before this talk that I was standing backstage, trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, and then I talked to you a little bit about the fact that whatever we're doing here is a consequence of this technological revolution.

[374] And I believe that that's the case, but I don't think that's all of it.

[375] It's not all medium, some of its message.

[376] And one of the things that I've been thinking about is that, you know, I'm attempting to mount a defense for classic Western values.

[377] Let's say that, particularly the value of individuality.

[378] There's a core idea there.

[379] The core idea is that I don't care who you are, but I'm going to interact with you as if your individual identity is superordinate to your group identity or to the multiplicity of your group identities.

[380] And that's the proper way of looking at the world.

[381] And what I mean by proper is something like if you don't look at that world that way, you are doing something truly perilous.

[382] And I believe that.

[383] I believe that if you invert that, because I know everyone has a group identity or multiple group identities, we're social creatures, right?

[384] We all fit into different groups, which is one of the problems with claiming that our primary identity is a group identity.

[385] It's right, okay, which group identity?

[386] And even the identity politics types who pursue intersectionality ran across that particular conundrum.

[387] It's like, well, if you have two identities, which one is paramount?

[388] Well, it's the intersection between them.

[389] What if you have ten identities, group identities, which you do, at least, they can be multiplied beyond count in some sense.

[390] If you make group identity paramount, then you degenerate into tribalism, and if you degenerate into tribalism, you degenerate into war.

[391] That's what it looks like to me. And I think the only way out of that, even though it might not be that stable away, because who knows if there is a way out of that, right?

[392] being tribal and warlike, that's us.

[393] You know, chimpanzees go to war, eh?

[394] You know, that was discovered by Jane Goodell in the 1970s.

[395] And that was a major discovery, because up till then, I would say, the more left -leaning anthropologists made the presumption that the reason that human beings were warlike was because we had been warped by our cultures.

[396] You know, we were basically good people.

[397] It's kind of the noble savage idea.

[398] You're basically good when you're born, but as you grow up, you're corrupted by your culture.

[399] One of the consequences of being corrupted by your culture is that maybe you become aggressive and bitter and you turn to warfare, something like that.

[400] It's a view that was grounded in the thinking of Jean -Jacques Rousseau, and that's basically what he believed.

[401] Human beings are basically good, but culture corrupts us.

[402] It's like, no, human beings are basically good and evil, and culture corrupts and ennobles us.

[403] And that's a way different story.

[404] And don't be thinking of romantic thoughts about Mother Nature.

[405] You know, she's got it in for you in the final analysis.

[406] So this is what I always think when I hear environmentalists talk about the planet being better off with people, if people weren't on it, which is not a sentiment I particularly appreciate.

[407] I think, well, if Mother Nature stopped trying to kill us, we'd be a lot more friendly and return to her.

[408] It's not like we're trying, it's not like we're not just trying to mount a reasonable defense.

[409] you know, and I think we deserve a little bit more credit for that than we ever get, you know, like we do pollute our own nest to some degree, but it's not all just casual, it's not all just in the pursuit of leisure, it's like we're trying not to die painfully, and that tends to make a bit of a mess, and maybe we're not as good at, you know, cleaning up the mess as we might be, but we're trying, Christ, it wasn't until the 1960s that we even realized that human beings had enough motive force as a collective group to actually pose something approximating a threat to the ecological stability of the planet.

[410] It's like 58 years ago.

[411] You know, it's just, it's yesterday, right?

[412] That's, that's only two years.

[413] That was like a year before I was born.

[414] It's not even a, it's not even a lifetime ago that that was realized.

[415] We're doing pretty good for people, for creatures that are just waking up to their planetary scale responsibilities.

[416] Anyways, back to, back to, well, obviously that irritates me to a great degree.

[417] Well, I'm sick and tired of people, I'm sick and tired of people being denigrated.

[418] You know, I actually like human beings.

[419] I mean, they're pretty peculiar, like Eric Weinstein, for example.

[420] It's like just, you know, but remarkable creatures, you know, and I think we deserve a little bit of, we deserve to have a little sympathy for ourselves, for Christ's sake, like we've got a burden that's completely unbearable.

[421] We're the only creatures that fully understand our extension in time, or the only creatures that know we're mortal, we're the only creatures that know that suffering is coming in the future.

[422] I can't believe that we're all not just stark, raving, mad, all the time.

[423] You know, well, it was something that just staggered me as a clinical psychologist.

[424] Like, I was never curious about why people were anxious or depressed or why they drank too much.

[425] It's like, yeah, no, you're anxious?

[426] Really?

[427] There's a shock?

[428] It's like, you're depressed.

[429] Well, what happened to you last year?

[430] Oh, well, my mother died of cancer, and I was unemployed, and then my wife left.

[431] And you're depressed.

[432] Really?

[433] If you're not depressed, you have a miserable life.

[434] Right?

[435] Well, that's a distinction you bloody well want to make if you're a clinical psychologist.

[436] It was such a relief to my clients.

[437] They'd come in and they'd tell me this story and I'd just be like, really?

[438] That happened to you?

[439] And you're not dead?

[440] It's like, And well, and I'm a little depressed.

[441] It's like, no, you're not.

[442] You're not.

[443] You have a terrible life, man. It's terrible.

[444] And they'd be so relieved, you know, because they were wandering around thinking, they're wondering around thinking, well, I'm all weak and depressed.

[445] It's like, no, you're not.

[446] You're just tortured to death by God.

[447] It's amazing.

[448] You're still standing.

[449] So that was helpful.

[450] It's like anybody in your situation would be depressed.

[451] And I think that's actually true of most people's lives quite often, you know, because even you talk to fortunate people, you know, they look fortunate from the outside and you talk to them seriously for half an hour about what's happened to them in their lives or maybe what's even going on right now.

[452] It's like tragedy is one degree away from everyone all the time.

[453] So, all right, so back to this idea of aim.

[454] So you look where other people look and your eyes have evolved so that other people can read your eyes.

[455] And so what that means is that we're, it means something like, it means something like, it means something like we're engaged in the collective process of determining what things are valuable.

[456] It's something like that.

[457] Okay, so now, I'm going to think about this from a free market perspective.

[458] So here's a defense of the free market system.

[459] And this is, this is a, I know, God, who would ever guess that you could hear that, right?

[460] Okay.

[461] The reason that we need a free market is because we're stupid.

[462] Right, and so like I read at one point, and I think it was in Alexander Solzhenitsyn that the Central Soviet had to make 150 ,000 pricing decisions, no, it's 3 ,000 pricing decisions a day.

[463] Now, I might have the figure wrong, but I don't have the order of magnitude wrong.

[464] It's like, I don't know how many of you have ever started a small business or any sort of business where you had a product, but if you did, what you'd find is that pricing a product is insanely difficult.

[465] You know, so we built this self -authoring program, for example.

[466] We built this other program, which we never could really sell, that helped people hire better employees.

[467] It turned out they didn't want to hire better employees, so that didn't work.

[468] So, who knew, you know?

[469] And we could never figure out how to price it.

[470] We thought, well, we could price it at $19, and then people could use thousands of them, or we could...

[471] But then it looks cheap and something that everybody could have, or we could price it at $2 ,000 and hardly anyone would get it.

[472] It's like, what's the right price?

[473] Well, what's the right price?

[474] And think, well, what does that question mean?

[475] Well, it means, what is that thing worth in comparison to what every other thing that's worth something is worth?

[476] It's like, oh, huh, that's a hard computational problem.

[477] And then this is part of the reason the Soviet system collapsed.

[478] It's like, what's a nail worth?

[479] Well, you don't know.

[480] Go make one.

[481] See how hard it is.

[482] It's really hard to make a nail.

[483] It's really hard to find the iron ore. Like, it's difficult.

[484] Maybe, who knows what a nail is worth.

[485] It's worth a hell of a lot if it's what stands between you and death.

[486] Like, a nail is worth a lot.

[487] And how do you figure out what it's worth?

[488] Well, it's something like, you let everyone bid on it and you accept the result.

[489] And the reason you do that is because there's all these people and they're pursuing all these things, all these different things, this multitude of things.

[490] And so if you let this free market, which is a, what do you call it?

[491] cognitive system, that's what it is, it's a distributed computational system, that takes all things into account as well as the collective brainpower of the entire mass of human beings that are operating within that framework can manage.

[492] And it does it all simultaneously.

[493] And it makes errors, because we get bubbles, right, price bubbles and so forth, and you get economic collapses.

[494] It's not a perfect mechanism, but it's not a perfect mechanism because it's trying to solve an impossible problem, and it does it pretty damn well.

[495] And so price, monetary price, is a decent indicator of value, but not a perfect one, because we all know that there are things that have value that you can't price.

[496] And that means that pricing isn't a perfect representation of value, but it's not bad, it's good enough so that most of the time we can trade without having to kill each other or steal, and that's really something.

[497] And so, well, that's my defense, part of the defense of the free market is that, well, we're too stupid to calculate the price of things, except by letting everyone vote on the prices all the time.

[498] So then you think, well, some things are worth more than others, right?

[499] So you get a hierarchy And so in the implicit in the process of pricing, which is this universal voting, is the hierarchical organization of things into rank order.

[500] I read today too in this same paper that the part of your brain that processes social status also processes rank ordering, which is extremely interesting.

[501] So, and this is what I'm trying to puzzle out tonight essentially is what's the relationship between social status and social hierarchy and rank order pricing.

[502] Now you think well why would you think there's a relationship, but it's easy.

[503] Rich high status people get the most valuable things, right?

[504] So obviously there's a relationship between social status and value because otherwise rich high status people wouldn't get the most valuable things.

[505] In some sense they're identical, right?

[506] So there's a very tight relationship between social status and value.

[507] Now then the question starts to become, and this is another, so that works out pretty nicely, and there's something that's genuine and valid to be said about that.

[508] So then the question might be, okay, so here's a question.

[509] Would you rather be rich or know how to generate money?

[510] If you had to pick one of those.

[511] Now this is a tough one, now, we didn't experiment a while back, couldn't replicate it very well, but we tried to do.

[512] We tried to test this question with women, because women like high status men, and that's cross -cultural.

[513] So if you look at female mating preferences, women mate across or up social hierarchies, no matter what the culture is, even in egalitarian societies like Scandinavia.

[514] And we thought, well, are women going for wealth, because that's associated with socioeconomic status, or are they going for the ability to generate wealth, which is a way better bet?

[515] And in our initial experiments, we found that women were better at going for the ability to generate wealth, because that was more reliable.

[516] Wealth can be stolen, say.

[517] It's hard to store, but your ability to generate an excess, well, that's sort of a fundamental, that's a fundamental characteristic.

[518] Maybe that's associated with your intelligence, that's what the research data indicates, and it's also associated with your conscientiousness and maybe your trait creativity.

[519] And so it looks like human beings have selected each other quite tightly for intelligence and conscientiousness and trait creativity and that sort of thing.

[520] On the bet that it's a better bet to select for generativity than wealth.

[521] And here's an issue too.

[522] Let's say you had a choice.

[523] You could be born at the 95th percentile in the United States for wealth, or you could be born at the 95th percentile for intelligence.

[524] Would you be better off at 40 if you were born at 95th percentile wealth or 95th percentile intelligence?

[525] And the answer is?

[526] It's intelligence, yeah.

[527] Which I love that.

[528] That's so cool, because it's actually a bit of a validation of the truly merit -based element of the meritocracy.

[529] Because if the reverse was true, well, then you don't have to accept a proposition Is it better if it's intelligent people that rise to the top?

[530] Now that's a real question, because you might say, no, you should just distribute things equally, you know, regardless of cognitive ability.

[531] And you can make a case for that, but then let's say you want to be selfish.

[532] It's like, no, maybe you want to devote more resources to people who are smart enough to figure out things that you would like to have figured out.

[533] Right?

[534] Well, that's also one of the issues about inequality that's actually useful.

[535] It's like, well, do you really want resources to be distributed equally?

[536] Or do you want resources to be distributed unequally if you could determine that the unequal distribution of resources would increase the rate at which things, problems you wanted solved were solved?

[537] And you might think, well, that's pretty damn naive, you know, only a Pollyanna would think that the economic system is set up that way.

[538] And it's like, it is set up that way, not completely, because it's a flawed system, but we know the psychometric studies indicate that the best predictors of long -term success in a Western society are intelligence and trait conscientiousness, which basically means that the best predictors of your long -term success are how smart you are and how hard you work.

[539] And that's a microaggression, by the way, in case any of you are keeping track of them.

[540] And I mean that technically, because in the UC campuses in this country, it is not.

[541] considered a microaggression to make the claim that people get ahead because they work hard.

[542] So, and I'm not, that is no word of lie.

[543] Look it up.

[544] Look it up.

[545] You can thank Daryl Wingsu for that bit of wisdom.

[546] If you're wondering who to blame, and you should wonder, and you should blame.

[547] So, okay, so, it may be better to choose to generate wealth than to choose wealth.

[548] And so then it might be better.

[549] Then you might think that competence is more valuable than material wealth.

[550] Is that a possibility?

[551] We might be able to assume that that's the case.

[552] Okay.

[553] So then this is where things get even more complicated.

[554] See, I've been trying to figure out what it is that a hierarchy, a human hierarchy, is actually based on.

[555] Now, the cynics, that would be the post -modernists and the Marxists, so that's ignorant cynics, by the way, because cynic isn't enough.

[556] You have to add the ignorant in there to get it really right.

[557] And the reason that I say that, and I would also say malevolent and willfully blind and vengeful.

