The World is Your Oyster

[0] Welcome to season two, episode 24 of the Jordan v. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter, collaborator, manager, and currently on a week -long fast just to see what happens.

[2] And I feel good, 83 hours in at the moment.

[3] I've still been exercising, just living my life.

[4] It's way easier than expected.

[5] I've been doing fasting for the last three months between 18 and 24 hours, 48 hours, and I swear the more I do it, the easier it gets.

[6] I did a DEXA scan last week, which measures body fat accurately and muscle tissue and bone density, and we'll see what a week of salt water does to me. I don't think it'll do a lot, to be honest, but that will be fun to put up on YouTube.

[7] I'm not going to get into a weekly update about family because honestly things are still crazily up in the air.

[8] We'll know more next week and I'll update you then.

[9] Something I learned recently that might be helpful, random piece of information, did you know cold showers or cold water immersion lowers cortisol levels?

[10] If you're having trouble sleeping, it should help with that too.

[11] That's my tip of the day.

[12] So that's about it for now, please enjoy this podcast, a 12 Rules for Life lecture from 2018 recorded in Winnipeg.

[13] For you Americans who don't recognize Winnipeg, it's in the middle of Canada.

[14] Nobody really visits there.

[15] Will you pass through it if you drive from Toronto to Vancouver though, the places people do visit?

[16] I'm just kidding.

[17] Winnipeg, you rock.

[18] I was able to title this week's episode.

[19] So I've titled it, The World is Your Oyster.

[20] Enjoy.

[21] When we return, the world is Orster, a 12 Rules for Life lecture by Jordan V. Peterson.

[22] Thank you very much all of you for coming here tonight.

[23] It's wonderful to see you all, and it's great to be in Winnipeg, so I hope we have a fine time tonight.

[24] I've been using these lectures as an opportunity, because they are an opportunity, I mean, to have serious conversations with people.

[25] It might be strange to think about a lecture as a discussion or a conversation, but But it is a conversation, you know, if, unless you're just reading it or working off pre -prepared notes, you know, if you're just addressing the audience and you're watching everybody and listening to people, listening to the watching individuals, but listening to the whole crowd as well.

[26] And you can tell how people are responding and you can see if people are following the arguments.

[27] And so, you know, when you participate in the conversation, there's a lot of nonverbal participation as well.

[28] the way you hold your eyes and well the way you move I know when I've got the audience engaged that it's silent nobody rustles around nobody moves you know their tension is focused on the front so I can tell when I'm in the right place so to speak conceptually and when everyone's on board and I get a chance to keep working on the ideas that I've been working on for 30 years in real time which I really like doing and so it's a chance to think on my feet.

[29] And I'm going to talk a fair bit about the book tonight, about 12 rules and a little bit about my other book, Maps of Meaning, which I put out an audio version, June 12th.

[30] And if you found 12 rules for life useful, then you might take a shot at listening to Maps of Meaning.

[31] It's a hard book, but the audio version, I think, makes it more accessible.

[32] So, I'm going to run through those themes, and then I was reading some poetry today, too, so I thought I might share that with you.

[33] I'm sure you're thrilled about that idea, but this is poetry written by Carl Marx.

[34] I didn't know he wrote poetry, and so I stumbled across some of the poems that he wrote when he was a young man. And, you know, I noticed with my book, my first book, MAPS of Meaning, actually started as a poem.

[35] It was about 20 pages long, and I was trying to explain.

[36] some ideas I had about, well, I was kind of obsessed with the Cold War and about what I knew about Nazi Germany, both of those things, and they were plaguing me, along with questions about the meaning of life in the face of its suffering.

[37] And I wrote a poem about it.

[38] And then I noticed that often my undergraduates, who are really trying to wrestle seriously with an essay, with an idea if, you know, if they were going to write about something that really gripped them personally, is that sometimes they would start by writing poetry.

[39] It was often very bad, the poetry.

[40] But that wasn't really the point.

[41] And then at the same time, along the same years, I suppose, I also spent a lot of time trying to understand the role of art in literature, in cognition, in human thinking, because obviously engaging in artistic production, including writing of such things as poetry, is actually a form of thinking, right?

[42] I mean, you kind of get the idea, which is a misbegotten idea, that what artists do is produce beautiful things, and that's the purpose of art, and it's not.

[43] The purpose of art is to think, and the productions are the secondary consequence of the thought process, and they kind of encapsulate the thought process.

[44] Like what artists do, visual artists say, painters, is they teach you how to see, and they really do that.

[45] That's what they do.

[46] They're perceptual geniuses.

[47] And when you look at their art, you learn how to look at the world.

[48] You learn what's beautiful and what isn't.

[49] You learn what's remarkable about individuals and what's remarkable about landscapes, what's beautiful, all of those things.

[50] And poetry is like that too.

[51] And so when people wrestle with ideas, they first encounter what they don't understand, because that's what you have to think about.

[52] You don't have to think about what you already understand.

[53] You've managed that.

[54] You have to think about what you don't understand.

[55] and then thoughts have to have a birthplace because they don't just magically appear in your head with no preparation.

[56] Like, that isn't how thinking works.

[57] Thinking is very, very complicated.

[58] And the first way that you encounter what you don't understand is through imagination, and that's the domain of art. And what real artists do is they go out to the frontier and they re -conceptualized perception and using imagination and they lay the ground for fully articulated knowledge.

[59] That's what artists do.

[60] And poetry is a very interesting medium because it stands halfway between the image and the fully articulated word.

[61] Because of course poetry is richly image -laden and also saturated in emotion.

[62] And so it's often the case if that you're trying to express an idea, it's not always the case, but it's often the case that if someone is trying to express an idea, they'll do it in song or they'll do it in poetry before they can express it as full -fledged philosophy.