[558] And I'm serious about those things.

[559] I think those are all justifiable claims, willfully blind, because we know where we know Marxism did in the 20th century if we want to keep our eyes open and if we don't then we have to wonder what we're up to Because if you don't keep your eyes open you can't see the point and maybe if you don't keep your eyes open you don't want to see the bloody point And that's for sure that's certainly the case in a situation like the analysis of what happened on the radical left in the 20th century Because that was some bloody nightmare.

[560] That's for sure So that's the willfully blind part the okay, so the basic critique as far as I can tell the basic critique that's emerging out of the universities of our cultural and economic systems is that it's a variant of the old Marxist doctrine that it was the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, right, that the bourgeoisie, they were wealthy, and the only reason they got their wealth is because they took it from people who were poor.

[561] Now, what we should point out is that some people who are wealthy are wealthy because they take money from the poor, right?

[562] But that doesn't mean that all people who are wealthy are wealthy because they take money from the poor.

[563] And there is a big difference between some and all.

[564] And the difference between some and all is the difference between someone who thinks and someone who's an ideologue.

[565] Because what the ideologue says is all.

[566] And if they say, oh, you better look out because you have more than some other person has.

[567] And if it's the case that wealth is theft, then to the degree that you have more than someone else, you're an oppressor.

[568] And if you think that isn't dangerous, then you don't know very much about what happened in places like the Soviet Union.

[569] Because really what happened as the Russian Revolution progressed was that was exactly how it turned out.

[570] Because of your multiple group identities, I can find one dimension along which you're clearly bourgeois.

[571] And if you're bourgeois along one dimension and not along nine others, it doesn't matter.

[572] Because even if you're a little bit bourgeois, that's enough to pack you off to the camps.

[573] And so, okay, so we're, now back, back to the, back to the wealth issue.

[574] So, some people who generate wealth do it as a consequence of the pathology of the hierarchical system.

[575] But many people don't.

[576] So what are the other pathways to wealth?

[577] Well, intelligence, conscientiousness, and so intelligence would be the ability to solve complex problems.

[578] I think, well, why do we want complex problems solved?

[579] And that's where you get down to the bedrock of things.

[580] I think, well, and this is justification for hierarchies.

[581] It's like, well, do we have problems?

[582] An answer to that seems to be yes, right?

[583] Because everyone has problems, and you can tell that you have problems because you're too damn anxious and you're in too much pain and there's too much suffering in your family and you're not as content as you could be and maybe even if you're doing okay, well, you can see that kind of level of misery around you.

[584] And that's a standard existential fact, that's a fact of reality, the existence of suffering.

[585] And maybe the other reason, the other evidence that we have problems is that there's also plenty of evidence for malevolence.

[586] People misbehave badly and they make a bad situation worse than it has to be.

[587] And so there's no shortage of suffering and malevolence.

[588] So that means we actually have real problems.

[589] And the reason I'm making this case, it's a very specific reason.

[590] One of the pathologies of the postmodern doctrine, all protestations to the contrary, is that there's no real world out there.

[591] There's just social construction, right, that everything we see is just a social construction, and arbitrary in some sense.

[592] And, you know, it's a powerful argument, because a lot of what we do is arbitrary.

[593] You know, it's like you're a plumber, and you're a lawyer, and you're a physician, and you like to play monopoly, and you like to play risk.

[594] It's like all those things are arbitrary, you know?

[595] a plumber instead of a lawyer.

[596] There's lots of ways to go through life.

[597] That's partly what makes the moral relativism argument relatively powerful, is there are lots of ways of being that seem to be valid.

[598] But that doesn't mean that there's no reality.

[599] It doesn't mean that we just can vote on and conjure up any reality we want.

[600] There's something solid underneath that that you have to contend with.

[601] Well, I would think, well, what are the solid things?

[602] How about death?

[603] that's one.

[604] How about suffering?

[605] That's another.

[606] Malvelance.

[607] That's another.

[608] Those things...

[609] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 28 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[610] I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator.

[611] This is a podcast from Westbury, New York, recorded on September 6th, 2018.

[612] We're going to get back to interviews as quickly as possible.

[613] We're still having some health trickiness.

[614] I'm currently in New York visiting my dad who has checked himself into rehab to get off of a prescribed anti -anxiety drug that he started taking when mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

[615] Turns out it's very difficult to get off of without having physical withdrawal.

[616] If this recording doesn't sound ideal, it's because I'm in New York visiting my dad.

[617] So interviews at the moment for the podcast are kind of out of the question.

[618] We should be back at it in a couple of months.

[619] If you want to hear how my mom is doing and how my dad is doing, please go to my YouTube page or type in Peterson Family Update September 2019 into YouTube.

[620] I go into why he's in rehab, how mom is doing.

[621] Don't worry, everything's fine, but there's more information on YouTube in that video.

[622] We're okay.

[623] We just need a bit of time to get back on our feet.

[624] after all the stress that we had to deal with following mom's diagnosis.

[625] I've named this podcast, Risk Being a Fool, a 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[626] Well, this is a nice, friendly place.

[627] It's sort of like the anti -Twitter, I would say.

[628] Yeah, so, well, thank you very much for the kind welcome.

[629] It's much appreciated.

[630] It's surreal to be here.

[631] Well, it's surreal to be doing all of this.

[632] It's surreal to have Dave Rubin introduce Eric Weinstein, the mathematicians, so we can come out here and sing Ador's song to you and then play the harmonica.

[633] I don't know what universe that makes sense in, but apparently it's this one.

[634] So I don't know what to make of that, except it's very amusing, and it's very good that things can be musing from time to time.

[635] It's nice to have Dave along to add some levity to the situation.

[636] in the Q &A as well because I think that no matter how serious the topics that you're talking about if you can't maintain a sense of humor about it then something has gone seriously wrong right and I think something's gone seriously wrong I suppose to the degree that we are increasingly unable to tolerate comedians and won't come to you speak at campuses for example and it's not really a very good thing even mainstream comedians like Jerry Seinfeld so okay so I use these opportunities privileges because it's a privilege to come here and speak to all of you to further my thinking about whatever it is that I happen to be thinking about and you know Dave was talking about ideas and there's two things that are sort of relevant when you're talking about ideas one is I think the ideas that you bring forward but the other is the engagement in the process of generating ideas and that's actually more important and I really think that that's what you need to do if you're speaking with people I mean you do that in a conversation you don't want to just trot out the same old things you've been thinking about for the last 10 years you know there's something stale and dead about that you want to be pushing the envelope with what you think and that's a good hint if you want to speak publicly or if you want to speak in a manner that's interesting is you have to take a bit of a risk, you know.

[637] Otherwise, you fall back on your notes and then you're like your own tape recorder or it gets even worse.

[638] You might become your own parody, you know, because you keep imitating your past successes or your past lack of failure, which is even a worse thing to imitate.

[639] It's better to take a risk.

[640] And then that's kind of exciting because, well, it's exciting to be the speaker because you don't know what the hell's going to happen because I never know.

[641] Backstage, I don't even really know what I'm going to talk about when I come out.

[642] Like, you know, I sit back in the dressing room for 45 minutes and I think about what it is that I'm thinking about and I have some sense of the direction that I want to go in, but I don't know exactly how it's going to go when I come out on stage, and so that gives me some rather anxiety -provoking moments.

[643] I usually have at least one small panic attack before I come on stage.

[644] They don't last that long, but they're there, But I don't think you can do anything worthwhile without risk, and I can bloody well tell you that you can't think without risk.

[645] That's for sure, because if you're thinking without risk, then you're not thinking about anything important.

[646] And if you're not thinking about anything important, well, the first issue is, well, why they hell bother then?

[647] Why bother thinking?

[648] And second, you're not thinking if you're not thinking about something important.

[649] And if it's going to be important, it's going to be contentious.

[650] And, you know, that's part of the reason why free speech is so important, because you have to be able to stumble around blindly like an idiot while you're trying to figure out difficult things because otherwise you'll never get a chance to figure them out because you're not going to bloody well get it right the first time, that's for sure.

[651] And so there's a lot of idiocy on the way to wisdom, and you have to understand that if you're going to allow your society to proceed with any degree of certainty.

[652] You have to flail about, you know.

[653] I was writing the other day, I've been writing the second volume, I suppose, of 12 Rules for Life, which is provisionally called, 12 more rules for life.

[654] Just took a long time to come up with that one, I'll tell you.

[655] And in the first chapter, I have an image at the beginning of each chapter, and the image that I chose, the first image I chose was a yin -yang symbol, but I dispensed with that.

[656] The second image I chose was the full card from the taro.

[657] It's a really interesting card, and it shows this kind of prince looking like guy, a young guy, he's looking up in the clouds and he's got a little dog with him, sun's shining behind him and he's about to step off a cliff.

[658] And it's a very, and it's the fool.

[659] It's a very paradoxical image because he's a good looking kid and he looks like he knows what he's doing and the day is bright and so that that signifies consciousness and yet he's willing to step off the cliff and so he's the fool and the fool is a complicated image.

[660] You know, the fool is the court jester who tells the truth, even to the king, because he's beneath contempt.

[661] So sometimes the jester is the only person that can tell the truth because he's beneath contempt.

[662] And that's actually the role that comedians play, is they can say what everyone else is thinking.

[663] And that's why we laugh, you know, because a good comedian says something that you think, but you'd never say.

[664] And the comedian says that, yeah, we all think that.

[665] And so, and if you can tolerate that, well, then you have a reasonably free society, right?

[666] if you can tolerate people who poke at you, especially if you have a position of power.

[667] And so, Carl Jung regarded the fool as the precursor to the Savior.

[668] It was a really strange idea, right?

[669] One of his paradoxical ideas, and the reason is, is that you can't advance unless you're willing to make a fool of yourself.

[670] Because in order to advance, you have to transform yourself into a beginner, right?

[671] Because you have to do something new in order to advance, and if it's new, then you're not good at it.

[672] And if you're not good at it, then you have to do it badly.

[673] And if you're going to do it badly, well, then you're going to be a bit of a fool.

[674] But if you're not willing to do things badly and be a bit of a fool, then you don't get any better.

[675] And so unless you're willing to be a fool, then you can't be redeemed.

[676] So that's a good thing to know whenever you're thinking about how foolish you're going to look when you try something new.

[677] It's like, well, you want to try something new because what there is of you right now isn't enough unless your life is perfect.

[678] and that's very unlikely unless the life of people around you that you love is perfect you're not everything you could be and maybe you're not everything you should be and so you have to be something new and if you're going to be something new then you have to risk being a fool and then maybe that'll move you to the next stage and so that's that perverse meeting of opposites you know so so I'm willing to come out on stage and risk being a fool I suppose because at least to some degree in principle that's the path way to wisdom.

[679] It's better to come out and see if you can discover some new truths rather than just reiterate truths you think you already know.

[680] I don't know if ever, if you're reiterating truth that you already know, I don't ever know if that's actually true.

[681] You know what I mean, because the state, whatever truth is, is very difficult to get your hand handles on it, or your hands on.

[682] It's not like, it's not like you can just write down the truth in a list and have the list be permanent.

[683] There's something alive about it and vital.

[684] And so it has, it has to be delivered in a, I don't know what it is, it has to be delivered in a new fashion.

[685] I think it's something akin to writing the line between chaos and order, which is why I used the yin and yang symbol as well in that chapter.

[686] That was the first image, you know, because if you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing, then you kind of have one foot where you're secure and you know what you're doing, and you have the other foot where you don't know what you're doing, and that's pushing you to develop.

[687] And there's something about that that embodies the truth, even though it's not a final truth.

[688] It's more like a truth of process and I think the deepest truth is actually a truth of process like it's the truth that you engage in when you sit down with someone that you love and you have a difficult discussion about something important when you're actually trying to solve a problem so that you could make things better you know now you have now and then you have a discussion like that those aren't easy discussions generally because well first of all you have to admit that you have a problem and then you have to formulate the problem then you have to agree on the problem then you have to both actually want to work towards a solution even if you're at odds with one another right and I've seen this I mean this is where many marriages fail unfortunately because people aren't able to sit down and say what they think and risk the terrible conflict that goes along with actually saying who it is that you are and what you want but but that's where you find the truth by doing that and then maybe you can stay where that is and that's where you should be and maybe that's what keeps you going through life and keeps everyone going.

[689] It's something like that.

[690] Now, I was thinking backstage, I was thinking, what the hell am I doing?

[691] I've been wondering that a lot, you know, I'll tell you.

[692] I've been wondering that an awful lot, because I can't really figure it out.

[693] I can't figure out, well, there's many, many things I can't figure out.

[694] But I can't figure out, for example, exactly why the book I wrote has become so popular, and I can't figure out why so many people are coming out to listen to me speak.

[695] Like, I think part of it, you know, I've been trying to take this part very careful, to get it right, and I think part of it is a mere consequence of technology.

[696] Not that there's anything mirror about that, because technology is an unbelievably, I mean, it doesn't need to be said, it's an unbelievably powerful force, and it's not like we've exactly got it mastered.

[697] We've developed all these new technologies in the last five years, thereabouts, and we have no idea how they work, or what they're doing, or what their implications are.

[698] You know, we launched these things on us like we're laboratory guinea pigs, or laboratory rats, and we try these massive, large -scale social experiments.

[699] We have no idea where they're heading, you know.

[700] We have Twitter and Facebook and Google and, well, on YouTube and podcasts.

[701] I mean, YouTube itself is an absolutely staggering revolution, you know, and it took me a long time to realize that.

[702] It took about three years of playing with YouTube before I figured out that there was something absolutely fundamental shifted as a consequence of it, and eventually figured it out.

[703] It was that YouTube allows the spoken word to have the same reach and permanence as the written word, but cheaper access, faster publication, and a wider audience.

[704] It's like, oh, I see, it's like, it's bigger than books.

[705] That actually turns out to be something pretty damn terrified.

[706] That's the right word for that.

[707] And then podcasts, maybe there are YouTube on steroids.

[708] They're more invisible, eh?

[709] It's like the podcast market is absolutely huge.

[710] You know, Rogan, from what I've been able to glean from my conversations with him, he gets 150 million downloads a month, right?

[711] So it's 1 .5 billion downloads a year, which I think probably makes him the most powerful interviewer who's ever lived.

[712] He's certainly up in the top two or three.

[713] And so, I don't know even, I don't know how to understand quantities like that.

[714] I don't know what that means.

[715] I think it means that more people can listen than can read.

[716] So, which is highly probable, right, because reading is a minority taste.

[717] Very few people read seriously and very few people buy books, but maybe five times as many, it's a guess, maybe five times as many people can listen as can read.

[718] And you can listen to a podcast when you're doing other things like driving or doing the dishes or exercising or whatever it might be.

[719] And so not only is the technology more accessible and very low cost and with infinite bandwidth, but it seems to have brought the possibility of engaging deeply with ideas to a much, much broader audience.

[720] And so God only knows how much of a revolution that is.

[721] Like, it's enough of a revolution to bring...

[722] We had 8 ,500 people in Dublin at our talk on the relationship between facts and values.

[723] It's like, oh, there's a big seller.

[724] It's like, line up for that, folks.

[725] Two and a half hours of discussion about the relationship between facts and values.

[726] It's like how the whole audience was basically silent listening the whole time.

[727] And as far as we could tell, you know, on board and along for the ride.

[728] And, you know, it's like, wow, people are a lot smarter than we thought they were.

[729] You know, I mean, collectively, it looks like we're smarter than we thought we were.

[730] And maybe these new technologies are starting to show us that that's actually the case.

[731] We have longer attention spans than we thought.

[732] We're capable of thinking about deeper things than we imagined something you can't do with TV, and maybe you couldn't do with radio either.

[733] And that people are interested in serious ideas.

[734] And so I think, well, part of what's happening here, why you're here is in part a consequence of that technological revolution that's bringing the possibility of long -form, complex, sophisticated philosophical dialogue to a very, very large number of people.

[735] And there's a market for it.

[736] And I happened, fortunately enough, I think along with the other, I tried to figure out what might unite those of us in the so -called intellectual dark web to the degree that anything does, because there's a very diverse range of political opinions and personalities within that group.

[737] It's a very strange group.

[738] It's like a herd of cats or something like that.

[739] Not exactly cohesive, but I think that two things, maybe three, constitute the nexus, the union.

[740] One is early adopter of this new technology.

[741] So that's being in the right place at the right time.

[742] The second is independent platform, right?

[743] So none of us are the servants of any particular masters.

[744] Or if we are, we have other independent sources of support, financial and otherwise, that enable us to establish a certain amount of autonomy.

[745] me. And then I would say the final thing probably is, maybe there's two things.

[746] One is the desire to pursue truth in conversation rather than to merely state what the truths are.

[747] And the final thing might be belief that our audiences are no stupider than we are, right?

[748] Which is, and that's certainly, I've always thought that with regards to the audiences I've talked to, students or otherwise, I always presumed that I could think as hard as I possibly could in real time.

[749] And, you know, that's certainly, I've always thought that.

[750] And, you know, I've talked to, students or otherwise, I always presumed that I could.

[751] And, people would follow, follow along, you know, and that's always worked.

[752] So, you know, I'm only always trying to talk about things that matter, because why the hell bother talking about something else?

[753] It's like, so, and so, well, so that's kind of how I've made sense of this.

[754] So I thought what I would do today, I've been puzzling away on something for a very long time.

[755] And I've got a little farther on it, I would say, in recent months, partly as a consequence of having to, having to, speak to Sam Harris for eight hours.

[756] Because Sam is, well, you know, I mean, it's not so bad to put yourself in a situation where you're forced to do something, right?

[757] The necessity can crush you, that's for sure, but it can also bring out the best in you, at least in principle.

[758] And so if you put yourself in a difficult situation, not too difficult, hopefully, then maybe you can rise to meet the challenge.

[759] And, you know, Sam's a pretty articulate defender of the rationalist atheist perspective.

[760] And, I happen to think that that's an easier position to argue than the position that I've taken, by the way, but that might be my own prejudiced viewpoint.

[761] But it's certainly having to contend with him for eight hours, certainly forced me to think through things more deeply than I had thought through them before.

[762] And so that process has continued.

[763] So I'm going to use Rule 1, mostly, tonight, as the basis for this inquiry.

[764] And so Rule 1 is stand up straight with your shoulders.

[765] back and it's a it's an inquiry into while I would say two things one is this the structure of hierarchy the existence of hierarchy and then its relationship to individual into the individual into individual perception and ethical action it's something like that and it's such a complicated that's such a complicated arrangement of topics that when I'm thinking about it often get lost because it spreads out to take in everything and then you can't think about it properly you got to narrow it and so the other thing that I'm trying to understand is how the relationship between the hierarchy and the individual structures human perception and that that's actually at the core of the argument that I've been having with Sam because Harris presumes that there's a world of facts and that you can perceive them and then you can derive the world of values directly from the world of facts and I understand why he's doing that he wants to do that because he's not he's sick and tired of moral relatives He's got a strong intuition that there's something wrong with moral relativism and then there definitely is The nihilism that it produces, I think is evidence at least psychological evidence for the falsity of its Position because I believe that a philosophy that makes people mentally ill is probably wrong and so well it might not be you know because if if you believe purely an objective truth, right and and you might say well if you knew the objective truth.

[766] It would drive you insane.

[767] It's possible that the universe is construction so that that's the case.

[768] And, you know, I mean, it's not like there is any shortage of harsh, objective truths.

[769] So, you know, Nietzsche said at one point that you could tell the character of a human being by how much truth he or she could tolerate, right, which is, well, that's something to think about.

[770] It's a very frightening idea, but, you know, you can understand that.

[771] It's not like most things you learn that are true.

[772] It's like they come along and sock you a good one, you know.

[773] Now and then you're lucky and you learn a truth that's comfortable, but that doesn't happen very often.

[774] often.

[775] So, all right.

[776] So, what I've been, see, see, I don't believe that the idea that you can get from the world of facts to the world of values without intermediation is true.

[777] I don't think you'd need to have a brain if that was true.

[778] I think the world would just tell you what to do and you just do it reflexively and automatically.

[779] But that isn't how it works.

[780] You have to perceive the world.

[781] And I mean, with your senses.

[782] And like, you do that real easily.

[783] You just look at the world and bang, there it is.

[784] It seems like, it seems like.

[785] It's straightforward.

[786] It is not straightforward.

[787] We don't know how human beings perceive the world.

[788] It seems impossible because there's so many ways that you can perceive the world.

[789] It's not obvious at all how we can settle on the one that we use at any given moment.

[790] You know, like if you are an artist, think about it this way, so maybe you're an artist, and for whatever reason, maybe you decide to take a photograph of this part of the stage, and then you decide to make a painting of it.

[791] You think, well, that's easy.

[792] You painted white and black.

[793] It's like, no, you don't, because it's not white and black.

[794] And, like, I have a friend who's an artist, and he actually painted a picture of a stage like this.

[795] There was a bunch of actors and actresses on it, and it was lit in multiple ways.

[796] Like, this stage is lit, you know?

[797] And he painted all the shadows.

[798] And I, here, for example, up here I can see probably 20 shadows of me from these lights.

[799] And every shadow is multiple hues of maybe gray, but it's not even gray.

[800] It's complicated colors and kind of an infinite number of complicated colors.

[801] And every surface around you is so complicated that, well, that you can sum it up by saying, well, it's black and white.

[802] But if you paint that, that isn't going to work.

[803] It's just going to look like you don't know what you're doing.

[804] And that's because you don't know what you're doing.

[805] That's why.

[806] You know, I think that this is reflected sometimes for people in psychedelic experience, you know, because in psychedelic experience, people get lost in the detail, right?

[807] They lose their ability to see the vague generalities that they normally perceive, and they start to see how complicated things actually are, and they get absolutely lost in it, which is probably why we don't function like that all the time.

[808] It's like, well, you've got to simplify the world, man, because if you're entranced by its complexity, you're going to wander out in traffic and die.

[809] Well, you're not going to be able to focus on the one thing you need to focus on to survive or the two things or the ten things and ignore everything around you that's complex beyond comprehension.

[810] So partly what you're doing when you're perceiving the world is you're filtering it like mad, right?

[811] And you know that.

[812] You just have to think about it a little bit.

[813] You know that.

[814] Like, if I look at any person, it's like, well, I can only see the front of you, and I can only see you in two dimensions.

[815] And if I replaced you with a cartoon, that would actually work pretty well.

[816] And you know that, because if you watch cartoons on TV, like The Simpsons, that works.

[817] And they're clearly two -dimensional and flat, right?

[818] Highly, highly simplified.

[819] But if you watch a complex story played out by highly simplified, cartoon characters, you don't care, right?

[820] It doesn't matter at all.

[821] It's just, you think about South Park.

[822] I mean, the animation could hardly be more primitive, right?

[823] It's basically cut out, but it doesn't matter at all as long as the story's acceptable, and that's a good indication of how little you need to perceive in order to actually operate functionally in the world.

[824] And what you see of the world, when you're perceiving it normally, is something like a cartoon.

[825] It's a low -resolution representation of a very high -resolution, And maybe, I've always been trying to figure out what, how it is that you determine how low a resolution you can get away with, and it's something like, you don't want to perceive anything to be more complicated than you need to, in order to use it as a tool or avoid it as an obstacle.

[826] It's something like that, so there's a functional element to it.

[827] You know, we tend to think we see objects in the world, factual objects, and then we assume what, we think about what they are, and we evaluate them, and then we decide how to act.

[828] And that's actually not how you perceive the world at all.

[829] That is not how your brain is set up So you perceive function.

[830] You look at you look for tools and obstacles.

[831] That's actually what you see in the world And so there's some mechanism that you use to simplify the world down to those things that you should focus on and those things that you should ignore Now, this is subtle, it's subtle and it's and it affects things in ways that you can't really, you'd never really guess.

[832] So let me give you some examples I was reading a scientific paper just before this talk on hierarchies.

[833] Because I remembered a graduate student had told me that she was pretty left -leaning my student, most kind of a social psychologist, she was trained by social psychologists, and she was kind of communitarian in her ethical orientation.

[834] So she thought, for example, that if you set up an organization, that if you set it up flat so that everybody had equal status, that would be an organization in which people would be happiest and most content.

[835] But then she went and looked at the literature on hierarchical organization and found that it was exactly the opposite People absolutely hate organizations like that partly because they're not organized It's like well Who do you who mediates disputes?

[836] Well, no one because it's a collective.

[837] So everyone has to mediate every dispute?

[838] Well, that's not going to work very well Who decides?

[839] Well, we won't do anything unless everyone agrees It's like God some to how often have you been with five people?

[840] trying to decide where you're going to go for lunch.

[841] It's like 20 minutes later, two of you are still in the bathroom, right?

[842] You haven't even got out of the hallway.

[843] So you can't even organize yourself to go for lunch if everyone's got an equal say.

[844] It's just in a completely absurd proposition.

[845] It does turn out that people are much happier in hierarchical organizations, but happy isn't the right word.

[846] We function more effectively all things considered in hierarchical organizations.

[847] And we actually desire to be in them.

[848] And part of the reason for that is that hierarchical organizations specify what it is that you should be doing and not only what you should be doing, but what you should be seeing Literally what you should be seeing because you need to know what to look at.

[849] And here's some examples of how much you need to know What to look at and also how you figure out what to look at which is how you figure out what's important Which is what a hierarchy is about.

[850] It's about what's important So here's an interesting little finding If you show monkeys pictures of high -status monkeys or low -status monkeys, they spend more time looking at the high -status monkeys They're just like celebrities.

[851] It's like people magazine for monkeys.

[852] It's like Really, it's exactly how it works.

[853] They gaze with awe at the high -status monkeys and then if you test their memory They remember the high -status monkeys and they forget the low -status monkeys So and then if you watch how monkeys interact with high and low -status conspecifics, creatures of the same species, then a monkey will look at something that a high -status monkey is looking at in preference to something that a low -status monkey is looking at.

[854] Now that's an interesting thing, eh, because you might think, well, how do you determine what it is that's important, which is maybe what you should focus your gaze on, or what you should focus your aim at?

[855] And one of the clues to that might be, well, what do people who have a choice decide to focus on?

[856] And then the question there would be, well, who are the people that have a choice?

[857] And the answer to that would be, well, people who are higher in the status hierarchy.

[858] And so what you want to do is you want to look at the things that people who are high in status hierarchies look at, because that's a clue to what's worth looking at.

[859] Why?

[860] Well, it's a clue because obviously they're looking at the right things, or they wouldn't be high status.

[861] And it's also a clue because if they're high status and they're looking at something, then that's an indication that someone of high status values that thing.

[862] And even if the thing isn't intrinsically valuable, the hierarchy is determined that it's valuable and it'd probably be worth your time to pursue that thing Because everyone else has decided that it's valuable and what are you going to do?

[863] You're going to pursue a bunch of things that everyone else doesn't think is valuable?

[864] What are you going to trade then?

[865] How are you going to be successful?

[866] And so this is part of the hint about the structure that structures perception.

[867] It's like And then this is how the marketplace in some sense the marketplace of public opinion is integrally associated with the structure that enables you to extract value from the facts of the world.

[868] I think they're the same thing.

[869] The hierarchy that we produce socially is the same as the hierarchy that we use to perceive the world.

[870] They're integrally associated.

[871] And I think that part of the reason that people dislike having their belief structures disrupted so much, because we really hate having our belief structures disrupted, is because if your belief structure is disrupted, then it disrupts the structure that you use to perceive the world, and it disrupts the concordance between your perception and what everybody else is perceiving.

[872] And that's terribly dangerous, because you don't want to be wandering around in a world where no one else is looking at things the way you are.

[873] Right?

[874] Now, maybe you're a spectacular genius, and you're on the cutting edge and all of that, but you're still going to suffer for that, but probably not.

[875] Probably you're just unbelievably alienated or edging towards psychosis.

[876] And even, and even if you're Even if you're correct and everybody else is wrong, it's not like that's going to be a comfortable place to be.

[877] That's for sure.

[878] And you can tell that by how fast people backtrack online when they're mobbed on Twitter.

[879] They put something forward and say, well, here's what I think, and there's like mob, and they go, whoa, no, I don't think that.

[880] Sorry.

[881] I've also been fascinated by that because one of the things I learned as a clinical psychologist is, you know, I often had clients who had been backed into a corner by people who were very malevolent and were trying to discredit them in various ways, and various subtle and intelligent and pernicious ways, right, to undermine them.

[882] And one of the things I noticed was that people were very bad at mounting their own defense.

[883] You know, so I spent two years with one client, someone I worked with in a consulting firm, and she had, she worked in a consulting firm, and she had moved in from another first.

[884] firm with a big client and when she moved into the new firm someone undermined her with her client and then took it and then made up a story that she was neurotically insane partly because she objected to the theft right and this person was very very effective at doing this and he and he was winning the battle he was he was blackening her reputation in a very effective way and it took like two years to mount a defense for her to get the story straightened back out even in her own head right because she wasn't sure what the reality was, because it had got so twisted.

[885] It was then that I realized that partly then how difficult it is to presume innocence instead of guilt, even on your own behalf.

[886] And then I also realized what an absolute bloody miracle it is, that we have a legal system where the fundamental presumption is one of innocence.

[887] You think, well, that's self -evidence.

[888] Like, believe me, man, that is not self -evident.

[889] If 10 people go after you and they say you're guilty, you're going to have a hell of a time disagreeing with it.

[890] Now, maybe you're one ornery son of a bitch, and you can tell everybody to screw off, in which case you probably have your own problems.

[891] Well, because that doesn't come without a cost, but the idea that you would just automatically rise to your own defense if you were attacked unfairly, it's like I wouldn't rely on that presupposition too hard, because if you were put to the test, you may find that that's not the case at all.

[892] And that might even be a testament to your fundamental socialized nature, right?

[893] Because like if a hundred people come after you and shake their finger and say you're wrong You might be wrong and if you know, you know what I mean?

[894] It's like a pure psychopath would just say screw you people like I don't care what you think But but you know we're not really admiers of pure psychopaths and and your own your own sociability might doom you under those circumstances So anyways back to the back to the hierarchy idea now so here's something else that's really interesting about gays.

[895] So, not only do we have this interesting finding about the monkeys, who look at higher status monkeys more often, and look where higher status monkeys look, which is unbelievably cool.

[896] It's such a...

[897] This is why I love animal experimentalists and ethologists.

[898] They come up with these weird little findings, and you think, well, who cares if monkeys look where high status monkeys look?

[899] It's like, no, you don't get it.

[900] You're a monkey, right?

[901] And you look where high status monkeys look, and that means it's wired into your biology and to look, and it bears directly on the question of how we determine what constitutes value.

[902] And it bears directly on the fact that one of the ways that we determine what constitutes value is by coming to a consensus about what's valuable and then having people mark what's valuable by their gaze.

[903] So here's something else that's cool, particularly about human beings.

[904] So we can really see, we can see better than any other animal except predatory birds.

[905] So, and there's a variety of reasons for that.

[906] One of them seems to be that we evolved extremely high -resolution vision, comparatively speaking, to detect reptilian predators.

[907] That's one of the, it's not the leading theory, but it's one of the leading theories about how that was developed.

[908] So I think that's extremely cool.

[909] But here's something else.

[910] So if you look at human beings' eyes, they're very particular and peculiar, because we have an iris that's marked out by the white of the skull.

[911] So, you know, you have a pupil, and then you have an iris, and then you have the white of your eyes.

[912] Other animals don't have that.

[913] It's just us.

[914] What's the hypothesis?

[915] Everybody, every one of your ancestors who had eyes that other people could not read, either got killed or did not reproduce.

[916] Because one of the things we absolutely want to know about everyone that's around us all the time is what the hell are they doing with their eyes.

[917] And why do we want to know that?

[918] It's like, well, think about it, when you look at someone, where do you look?

[919] You know, you don't look at their neck, right?

[920] You don't look at their shoulder.

[921] You don't even really look at their face.

[922] You look at their eyes.

[923] You look at their eyebrows, and your face is an emotional display unit, right?

[924] It's unbelievably subtle.

[925] You know, your facial musculature is so heavily innervated that you can learn to move one neuron in your face.

[926] That's how high resolution your face is.

[927] We're looking at faces to find out what people are interested in and we're looking at what people are interested in so we can figure out what the hell they're up to.

[928] And so that's how we understand people.

[929] It's so cool.

[930] So the way you understand someone fundamentally is you look at what they're looking at and then you look at it so you're mimicking them with your body, right?

[931] So if I'm looking at what you're looking at, if we're sharing gaze, then we put ourselves in the same psychophysiological position.

[932] We're after the same thing And so then our emotions line up So imagine that you're playing monopoly with someone For example So you share an aim right Which is to win And because you share the aim Then you know what everybody is going to do From a motivational and emotional perspective Because you know that if they raise it Roll a double six that they're going to be happy And if they land on go to jail That they're going to be unhappy And so the fact that the goal is shared And the vision is shared And the gaze is shared Means the emotions line up And the motivations line up And as soon as the emotions, emotions and motivations line up, then the other people will act like you'll act, and then you can understand them.

[933] And so that's also why we need a common goal.

[934] You know, in my country, in Canada, and increasingly in years, and you better look the hell out about this, I can tell you, we've fallen prey in Canada to the doctrine of multiculturalism, right, which has been the official doctrine in Canada since about 1968.

[935] And it sounds real nice, you know, that everybody can come to Canada and maintain their culture and live.

[936] live in peace and harmony, until you realize that people around the world have maintained their culture everywhere, and it's not exactly like they've been living in peace and harmony.

[937] And so why that would transition out of that tribal state of warfare, despite its advantages in terms of diversity, merely because you're now living in the frigid tundra of the northern wasteland is beyond me, you know, to the degree that people can bring their cultures to a new culture and live harmoniously.

[938] There's a relationship between them, between that ability to live in peace and to adopt a common framework, right, a common vision, a common purpose, a common set of goals, because that is actually what unites people in peace.

[939] It's the definition of being united in peace.

[940] You know, if you have 20 people in a room and three of them want to play Monopoly and two of them want to play basketball and six of them want to have an orgy and so forth, you're just not going to have a coherent party, right?

[941] This might be exciting, but it's not going to be, it's not going to be coherent.

[942] There has to, and I think the politicians in my country have been so damn naive that they didn't understand that it was the fundamental unifying structures of English common law, among other things, that provided the framework within.

[943] which peace could be had if people brought the diverse beliefs of their various cultures and subordinated them to that overarching framework.

[944] It's right.

[945] So yes, you can maintain your culture, but you have to act within the boundaries of constitutional belief at minimum, something like that.

[946] You can't just throw that away and say it's nothing.

[947] It's like it's bloody well, not nothing.

[948] That's for sure.

[949] So you have to get your aim together and to get your aim together is the hallmark, it's the hallmark of peace and Hallmark also of productivity, as far as I can tell.

[950] It's something like that.

[951] So, okay, so, all right, so that's a bit of a discussion about the idea of aim.

[952] Now, I'm going to start from a different position.

[953] So I said before this talk that I was standing backstage trying to figure out what the hell I was doing, and then I talked to you a little bit about the fact that whatever we're doing here is a consequence of this technological revolution, and I believe that that's the can.

[954] but I don't think that's all of it.

[955] It's not all medium, some of its message.

[956] And one of the things that I've been thinking about is that, you know, I'm attempting to mount a defense for classic Western values, let's say that, particularly the value of individuality.

[957] There's a core idea there.

[958] The core idea is that I don't care who you are, but I'm going to interact with you as if your individual identity is superordinate to your group identity, or to the multiplicity of your group identities.

[959] And that's the proper way of looking at the world.

[960] And what I mean by proper is something like, if you don't look at the world that way, you are doing something truly perilous.

[961] And I believe that.

[962] I believe that if you invert that, because I know everyone has a group identity or multiple group identities, we're social creatures, right?

[963] We all fit into different groups, which is one of the problems with claiming that our primary identity is a group identity.

[964] It's right, okay.

[965] Which group identity?

[966] And even the identity politics types who pursue intersectionality ran across that particular conundrum.

[967] It's like, well, if you have two identities, which one is paramount?

[968] Well, it's the intersection between them.

[969] What if you have ten identities, group identities?

[970] Which you do, at least, they can be multiplied beyond count in some sense.

[971] If you make group identity paramount, then you degenerate into tribalism.

[972] And if you degenerate into tribalism.

[973] And if you degenerate, into tribalism, you degenerate into war.

[974] That's what it looks like to me. And I think the only way out of that, even though it might not be that stable away, because who knows if there is a way out of that, right?

[975] Being tribal and warlike, that's us.

[976] You know, chimpanzees go to war, eh?

[977] You know, that was discovered by Jane Goodell in the 1970s.

[978] And that was a major discovery, because up till then, I would say the more left -leaning anthropologists made the presumption.

[979] that the reason that human beings were warlike was because we had been warped by our cultures.

[980] You know, we're basically good people.

[981] It's kind of a noble savage idea.

[982] You're basically good when you're born, but as you grow up, you're corrupted by your culture.

[983] One of the consequences of being corrupted by your culture is that maybe you become aggressive and bitter and you turn to warfare, something like that.

[984] It's a view that was grounded in the thinking of Jean -Jacques Rousseau, and that's basically what he believed.

[985] human beings are basically good but culture corrupts us.

[986] It's like, no, human beings are basically good and evil and culture corrupts and ennobles us.

[987] And that's a way different story, and don't be thinking of romantic thoughts about Mother Nature.

[988] You know, she's got it in for you in the final analysis.

[989] So this is what I always think when I hear environmentalists talk about the planet being better off with people, if people weren't on it, which is not a sentiment I particularly appreciate.

[990] I think, well, if Mother Nature stop trying to kill us, we'd be a lot more friendly and return to her.

[991] It's not like we're not just trying to mount a reasonable defense.

[992] You know, and I think we deserve a little bit more credit for that than we ever get.

[993] You know, like we do pollute our own nest to some degree, but it's not all just casual.

[994] It's not all just in the pursuit of leisure.

[995] It's like we're trying not to die painfully, and that tends to make a bit of a mess.

[996] and maybe we're not as good at, you know, cleaning up the mess as we might be, but we're trying, Christ, it wasn't until the 1960s that we even realized that human beings had enough motive force as a collective group to actually pose something approximating a threat to the ecological stability of the planet.

[997] It's like 58 years ago.

[998] You know, it's just, it's yesterday, right?

[999] That's only two years.

[1000] That was like a year before I was born.

[1001] It's not even a lifetime ago that that was realized.

[1002] We're doing pretty good.

[1003] good for creatures that are just waking up to their planetary scale responsibilities.

[1004] Anyways, back to, back to, well, obviously that irritates me to a great degree.

[1005] Well, I'm sick and tired of people, I'm sick and tired of people being denigrated.

[1006] You know, I actually like human beings.

[1007] I mean, they're pretty peculiar, like Eric Weinstein, for example.

[1008] It's like just, you know, but remarkable creatures, you know, and I think we deserve a little bit of, we deserve to have a little sympathy for ourselves, for Christ's sake, like we've got a burden that's completely unbearable.

[1009] We're the only creatures that fully understand our extension in time.

[1010] We're the only creatures that know we're mortal.

[1011] We're the only creatures that know that suffering is coming in the future.

[1012] I can't believe that we're all not just stark, raving, mad all the time.

[1013] You know, well, it was something that just staggered me. As a clinical psychologist, like, I was never curious about why people were anxious or depressed or why they drank too much.

[1014] It's like, yeah, no, you're anxious?

[1015] Really?

[1016] There's a shock?

[1017] It's like, you're depressed.

[1018] Well, what happened to you last year?

[1019] Oh, well, my mother died of cancer, and I was unemployed, and then my wife left.

[1020] And you're depressed.

[1021] Really?

[1022] But you're not depressed.

[1023] You have a miserable life.

[1024] Right?

[1025] Well, that's a distinction you bloody well want to make if you're a clinical psychologist.

[1026] It was such a relief to my clients.

[1027] They'd come in and they'd tell me this story.

[1028] And I'd just be like, really?

[1029] That happened to you?

[1030] And you're not dead?

[1031] It's like, well, and I'm a little depressed.

[1032] It's like, no, you're not.

[1033] You have a terrible life, man. It's terrible.

[1034] And they'd be so relieved, you know, because they were wandering around thinking, they were wandering around thinking, well, I'm all weak and depressed.

[1035] It's like, no, you're not.

[1036] You're just tortured to death by God.

[1037] It's amazing.

[1038] You're still standing.

[1039] So that was helpful It's like anybody in your situation would be depressed And I think that's actually true Of most people's lives quite often You know, because even you talk to fortunate people You know, they look fortunate from the outside And you talk to them seriously for half an hour About what's happened to them in their lives Or maybe what's even going on right now It's like tragedy is one degree away from everyone all the time So all right So Back to this idea of aim So, you look where other people look, and your eyes have evolved so that other people can read your eyes.

[1040] And so, what that means is that we're, it means something like, it means something like we're engaged in the collective process of determining how things, what things are valuable.

[1041] It's something like that.

[1042] Okay, so now, I'm going to think about this from a free market perspective.

[1043] So here's a defense of free, of the free market system.

[1044] And this is, this is a, I know, God, who would ever guess that you could hear that, right?

[1045] Okay, the reason that we need a free market is because we're stupid.

[1046] Right, and so like I read at one point, and I think it was in Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that the Central Soviet had to make 150 ,000 pricing decisions, no, it's 3 ,000 pricing decisions a day.

[1047] Now, I might have the, I might have the figure wrong, but I don't have the order of magnitude wrong.

[1048] It's like, I don't know how many of you have ever started a small business or any sort of business where you had a product.

[1049] But if you did, what you'd find is that pricing a product is insanely difficult.

[1050] You know, so we built this self -authoring program, for example.

[1051] We built this other program, which we never could really sell, that helped people hire better employees.

[1052] Turned out they didn't want to hire better employees, so that didn't work.

[1053] So, who knew, you know?

[1054] And we could never figure out how to price it.

[1055] We thought, well, we could price it at $19.

[1056] And then people could use thousands of them, or we could, but then it looks cheap and something that everybody could have, or we could price it at two thousand dollars and hardly anyone would get it's like what's the right price?

[1057] Well, what's the right price?

[1058] And think, well, what does that question mean?

[1059] Well, it means what is that thing worth in comparison to what every other thing that's worth something is worth?

[1060] It's like, oh, huh, that's a hard computational problem.

[1061] And then this is what part of the reason this is, the Soviet system collapsed.

[1062] It's like, what's a nail worth?

[1063] Well, you don't know.

[1064] Go make one.

[1065] See how hard it is.

[1066] It's really hard to make a nail.

[1067] It's really hard to find the iron ore. Like, it's difficult.

[1068] Who knows what a nail is worth?

[1069] It's worth a hell of a lot if it's what stands between you and death.

[1070] Like, a nail is worth a lot.

[1071] And how do you figure out what it's worth?

[1072] Well, it's something like you let everyone bid on it and you accept the result.

[1073] And the reason you do that is because there's all these people and they're pursuing all these things, all these different things, this multitude of things.

[1074] And so if you let this free market, which is a, what do you call it, a distributed cognitive system, that's what it is.

[1075] It's a distributed computational system that takes all things into account as well as the collective brain power of the entire mass of human beings that are operating within that framework can manage.

[1076] And it does it all simultaneously.

[1077] And it makes errors because we get bubbles, right, price bubbles and so forth, and you get economic collapses.

[1078] It's not a perfect mechanism.

[1079] But it's not a perfect mechanism because it's trying to solve an impossible problem, and it does it pretty damn well.

[1080] And so price, monetary price, is a decent indicator of value, but not a perfect one, because we all know that there are things that have value that you can't price.

[1081] And that means that pricing isn't a perfect representation of value, but it's not bad.

[1082] It's good enough so that most of the time we can trade without having to kill each other or steal, and that's really something.

[1083] And so, well, that's my defense, part of the defense of the free market, is that, well, we're too stupid to calculate the price of things, except by letting everyone vote on the prices all the time.

[1084] So then you think, well, some things are worth more than others, right?

[1085] So you get a hierarchy.

[1086] And so implicit in the process of pricing, which is this universal voting, is the hierarchical organization of things into rank order.

[1087] I read today, too, in this same paper, that the part of your brain that processes social statuses, also processes rank ordering, which is extremely interesting.

[1088] So, and this is what I'm trying to puzzle out tonight, essentially, is what's the relationship between social status and social hierarchy and rank order pricing?

[1089] Now you think, well, why would you think there's a relationship?

[1090] That's easy.

[1091] Rich, high status people get the most valuable things, right?

[1092] So obviously there's a relationship between social status and value, because otherwise rich, high status people wouldn't get the most valuable things.

[1093] In some sense, they're identical, right?

[1094] So there's a very tight relationship between social status and value.

[1095] Now then the question starts to become, and this is another, so that works out pretty nicely, and there's something that's genuine and valid to be said about that.

[1096] So then the question might be, okay, so here's a question.

[1097] Would you rather be rich or know how to generate money?

[1098] If you had to pick one of those.

[1099] Now this is a tough one.

[1100] Now, we didn't experiment a while back, couldn't replicate it very well, but we tried to test this question with women.

[1101] Because women like high status men, and that's cross -cultural.

[1102] So if you look at female mating preferences, women mate across or up social hierarchies, no matter what the culture is, even in egalitarian societies like Scandinavia.

[1103] And we thought, well, are women going for wealth, because that's associated with socioeconomic status, or are they going for the ability to generate wealth, which is a way better bet?

[1104] And in our initial experiments, we found that women were better at going for the ability to generate wealth, because that was more reliable.

[1105] Wealth can be stolen, say, it's hard to store, but your ability to generate an excess, well, that's sort of a fundamental characteristic.

[1106] Maybe that's associated with your intelligence, that's what the research data indicates, and it's also associated with your conscientiousness and maybe your trait creativity.

[1107] And so it looks like human beings have selected each other quite tightly for intelligence and conscientiousness and trait creativity and that sort of thing.

[1108] On the bet that it's a better bet to select for generativity than wealth.

[1109] And here's an issue too.

[1110] Let's say you had a choice.

[1111] You could be born at the 95th percentile in the United States for wealth, or you could be born at the 95th percentile for intelligence.

[1112] Would you be better off at 40 if you were born at 95th percentile wealth or 95th percentile intelligence?

[1113] And the answer is?

[1114] It's intelligence, yeah.

[1115] Which I love that.

[1116] That's so cool, because it's actually a bit of a validation of the truly merit -based element of the meritocracy.

[1117] Because if the reverse was true, well, then you don't, well, you have to accept a proposition Is it better if it's intelligent people that rise to the top?

[1118] Now, that's a real question, because you might say, no, you should just distribute things equally, you know, regardless of cognitive ability.

[1119] And you can make a case for that, but then let's say you want to be selfish.

[1120] It's like, no, maybe you want to devote more resources to people who are smart enough to figure out things that you would like to have figured out.

[1121] Right?

[1122] Well, that's also one of the issues about inequality that's actually useful.

[1123] It's like, well, do you really want resources to be distributed equally?

[1124] Or do you want resources to be distributed unequally if you could determine that the unequal distribution of resources would increase the rate at which things, problems you wanted solved were solved?

[1125] And you might think, well, that's pretty damn naive, you know, only a Pollyanna would think that the economic system is set up that way.

[1126] And it's like, it is set up that way, not completely, because it's a flawed system, but we know the psychometric studies indicate that the best predictors of long -term success in a Western society are intelligence and trait conscientiousness, which basically means that the best predictors of your long -term success are how smart you are and how hard you work.

[1127] And that's a microaggression, by the way, in case any of you are keeping track of them.

[1128] And I mean that technically, because in the UC campuses in this country, it is not.

[1129] considered a microaggression to make the claim that people get ahead because they work hard.

[1130] So, and I'm not, that is no word of lie, look it up, look it up.

[1131] You can thank Daryl Wingsu for that bit of wisdom, if you're wondering who to blame, and you should wonder, and you should blame.

[1132] So, okay, so, it may be better to choose to generate wealth than to choose wealth.

[1133] And so, then it might be better.

[1134] Then you might think that competence is more valuable than material wealth.

[1135] Is that a possibility?

[1136] We might be able to assume that that's the case.

[1137] Okay.

[1138] So then, this is where things get even more complicated.

[1139] See, I've been trying to figure out what it is that a hierarchy, a human hierarchy, is actually based on.

[1140] Now, the cynics, that would be the post -moder.

[1141] and the Marxists.

[1142] So that's ignorant cynics, by the way, because cynic isn't enough.

[1143] You have to add the ignorant in there to get it really right.

[1144] And the reason that I say that, and I would also say malevolent and willfully blind and vengeful and and and I I'm I'm serious about those things.

[1145] I think those are all justifiable claims willfully blind because we know what Marxism did in the 20th century if we want to keep our eyes open and If we don't, then we have to wonder what we're up to.

[1146] If you don't keep your eyes open, you can't see the point.

[1147] And maybe if you don't keep your eyes open, you don't want to see the bloody point.

[1148] And that's for sure.

[1149] That's certainly the case in a situation like the analysis of what happened on the radical left in the 20th century.

[1150] Because that was some bloody nightmare, that's for sure.

[1151] So that's the willfully blind part.

[1152] Okay, so the basic critique, as far as I can tell, the basic critique that's emerging out of the universities of our cultural and economic systems is that it's a variant of the old Marxist doctrine that it was the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, that the bourgeoisie, they were wealthy, and the only reason they got their wealth is because they took it from people who were poor.

[1153] Now, what we should point out is that some people who are wealthy are wealthy because they take money from the poor, right?

[1154] But that doesn't mean that all people who are wealthy are wealthy because they take money from the poor.

[1155] And there is a big difference between some and all.

[1156] And the difference between some and all is the difference between someone who thinks and someone who's an ideologue.

[1157] Because what the ideologue says is all.

[1158] And if they say all, you better look out because you have more than some other person has.

[1159] And if it's the case that wealth is theft, then to the degree that you have more than someone else, you're an oppressor.

[1160] And if you think that isn't dangerous, then you don't know very much about what happened in places like the Soviet Union, because really what happened as the Russian Revolution progressed was that was exactly how it turned out.

[1161] Because of your multiple group identities, I can find one dimension along which you're clearly bourgeois.

[1162] And if you're bourgeois along one dimension and not along nine others, it doesn't matter, because even if you're a little bit bourgeois, that's enough to pack you off to the camps.

[1163] And so, okay, so we're, now back, back to the, back to the wealth issue.

[1164] So, some people who generate wealth do it as a consequence of the pathology of the hierarchical system.

[1165] But many people don't.

[1166] So what are the other pathways to wealth?

[1167] Well, intelligence, conscientiousness, and so intelligence would be the ability to solve complex problems.

[1168] I think, well, why do we want complex problems solved?

[1169] And that's where you get down to the bedrock of things, I think, well, and this is the justification for hierarchies.

[1170] It's like, well, do we have problems?

[1171] An answer to that seems to be yes, right?

[1172] Because everyone has problems, and you can tell that you have problems because you're too damn anxious, and you're in too much pain, and there's too much suffering in your family, and you're not as content as you could be, and maybe even if you're doing okay, well, you can see that kind of level of misery around you.

[1173] And that's a standard existential fact, that's a fact of reality, the existence of suffering.

[1174] And maybe the other reason, the other evidence that we have problems is that there's also plenty of evidence for malevolence.

[1175] People misbehave badly and they make a bad situation worse than it has to be.

[1176] And so there's no shortage of suffering in malevolence.

[1177] So that means we actually have real problems.

[1178] And the reason I'm making this case, it's a very specific reason.

[1179] One of the pathologies of the postmodern doctrine, all protestations to the contrary, is that there's no real world out there.

[1180] There's just social construction, right, that everything we see is just a social construction, and arbitrary in some sense.

[1181] And, you know, it's a powerful argument, because a lot of what we do is arbitrary.

[1182] You know, it's like you're a plumber, and you're a lawyer, and you're a physician, and you like to play monopoly, and you like to play risk.

[1183] It's like all those things are arbitrary, you know?

[1184] a plumber instead of a lawyer.

[1185] There's lots of ways to go through life.

[1186] That's partly what makes the moral relativism argument relatively powerful, is there are lots of ways of being that seem to be valid.

[1187] But that doesn't mean that there's no reality.

[1188] It doesn't mean that we just can vote on and conjure up any reality we want.

[1189] There's something solid underneath that that you have to contend with.

[1190] Well, I would think, well, what are the solid things?

[1191] How about death?

[1192] That's one.

[1193] How about suffering?

[1194] That's another.

[1195] Malevolence, that's another.

[1196] Those things are real.

[1197] There's real.

[1198] And even if you say, well, I don't think they're real, it's like, yeah, but you act like they're real, so I don't care what you think.

[1199] You know, if you're in, try to argue yourself out of your pain.

[1200] Good luck with that.

[1201] You know, that's where the metal, that's where the tire hits the road, as far as I'm concerned.

[1202] I think that's why so many religious systems insist upon the equation of life with suffering.

[1203] and malevolence.

[1204] It's like, those things are undeniable.

[1205] I think that's where Descartes got it wrong.

[1206] It's not, I think, therefore I am.

[1207] It's that I suffer, therefore I am.

[1208] Or maybe it's I'm malevolent, therefore I am.

[1209] I think those things are more undeniable than thinking.

[1210] It's like, maybe I don't think, but I'm certainly in pain.

[1211] And so is everyone else.

[1212] And so we have real problems.

[1213] And that's the real world.

[1214] And so because we have real problems, we need to solve them.

[1215] We need real solutions.

[1216] And that means if we need real solutions, we need competent people to solve the damn problems.

[1217] And you can actually define whether or not a problem is solved, because it gets solved, right?

[1218] It disappears, and then you might say, well, what do we want to do?

[1219] Do we want to solve a problem efficiently or inefficiently?

[1220] And the answer is, well, do you only have one problem?

[1221] Do you have one problem in infinite resources?

[1222] Well, then you don't care if it's efficient.

[1223] Maybe you have ten problems and constrained resources, which you do.

[1224] do.

[1225] Well, then efficiency matters.

[1226] So not only do we have real problems, we want them actually solved, and we want them solved in an efficient manner.

[1227] And so how are we going to do that?

[1228] Well, how about we get stupid and lazy people to solve them?

[1229] Well, that seems like a bad idea.

[1230] You know, and you might say, well, it's not their fault.

[1231] I'm sorry to be so blunt.

[1232] It's not their fault they're stupid.

[1233] And it's not their fault they're lazy.

[1234] And there's actually a fair bit of truth to both of those, because even trait conscientiousness, which is the trait.

[1235] that's associated with hard work and diligence.

[1236] There's a fair genetic component to that.

[1237] It's like 50 % of the variability in trait conscientiousness looks like it's attributable to genetic factors.

[1238] And it isn't easy to know what to make of that.

[1239] So does that still mean we should reward people who work harder?

[1240] It's like, well, why do you work harder?

[1241] Well, maybe it's your character, whatever that is.

[1242] It's not like I doubt that, but the literature indicates that you can predict conscientiousness using genetic analysis.

[1243] So there's something about it that's kind of arbitrary, but that seems to me to some degree beside the point, not completely, but to some degree beside the point.

[1244] We still want to devote resources to, because we have real problems, what we want to do is produce hierarchies that devote resources to the people who are most likely to solve the problems.

[1245] And the best bet we have is to final resources to people who are smart and competent.

[1246] And of course, it's not like you really want to argue about that.

[1247] It's like, let's say you have brain cancer.

[1248] It's like, so you're going to go find a surgeon.

[1249] Well, you're going to hope there's a hierarchy of surgeons, right?

[1250] And you're going to hope you have access to the information about that hierarchy.

[1251] And you're going to hope that the damn surgeon who operates on your brain is smart and competent.

[1252] And maybe you're willing to pay a premium for that because, well, because otherwise, well, then you die.

[1253] And that actually turns out generally to matter to people.

[1254] And so that actually constitutes that's a real problem, right?

[1255] That's the real world right there.

[1256] So, okay, so what's the utility of hierarchy?

[1257] Well, here's how it works, and I think this is why it's inevitable.

[1258] And this is supported by the relevant scientific literature.

[1259] Now, it's more complex in the case of human beings, because animals, when they aggregate into hierarchies, the hierarchies are mostly dominance, it's power.

[1260] And human hierarchies, they tilt, especially in non -terranical societies, the hierarchies tilt more towards competence.

[1261] Now, it's not like competence is pleasant, because there are massive differences in people's competence, and that's actually a really harsh truth.

[1262] You know, it's like, here's an example.

[1263] We made this instrument called the Creative Achievement Questioner.

[1264] And what it does is it, it'll give you a score indicating how many creative things you've achieved in your life, not thoughts you've had, but actual things you've done that are creative.

[1265] Have you written a piece of music?

[1266] Have you written a screenplay?

[1267] Have you invented something?

[1268] Have you written a scientific paper?

[1269] Have you can you dance?

[1270] Can you sing?

[1271] Etcetera, et cetera.

[1272] And so what we did was we identified 13 domains of creative achievement And then we had experts rank order different levels of attainment within those domains ranging from zero I have no training or recognized talent in this area to 10 something like 10 I have an international reputation The median score across the 13 dimensions was zero.

[1273] 70 % of people scored zero on the 13 -dimensional creative achievement questionnaire.

[1274] And then a tiny fraction of people were just hyper -creative.

[1275] You think, well, that's inequality, and so this is also, is this a justification for inequality?

[1276] That's what I've been thinking about for about a month.

[1277] I thought, can I make a case for inequality?

[1278] So that'll make me popular.

[1279] The case for inequality.

[1280] Why is it good to have rich people?

[1281] There's a good one.

[1282] It's like no one ever asks that Should we have rich people?

[1283] It's like no, it's rich.

[1284] That's not good.

[1285] Well, let's think about that for a minute So when flat -screen TVs came out, how much did they cost?

[1286] Well, when they first came out, they cost as much as the factory that built them, right?

[1287] So that's a lot and then maybe you produce a thousand and the price dropped to $65 ,000 for maybe a 65 inch flat screen.

[1288] So then only the guy you hate up the street who has three Mercedes could have a 65 inch flat screen.

[1289] But then it's like five years later, you have two of them and they don't cost anything.

[1290] And why is that?

[1291] It's because some lucky bastard got one before you did.

[1292] And that's the price you pay for ever getting one.

[1293] And I actually think that's an unassailable truth.

[1294] I think that you cannot get a valued good to everyone, without only getting it to some people first.

[1295] And I mean, I'm not an economist, and Eric is probably like tearing his hair out behind the stage.

[1296] But it seems to me that, you know, if you don't have pools of unequal distribution of wealth, pools of wealth, then you can't introduce new and expensive products into a marketplace in the hope of making them mass accessible, unless you have some people who are so filthy rich they can afford them when they're still stupidly expensive.

[1297] And I started thinking about this because a friend of mine who works on the development of computer chips said that We were talking about the necessity for private pools of wealth and he said well, you know some things are really expensive like chip Fabrication plants are like four and a half billion dollars It's like someone has to have or a small number of people a small group of people have to have four and a half billion dollars You don't get to have a chip fab plant and then you don't have an iPhone.

[1298] It's not like an iPhone is cheap Those things are bloody miracles and they don't cost anything but caught alive man Try to make one of those.

[1299] It's taken three and a half billion years to make one of those, man. That's a complicated thing.

[1300] Okay, so, I won't go any more on the inequality end of things, but I've been thinking about a lot.

[1301] Well, I'll give will, actually.

[1302] Here's another thing.

[1303] Well, so imagine a world that was equal, where everyone was equal.

[1304] Okay, so what does that mean?

[1305] Does that mean everybody is like Albert Einstein and Louis Armstrong, and Rudolf Nureyev?

[1306] combined?

[1307] Plus, they can play basketball?

[1308] It's like, so is everybody all of a sudden super skilled at everything?

[1309] Or is everybody just mediocre at everything?

[1310] Or is everybody terrible at everything?

[1311] I don't know.

[1312] All of those things are equal.

[1313] It seems a lot to ask to assume that everybody's going to be like Rudolph Nureyev to the fourth power.

[1314] I don't see how that's going to happen.

[1315] And so, like, maybe it's also the case that if we want anything to be spectacular, we have to let only some people have that, so the rest of it can have, the rest of us can have some of it.

[1316] Like, that might be possible, and we seem to sort of allow for that in some domains, like we're not necessarily jealous of athletic prowess.

[1317] You know, we might wish we had it, we had it, but we seem to be able to be okay that some people are absolutely spectacular at playing basketball, and others are spectacular, at playing hockey, and it's okay that everyone isn't like that, and we seem to be kind of happy, like maybe you would love to sing, I would love to sing, but I can't, Neither can Eric, despite his attempts.

[1318] But he's very brave, that's for sure.

[1319] And it's okay.

[1320] And I think I thought about this, too, because I took the story of Cain and Abel apart so much, you know, because it's a story of primordial jealousy, the jealousy about the favored.

[1321] And I'm wondering, well, are we really that upset that some people are more favored than we are, because then at least someone is more favored than we are.

[1322] And maybe we can benefit as a consequence.

[1323] Maybe we're jealous that they have what we don't have, but maybe if there weren't people that didn't have what we don't have, we wouldn't have anything.

[1324] Like maybe inequality is a necessary precondition for just for the existence of wealth itself.

[1325] And I believe that.

[1326] I think that there, I think you could formalize this.

[1327] I think you could look at economies across the world and say, we pay the price of X units of inequality for X units of production of wealth.

[1328] And that's another defense of the West, I would say, is that at least in the West, We produced inequality, but every system produces inequality, and every system produces hierarchies.

[1329] And in the West, we produced unequal hierarchies that also make poor people rich.

[1330] And that's pretty damn good, like it's still, right?

[1331] Okay, and so maybe I'll kind of close with that.

[1332] Another thing I've been thinking about is, you know, I've been reading all these books, like Stephen Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now, and Hans Rosling wrote a book called Fat, I don't remember the name of it, Exactly.

[1333] It doesn't matter.

[1334] It's hands rosling.

[1335] He's a very smart guy and there's about six books like this right now.

[1336] And what they're doing is they're documenting an economic miracle that's sort of occurring under people's noses.

[1337] No one knows about this, you know?

[1338] So between the year 2000 and 2012, the rate of the level of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50%.

[1339] Now, it was pretty absolute poverty.

[1340] I think UN defined absolute poverty as living on less than a dollar 90 a day in 2005 dollars, something like that.

[1341] like that, so it's pretty dismal.

[1342] And so, you know, you could be cynical and say, well, you know, people push past that, but they're still pretty damn poor.

[1343] It's like, yeah, but they're not as poor as they were.

[1344] And the UN set as a goal between 2000 and 2015, the halving of absolute poverty across the world, and we hit it three years ahead of schedule.

[1345] It's like, that wasn't a New York Times headline.

[1346] It should have been a New York Times headline for like a year.

[1347] And everybody should have been running around patting themselves on the back, right?

[1348] And the UN, which is a pessimistic organization, apart from its other sins, has also projected, this is their projection.

[1349] By the year 2030, we'll have conquered abject poverty by that definition.

[1350] It'll be gone.

[1351] And so that 12 -year period from 2000 to 2012 was the fastest growing, that was the most rapid economic miracle in human history by a huge margin.

[1352] And I think it was partially a consequence.

[1353] It was a delayed consequence of the fact that the Cold War came to an end in 1989.

[1354] So we finally got to the place, between 2000 and 2012, where many developing countries weren't doing absolutely pathologically destructive things with their economy.

[1355] They were letting free market, Western notions of economics and personal sovereignty creep into their economic systems.

[1356] And the consequence of that was that way fewer people were dying of starvation.

[1357] And so that's a big deal.

[1358] It's so interesting to me to see that just as that's happening all around the world and it's it's happening It's very interesting to read these books because it's happening in multiple dimensions, you know So the child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as the child mortality rate was in Europe in 1952.

[1359] It's like it's absolutely jaw -dropping.

[1360] It's like you know that's again, that's all within the span of one lifetime It's absolutely amazing, you know, and the birth rates are plummeting all around the world.

[1361] So it doesn't look like we're gonna overpopulate the planet.

[1362] We're gonna to peak out at about $9 billion.

[1363] It seems to me likely at 100 years the problem will be that there aren't enough people on the planet.

[1364] I think that's a highly probable, you know, barring absolute bloody catastrophe, and we can pray that that won't happen.

[1365] So that's pretty interesting.

[1366] There's more forest in China now than there was in 1993, and there's more forest in the northern hemisphere than there was 100 years ago.

[1367] So that's pretty cool.

[1368] If you get gross domestic product up to $5 ,000 a year, environmental degradation decreases.

[1369] So there's, isn't that cool?

[1370] You think Think about what that means.

[1371] Make people rich and the planet improves.

[1372] Wouldn't that be something?

[1373] We could have our cake and eat it too.

[1374] Wouldn't that be something?

[1375] That was a more incoherent lecture that I generally deliver.

[1376] But I wanted to walk through some of the things that I've been thinking about, see if I can pull them together.

[1377] I guess I'll close with this.

[1378] This is sort of what ties it together.

[1379] See, I think that what happens as we evolve our hierarchies.

[1380] We evolve these hierarchies of competence.

[1381] And then we look at where they're pointing.

[1382] And you could think, well, maybe they're pointing toward material wealth.

[1383] And maybe they're pointing towards status, and maybe they're pointing towards exploitation, and maybe they're pointing towards power.

[1384] But I don't think that that's what they're pointing to.

[1385] And I think this is how the religious conception emerges from the process of hierarchical value.

[1386] Think, well, what is it that produces success in a highly functional hierarchy?

[1387] It's not dominance, and it's not power.

[1388] and it's not exploitation, it's none of that.

[1389] It's something much more sophisticated.

[1390] It's something like, I think part of its truth, I think that if you want to move forward in life properly, one of the best things that you can possibly do to master the hierarchy and to attain the things of value is to tell the truth.

[1391] And I think that what the hierarchy points to is not things of value, but a way of being that produces things of value.

[1392] And I think that what the hierarchy points to when it's properly constructed is the ultimate mode of being that produces things of value.

[1393] And because you think, well, that's kind of the people that you admire, right?

[1394] I mean, maybe you're thinking in a relatively unsophisticated manner, and all you're doing is admiring someone who has excess material wealth.

[1395] But that isn't really what you want and admire if you think about what you want for yourself.

[1396] And if you had a real life, you know, you'd sort of want to be healthy.

[1397] Hopefully, that's a big deal.

[1398] And maybe you want to have someone to love who's also healthy.

[1399] That would be helpful.

[1400] And maybe you have a family and you take care of them and they're doing well.

[1401] And maybe you do that in a way so that the community functions well, and maybe you have some long -term visions to improve the structure of reality and to work against suffering and to constrain malevolence so that you're with an ethical framework and so that you're a good person and you're living a good life.

[1402] And my suspicions are is that the image that's at the center of the hierarchies we produce is actually something like that.

[1403] It's something like an image of a transcendent mode of being.

[1404] And I've thought for a long time that the image of the Redeemer, the hero, and that's what comes out of the fool, let's say, the image of the Redeemer is an image that is, it's like a ghostly presence in the middle of a hierarchy.

[1405] It's like, because the hierarchy is always saying, here's what you should be, here's what you should be, here's the ideal towards which you should strive.

[1406] And that's, that's not tyrant.

[1407] It's not that.

[1408] And I think we make a big mistake by looking at our culture, our functional, our highly functional culture, that's doing good things.

[1409] and preventing starvation and lifting people out of poverty and providing people with the means to have a decent life.

[1410] I think we make a huge mistake by looking at that and say, well, that's all based on power and tyranny.

[1411] It's like, no, it's not.

[1412] There's something absolutely fundamental, truly ethical right at its core.

[1413] Something that has to do with the proper aim and something that has to do with fair play and something that has to do with the desire to set the world straight and to ameliorate suffering.

[1414] And that's really at its core.

[1415] This is partly why I've been arguing about religion with Sam Harris, because one of the the things I think.

[1416] You know in the West we formulated the idea of the divine individual.

[1417] You see that most explicitly in Christianity because in Christianity at the core there's a divine individual and I think about that psychologically it's an image.

[1418] It's like that's the image of the perfect thing that you should strive to be and the idea is that what you should strive to be is the perfect individual that you could be and and that's and is that divine it's like well it's the highest value that's a good that's a good good definition of what constitutes divine even if you just keep it secular you know you say what's the best that mortal primates like us can manage it's still the highest value and I think that we forget that at our peril we've extracted out this image over thousands of years of what we all could be and to the degree that our hierarchies reflect that and we manifest that in our own life then we can we can actually we can address the problems that we have the genuine problems we have we can ameliorate suffering we can constrain malevolence, we can do that practically, so we can actually make things better in the world, just like you make things better when you feed your children.

[1419] But it also works psychologically, because if you take on the burden of addressing suffering, you take on those problems, as if they're your own, well, then you can start to solve them, and then your life also has meaning.

[1420] And so it's so interesting, you win in that way, even if you lose, even if you can't solve the problem, the fact that you're striving to solve a problem that's really worth solving, Actually solves the problem to some degree because that imbues your life with sufficient meaning so that you can tolerate the suffering that's an intrinsic part of it And so you win either way and I think that one of the things I learned from reading Jung is that we have to wake up to these sorts of things is that we We're unconscious in our religious presuppositions for our entire evolutionary history.

[1421] We didn't know what we were dreaming And we have to wake up and realize it and that's what we're that's what we were dreaming We're dreaming up the perfect individual that that that It's a ghostly image inside the hierarchy, that's reflected.

[1422] It's reflected in what people want you to be, because everyone's always telling you what you should be.

[1423] You know, they're telling you with their gaze, they're telling you with their glance, they're telling you with their rewards and their subtle punishments, they're trying to call forward out of you, that ideal.

[1424] And that ideal is, that ideal is the identification of the ideal that I think we got right in the West, the sovereign individual, The sovereign individual with the responsibility to take on the suffering of the world as if it's his or her true responsibility and to address evil in the same manner.

[1425] I think that's how it is.

[1426] I think we need to know that.

[1427] And I think that's where I'll stop.

[1428] Thank you very much.

[1429] Long Island, man. These are my people.

[1430] What do you think?

[1431] It's been pretty good.

[1432] It's been pretty good.

[1433] It's a nice, friendly theater, and the crowd seems present.

[1434] So, yeah, how's it going for you?

[1435] Pretty good.

[1436] Yeah.

[1437] Not bad.

[1438] No one is a prophet in his own land, you know.

[1439] Good night, everybody.

[1440] All right, Peterson.

[1441] They lined up the good questions, my people, in my land.

[1442] Jordan, when's the last time you got drunk?

[1443] It's right there.

[1444] Oh, and what was the sauce?

[1445] Okay, see, I didn't make it up.

[1446] That's the guy right there.

[1447] So I have this friend named Greg Hurwitz, and I just did a video with him.

[1448] I think it was called Invitation to the Intellectual Dark Web.

[1449] One of the things Greg is doing, which I think is really cool, is he's, this is really cool, and it's weird.

[1450] He thinks it's weird, too, but it seems to be working.

[1451] He has the opportunity to train political candidates for the Democratic Party.

[1452] And so he's trained a whole bunch of them who are running in different elections and getting them to abandon identity politics and he's trying to restructure the central message of the Democratic Party and he's actually producing ads.

[1453] He's got permission not only to do this from major players in the Democratic Party, but also to talk about it, which is really, well, who knows, it's as strange as having Eric play the harmonica on stage here except on a much bigger scale.

[1454] And so, I've known Greg for a long time.

[1455] He was a student of mine at Harvard years and years ago.

[1456] He's a very smart guy.

[1457] And he writes thrillers and comic books too.

[1458] He wrote Batman and Wolverine and he wrote the origin story for the penguin.

[1459] And so, and so he's a multi -talented guy.

[1460] And he writes these thrillers and he wrote this recent series.

[1461] It started with a book called Orphan X. And it's about this kind of superhero -like guy.

[1462] named Evan Smoke, and he drinks expensive vodka of various sorts.

[1463] And Greg just thought that would be an interesting detail in the book, and so he has him drink these spectacularly expensive and high -end distillery, you know, private distillery, small private distillery vodkas.

[1464] And the companies that make the vodka's turned out to be thrilled about it.

[1465] Now you could be cynical and say that he knew that would happen, but he didn't.

[1466] But it did happen, and so now he's like swamped with high -end vodka.

[1467] And so was I. Yeah, and it was really fun.

[1468] It was really fun.

[1469] I paid for it dreadfully.

[1470] And that was about a year ago.

[1471] And luckily, I trust him a lot.

[1472] Because I'm not in a situation where I can afford to really drink anything because I can't say anything that I shouldn't say.

[1473] And you know what happens when you get drunk?

[1474] You get to say things you shouldn't say because everyone knows how much fun that is.

[1475] So it was maybe a year and a half ago, and it was expensive vodka, so that's the story of that.

[1476] I would love to, but won't.

[1477] Did Sam Harris move you on any specific issue during your debates?

[1478] Look, it's not like I don't understand and appreciate Sam's argument.

[1479] I've worked as a scientist for 30 years.

[1480] you know so it's not like everything he says doesn't fill me with doubt I'm not stupid you know and the like what Sam is a mouthpiece for the rationalist challenge to to the traditional religious worldview and he's an effective mouthpiece and that's not a denigration by the way because we're all mouthpieces to some degree for ideas that have lengthy developmental history And there's no doubt that the materialist viewpoint mounts an insanely potent challenge to even the idea that life is intrinsically meaningful.

[1481] But, and it's not like that doesn't affect me. You know, people say, well, do you believe in God, which is a question I hate?

[1482] It's like, oh yes, I'm absolutely certain.

[1483] It's like, good, you find someone who's absolutely certain.

[1484] You're not going to find anyone who's absolutely certain, because that's just what it's like to be human.

[1485] And so, did he move me?

[1486] It's like, hopefully I made my argument sharper, because as powerful as his position is, it's certainly not complete.

[1487] Because we don't know everything about the world.

[1488] And I think it's wrong.

[1489] And I think the science indicates that it's wrong.

[1490] So, for example, I laid this out pretty carefully in 12 Rules for Life, but even more in maps of meaning.

[1491] We have an instinct for meaning.

[1492] It's based in what the Russian neuropsychologist called the orienting reflex, and it's a really deep reflex.

[1493] It goes all the way, it's represented at multiple levels in your brain.

[1494] It goes all the way down to the bottom.

[1495] It's very, very old.

[1496] And out of that springs the apprehension of meaning, and I believe that that is a valid guide to being.

[1497] I believe that's true, and I believe that that valid guide to meaning is expressed as clearly as we can express it in our most profound archetypal stories.

[1498] And I think that if Sam knew the science, which he doesn't, then he'd know that.

[1499] You know, because he presents himself as a neuroscientist on rather thin ground.

[1500] So it isn't exactly that he moved me, I wouldn't say, although I have.

[1501] I had to sharpen my arguments in relationship because of the debates, but it's certainly the case that that materialist, atheist framework is incredibly potent.

[1502] You know, I've been trying to figure out how to deal with that, especially because, you see, I knew that I learned that Nietzsche's criticism was correct, not Dostoevsky as well.

[1503] It leads to nihilism, and nihilism leads to hell, and anything that takes you to hell is wrong.

[1504] Now, why it's wrong and how it's wrong, that's a very difficult question.

[1505] But I think it's wrong.

[1506] So, and hopefully I'm better at arguing for that than I was a month and a half ago.

[1507] We'll see.

[1508] I wish you guys could all experience what it's like to have Jordan staring at you directly in the eyes.

[1509] Would he's two feet away from you saying that?

[1510] Although this is not legal.

[1511] That sounds fun.

[1512] Will you please move to America and run for president of the United States?

[1513] Do you know what that job does to people?

[1514] Did you see what happened to Obama?

[1515] Christ, he aged like 20 years during his time in office.

[1516] It's like it's an impossible job.

[1517] So, you know, I think about Trump, I think.

[1518] How old is he?

[1519] Jesus, you want to be doing that when you're 72?

[1520] You think, oh, well, he gets to be president.

[1521] It's like, oh, yeah.

[1522] man what a job that is you know every single thing you do is fatal and it's and and and and that happens like 300 times a day it's it's it's it's a hell of a job be nice to have a little more sympathy for the people who who have it so so no because it's illegal and people have asked me the similar question in Canada you know if I ever would consider political office and I've considered it a lot but every time I No I don't think so I think that I'm pretty sure if Trudeau can do it you can do it come out I think I'm more suited to the role of evil advisor sitting behind the king whispering in his ear court jester okay what advice would you have for young parents oh well that's rule 5 right don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them So, well, I'll tell you a little story that this is kind of a good one.

[1523] So my daughter was just, she has a baby 13 months old named Scarlett.

[1524] And she's trying to, she was trying to crib train Scarlett last week to get her to go to sleep.

[1525] And it's hard, you know, because when you have a little baby, very little baby, The thing about little babies, say, under six months, is they're always right, and everyone else is always wrong.

[1526] So if your baby's crying, then that's your problem, and you should do something about it.

[1527] Then you don't get to blame the baby.

[1528] The baby is completely 100 % innocent.

[1529] But then as the baby gets older and turns into an older person, then, you know, that gradually, they gradually can be attributed more responsibility.

[1530] and take on more responsibility.

[1531] And so, you know, Scarlett's 13 months, and it's time for her to learn to go to sleep in a crib.

[1532] And that's not very pleasant.

[1533] So it sort of coincided with weaning as well, so it's quite a bit of disruption in her life.

[1534] And so they put her in the crib, and she wasn't very happy about that.

[1535] She's doing a lot of squawking.

[1536] And that's very painful for a mother who's been accustomed to responding to the child's every demand.

[1537] on -demand and so we had quite a lengthy discussion about that this week and I said leave her in her crib put the video monitor on her so you can see that she's okay and tough it out and it's going to be painful but if you do it what you'll see is that each night the time that she spends crying will diminish very rapidly and if you can tough it out for a week she'll go You go to sleep when you put her in the crib and she'll stay asleep at night and you'll have solved the problem of putting your child to bed, which is an immense problem.

[1538] And that three days of misery will give you and her ten years of peace.

[1539] But you have to stick it out.

[1540] Now, here's why.

[1541] So if you want to ruin your child, here's how.

[1542] Okay, so I'm a behavioral psychologist, so I actually know how to do this.

[1543] You treat your child as if he or she is a slot machine.

[1544] Actually, you treat you like you're the slot machine for your child.

[1545] Now, slot machines, here's why slot machines are vicious.

[1546] I actually had an idea, just so you know, this has to do with being the evil advisor to the king.

[1547] I figured out a way to make slot machines even more addictive.

[1548] I think I could have made a billion dollars with that idea, but I never told anybody about it.

[1549] So, anyways, I'm not telling you either.

[1550] So anyways, here's how you ruin your child if you want to.

[1551] So put them to bed and let them cry, and then when they cry for a while, go in there and randomly interact with them, and then leave, and then after they cry for some random period of time and you can't stand it anymore, then go back in there and randomly interact with them again.

[1552] And then do that with varying lengths of...

[1553] time for a month, okay?

[1554] And then what you've done is you've trained your child to be insanely persistent with their negative emotion because that will certainly attract your attention.

[1555] And if you do that for a whole month and you vary the amounts of time between the reward, which is you going in there, then you've also trained, you've cemented in the persistence.

[1556] So imagine a slot machine, right?

[1557] Well, it's addictive because if you keep pulling on, it's arm, you will eventually win.

[1558] For sure, but you can't tell when.

[1559] And so what a slot machine does is reward you for insane persistence.

[1560] And it's set up that.

[1561] It's called a variable ratio reinforcement schedule.

[1562] And the behaviorist figured out how to addict rats like mad to behavior using those reinforcement schedules.

[1563] And you can easily do that with children.

[1564] And you can easily do that with bedtime.

[1565] And then you get a child who will not go to bed.

[1566] And then you get to fight with that child for 10 years and then you hate them right so that's a very bad idea so don't do that that's my advice to your to new parents it's like there's things you have to do that you have to stick out and you know one thing you want to do with your child is we'll figure it out it's like do you like your wife maybe not do you like your husband maybe not if you do then maybe you want to put your child to bed at like eight because then you get to see your wife or you get to see your husband then your marriage doesn't fall apart and you don't hate each other and one of you doesn't have an affair and then your child doesn't have parents that divorce it's like so put your damn kid to bed because then you won't hate them right right and don't think that you're so nice because you're not you're horrible and if you know you're horrible then maybe you won't be horrible to your children see when I had kids I knew I was horrible And I thought, I don't want to be horrible to my children, even though I'm horrible.

[1567] And so then I thought, well, they better not make me angry, because then I'll be horrible.

[1568] And so then I thought, well, I could do them a great favor by helping them not make me angry.

[1569] And it turned out, and I have a sensible wife, thank God.

[1570] And, you know, all of our disciplinary routines were discussed between the two of us, which is another thing I'd really, really recommend.

[1571] It's like, you're stupid, and so is your wife, but you're stupid.

[1572] in different ways.

[1573] And so if you put the two of you together, then you make one person who's not fatally flawed if you're lucky.

[1574] And then that child can interact with that one person who's not fatally flawed, and hopefully you will be a reasonable representative of society at large.

[1575] And then your child can learn how to deal with you, and in doing so also learn to deal with all other people.

[1576] And that's what you're supposed to do as a parent.

[1577] And so the other thing I would recommend to young parents is don't make too many rules, man Enforce the ones you make and get on the same page so that no matter which way your child turns It's the same world facing them because the children are also unbelievably canny and they will set you against each other So of course they will because they're curious.

[1578] It's like well can I do this?

[1579] Can I do this?

[1580] Can I do this?

[1581] If it works then yes, I can do it and if it doesn't work well Here's the issue for putting your child in the crib and letting that work itself out.

[1582] You know, when kids learn to walk, they always stand up underneath tables.

[1583] And every time they stand up underneath the table, they whack their head.

[1584] And like, how many 50 -year -olds do you know that stand up underneath tables and whack their heads?

[1585] It's like zero, right?

[1586] And the reason for that is the tables never move up and down in height.

[1587] So every time you stand up underneath when you get hit, and so that happens to you twice, and it never happens to you again in your whole life.

[1588] And that's the secret to discipline as well.

[1589] It's like, make your rules.

[1590] Not very many of them.

[1591] Put your disciplinary structure in place carefully, because you're going to have to enforce it, and then don't waver.

[1592] And then what the child will do is hit it twice, and that'll be painful for you and the child, and then they'll never do it again.

[1593] Well, they will, but you know what I mean.

[1594] It's still effective.

[1595] So that's some advice, and it's useful advice.

[1596] Like Jordan Peterson uncensored tonight.

[1597] That's what we're getting here.

[1598] Yeah.

[1599] A lot of colleague go after me this morning.

[1600] They're in a very rude way, and it sort of rattled me up.

[1601] I'm a funny person because I don't really have stomach for conflict.

[1602] You'd never bloody well guessed that, because I've just been in conflict nonstop for two years.

[1603] And it's worn me out quite a bit, so I had some conflict this morning with this colleague who felt that it was his moral obligation to take me to task and so it's sort of what would you say it's defocused me to some degree so that's the consequence that's why I'm less censored tonight than I should probably be I think you guys are okay with that though right well actually that's a perfect segue to the next question which is how do you deal with all the hate yeah yeah that actually works really well it's like Do you see the Simpson episode?

[1604] I love this Simpson episode.

[1605] So Homer is standing in front of Marge and he's mixing up a quart jar of mayonnaise and vodka.

[1606] And he drinks it all down and Marge says, Do you really think that's a good idea?

[1607] Homer says, that's a problem for future, Homer.

[1608] I'd sure hate to be that guy.

[1609] God, I think that's so funny.

[1610] But, well, okay, how do I deal with it?

[1611] it.

[1612] I rely a lot on my family.

[1613] And luckily, fortunately, we had put ourselves together reasonably well by the time all of this happened.

[1614] You know, we didn't have a lot of elephants under the carpet.

[1615] There was some mice maybe under the carpet, but there weren't any elephants.

[1616] Thank God, because if there would have been fractures, we would have been done.

[1617] And there were other times in our life, in our family, where that would have also been the case.

[1618] So I've really been able to rely on my son and my daughter, my wife.

[1619] My wife travels with me. She's here somewhere in the audience.

[1620] She's with her sister who's traveling with us, so that's kind of interesting.

[1621] And my parents have been very helpful, and I've had a handful of friends who have been extremely helpful, very critical, very, very critical.

[1622] They're smart people, and they've been watching what I've been doing, and then my brother -in -law is particularly like that.

[1623] He phoned me up and he says, well, here's, these are things you did right, and this is a bunch of things you did that were stupid and you shouldn't do them again.

[1624] It's like, oh, God, okay.

[1625] But he's right, you know, it's harsh, but he's right, and that's helpful because then you don't have to do it again.

[1626] And so, and then I'm detached from it to some degree, partly because I've learned that you don't want to jump to conclusions.

[1627] Like, what's happened to me that's been strange is that every time someone has come after me so far, the tide has turned.

[1628] So if I can just stick it out for two weeks.

[1629] This is something to know, by the way.

[1630] I'll tell you something you might need to know at some point in your life.

[1631] Okay, if someone comes after you, a bunch of people come after you.

[1632] And the first thing you want to do, you want to talk to somebody that you care about, you want to find out how stupid you are.

[1633] And if you've done anything dumb, because you need to know.

[1634] You need to kind of go over your conscience with a fine -tooth comb.

[1635] But you want to do that while you're presuming your own innocence, right?

[1636] Because you deserve a good defense.

[1637] That presumption of innocence, that's unbelievably important.

[1638] Okay, so now, if you figure out that you're basically in the clear, if you're basically innocent, or that you can, that there's reasonable doubt at least, then mount a defense and don't apologize.

[1639] If you apologize, especially the way things are now, you're done.

[1640] All it is is an admission of guilt, and the vultures will take you out.

[1641] So, do not admit to criminal action if you did not commit it.

[1642] And then you've got to put your head down, and it's like, there's this great movie called Runaway Train.

[1643] I loved that movie.

[1644] And at the end of the movie, there's two criminals on a train, and the train is...

[1645] Throttles open.

[1646] It's in Siberia, and it's going to crash, and there's nothing they can do about it.

[1647] And the old criminal stands up on top of the locomotive in the cold and just leans forward, right?

[1648] He's just, he knows that the end is coming, he's going to confront it head on.

[1649] It's a very cool movie, runaway train.

[1650] And that's what you do for two weeks.

[1651] It's like you just let it happen.

[1652] Just take it.

[1653] And if you can handle it and you don't panic, it'll go away and the tide will flip if you're fortunate you're careful but you've got to be able to withstand that two weeks and that's no easy matter man because you're going to be tempted like mad to abjectly apologize and that's not good and so I've learned to just detach myself and watch and you know lots that's been very strange like the last time that there's been like ten things that just more than that Jesus Christ Here, I'll tell you what my life's been like.

[1654] This is a funny story, I suppose.

[1655] So, about a year ago, I think it was, my faculty association at the university decided to take action against me for something that I hypothetically said.

[1656] And that wasn't the reason, but whatever.

[1657] they got 200 faculty members to sign a petition to have me fired from the university and my son came over and they didn't even contact me even though it was my faculty association they never even contacted me and they didn't really look into this story or anything whatever it doesn't matter but there were 200 of them and my son came over and I said and he got pretty used to there being one you know scam per day or maybe two scandals per day on a good day.

[1658] I said, Julian, the faculty association just presented a petition to the university administration to have me fired, and he said, how many people signed it?

[1659] And I said, well, 200.

[1660] He said, oh, it's only 200 people.

[1661] You have got anything to worry about.

[1662] And that was sort of the reality of our life for, well, it has been for two years.

[1663] It's like, if all that happened that day was 200 of your colleagues wrote a petition to have you fired, then that really wasn't anything you had to take with.

[1664] any degree of seriousness.

[1665] So, and so it's just been, it's just been surreal.

[1666] It's like one bloody scandal after another.

[1667] And so, but I guess the other thing that's been helpful to me in that is, and this was fortune, good fortune, when all this first broke, I already, see, I had recorded pretty much everything I said to my students for 30 years, you know, like all my lectures are online.

[1668] Now, not everything I've said, but it's a representative sample, man. It's like years of courses, including ones that I taught back in the 1990s.

[1669] You know, and very soon after the first political scandal broke around me, you know, people were going through what I had lectured about with a fine -tooth comb to find a, they're going through with a fine -tooth comb to find a smoking pistol, which is a terrible mixture of metaphors.

[1670] But they didn't find one, and that's because I have been very careful with what I've said.

[1671] And so, that's, that's also protected me, right?

[1672] Luckily, my past hasn't been too scandalous, and a lot of that's good fortune.

[1673] So, and then I also believe in what I'm doing, you know, like I've really thought through the things that I was talking to you, to everybody about tonight.

[1674] Like, I've really thought through them when I wrote Maps of Meaning, my first book, and I probably over -edited it.

[1675] But I think, I think I probably wrote every sense.

[1676] in that book somewhere between 20 and 50 times.

[1677] And I actually mean that literally, because the way I write is like, I'll write a paragraph, and then I cut the paragraph and put it in a separate document, and then I list out all the sentences and put spaces between them.

[1678] Then I write variations of the sentences to see if I can get a better sentence, and if I do, then I replace it.

[1679] And I did that over and over and over and over and over until.

[1680] And what I was looking for, I wanted to make every sentence something I could not challenge.

[1681] right so I'd hit it from every angle I could see can I make this sentence better do I believe what this sentence says does it seem like something solid that you could actually stand on that was the test and I was trying to hit it as hard as I can with everything I could think to see if I could break it and what all I kept was what I couldn't break and you know I re -read maps of meaning a couple of months ago because I made the audio version so I read it out loud you know and I think I'm still pleased with what it is that I wrote and that was 20 years ago now.

[1682] I got it right enough so that it changed my life, changed my family's life, it's changed the lives of the people who've been exposed to the material.

[1683] And it's not because of the brilliance of my thought.

[1684] It's because I was able to put forward these archetypal themes that I had learned in relatively clear language and everyone needs to know those stories.

[1685] You have to know them to be properly human.

[1686] They're part of our essential cultural heritage, let's say.

[1687] So I also have faith in that because it's, I've seen it work so much.

[1688] And so that also helps me handle this.

[1689] And then all these events, well, you've been around for what, 45 or 50 of these, I mean, what do you think of them?

[1690] It's awesome.

[1691] Why?

[1692] It's powerful because of this, because we could hear a pin drop right now.

[1693] It's incredible.

[1694] And the amount of people that we meet after that will do tonight.

[1695] that you sparked something in them that they stopped doing drugs or they got their shit together and they got a job and found a better relationship or whatever else.

[1696] And they're often tough people.

[1697] Yeah.

[1698] Right, you know, they've been through the mill.

[1699] How about that, the father and son that came backstage a couple months ago, they said they hadn't, the father said he hadn't seen his son, I think in about five years.

[1700] And somehow it came to be that they both read 12 rules for life.

[1701] And that was the first night that they had seen each other.

[1702] Yeah, that was good.

[1703] That's powerful.

[1704] That was good, man, yeah.

[1705] Yeah, well, and some of this is a real...

[1706] Some of this is a tremendous adventure, you know, like all of this technological change, the sorts of things that you're doing online with your talk show.

[1707] And, like, these are having widespread cultural impact, and so that's a bloody amazing.

[1708] And so, well, life is an adventure, if you're lucky, that's about the best you can hope for, and this is certainly an adventure, that's for sure.

[1709] So, hooray for that.

[1710] That right there seems like the right ending.

[1711] Should we end it right there or one more?

[1712] Was there any chance?

[1713] Get out of here.

[1714] All right, this is a good one.

[1715] It's better than a barrage of fruit.

[1716] It's Long Island.

[1717] They throw bagels.

[1718] Or pizza.

[1719] Man, the carbs in this town.

[1720] Jesus.

[1721] I live in L .A. now.

[1722] I'm doing this paleo thing.

[1723] I gained about 27 pounds today.

[1724] I like this one.

[1725] This is a good ending.

[1726] what would a younger Jordan Peterson think of the guy sitting here tonight?

[1727] We could have got out of here a minute ago, but yeah.

[1728] I would think he'd think that he got what he wanted.

[1729] On that note, guys, it's been a pleasure coming back to Long Island and doing this for you guys.

[1730] I am going to get out of the way.

[1731] Make some noise for Dr. Jordan Peterson, everybody.

[1732] Thank you very much.

[1733] It's a pleasure being here, and I appreciate very much you coming out, so good night.

[1734] If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life and antidote to chaos.

[1735] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1736] See Jordan B. Peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1737] I hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1738] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts.

[1739] I haven't decided what to play next week, so it'll be a surprise.

[1740] Thanks for listening.

[1741] I'll talk to you next week.

[1742] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at jordan