[63] And so you're grappling with an idea, and that manifests itself in being gripped by motivation and emotion, and then that produces a burst of imagination, and then that can be represented visually, or it can be represented in poetry, and then maybe it can be represented in story, and only after that can it be fully articulated.

[64] And so that's how thought works.

[65] It goes from the absolute unknown itself to the relatively unknown.

[66] That would be the domain of imagination and dream.

[67] and then from that, fully articulated verbal representations are extracted.

[68] And that's actually how your brain works, and your right hemisphere is involved mostly.

[69] Mostly, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it's close enough.

[70] Your right hemisphere is involved in that initial imaginative grappling process that's emotion -laden and image -laden.

[71] And then as you work on it, especially as you articulate it, then your left hemisphere dominates more and more in terms of the representations.

[72] So that's the process by which thought generated.

[73] That's also why you see that artists are on the forefront of conceptual revolutions, you know, like the Renaissance, for example, which laid the groundwork for the emergence of the modern West, was an artistic movement to begin with, right?

[74] It was great artists, especially in Northern Italy.

[75] There was this absolute flowering of staggering art. One of the things you saw, for example, in Northern Italy, in the Renaissance was, and this was when medieval times shifted to modern times, you know, the religious images that medieval people used were very iconic, right?

[76] You look at medieval art. It's very iconic.

[77] It looks very old -fashioned to us, 12th and 13th century stuff before that even.

[78] You know, it's almost cartoon -like.

[79] And very, very iconic images of Christ, for example.

[80] They're generic images, in a sense.

[81] But as soon as the Renaissance hit, then all of a sudden you saw these religious figures become humanized, so they actually took on individual, recognizable individual characteristics.

[82] And there was a revolution in an idea that accompanied that, because what it meant was that the divine images in some sense were being brought to earth and transformed into something that was much closer to the individual, to the everyday individual.

[83] And it was that idea that laid the groundwork for the generation of the spread of democratic ideas, at least in part, the idea that each individual was important enough to be regarded as the locus of political responsibility.

[84] And that was all laid out by the artists first.

[85] Like they were grappling with that.

[86] That's why these paintings from Northern Italy, the Renaissance paintings, they're so unbelievably valued by people.

[87] You know, I was in this museum in New York, and I don't remember which one it was a while back.

[88] And it was quite a room.

[89] There were paintings in that room by great masters like Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Botticelli and these great, great Renaissance artists.

[90] there was probably maybe there was a dozen paintings in the room and each of those paintings would have been worth who knows, a quarter of a billion dollars so I was standing in this room with like three billion dollars worth of paintings and you think there's incredibly expensive artifacts in an incredibly expensive building on prime real estate in the middle of the most expensive city in the world unbelievably highly valued and people from all over the world making pilgrimages to see them it's like something's going on there right that's not trivial there's no way you're spend that much time and effort and money, right?

[91] Serious money, like dead, serious money.

[92] There isn't more expensive artifacts that we know of than high -quality art. You know, paintings go for $200 million.

[93] It's like, what's going on with that, you know?

[94] I mean, obviously, there's status symbols to some degree, but that's not, but the question is, why are they status symbols, you know?

[95] And so, so anyways, that's a bit of a, what would you call, meditation on the utility of poetry.

[96] Now, and so I'm going to start with a bit of a poem from Shakespeare, and there's a specific reason for it, so I'll just read it.

[97] It's just a fragment, and most of you've probably heard this, so it's from, as you like it, all the world's a stage, and all the men and women, merely players, they have their exits and their entrance, and one man in his time plays many parts.

[98] Well, that's worth taking apart.

[99] And Shakespeare, of course, his writing is well regarded as close to immortal as anything that human beings produce might be.

[100] And the reason for that is that it's endlessly dense.

[101] That's one way of thinking about it.

[102] You can dive into it like you can into anything profound and never come up again.

[103] It's just connected to everything, you know.

[104] And so, and he makes a set of propositions here, and you can just zip by them, you know, without really noticing what they are.

[105] But it's helpful to notice what they are.

[106] All the world's a stage.

[107] Okay, well, that's a metaphysical presupposition, that.

[108] And it's not a trivial one.

[109] It might even be an ontological presupposition.

[110] So ontology is the study of the structure of being.

[111] And so Shakespeare's actually making an ontological argument.

[112] He said, all the world is a stage.

[113] Okay, so what does that mean exactly?

[114] Because that's not the same as saying the world is, what do you say?

[115] The world is fundamentally a material place.

[116] That's a completely different claim.

[117] The world is a stage, that's a particular way of looking at the world.

[118] And so what do you do on a stage is, well, you play your part, and each person plays their part.

[119] And so there's something very technically very interesting about that claim, because what Shakespeare is, is suggesting is that the world is best conceived of as a forum for action, because of course that's what the stage is for, a place that you act things out.

[120] And there's a secondary consideration that emerges out of that is that, well, if the world's a stage and you play your part, then what should your part be?

[121] What's the proper part to play?

[122] And you might say, well, maybe that's the fundamental question of life.

[123] You're on the stage.

[124] It's a drama of life and death.

[125] That's clearly the case.

[126] You play your part.

[127] Well, two questions.

[128] What is the part you're playing?

[129] That's the first question.

[130] One of the things I learned from Carl Jung, which really shocked me, you know, Jung said, everybody acts out a story.

[131] A myth, actually.

[132] That was his more fundamental claim.

[133] So myth is like a fundamental story.

[134] You act out a myth whether you know it or not.

[135] Well, that's an interesting claim.

[136] And his secondary claim was, you should know which myth you're acting out.

[137] Because it might not be one you would choose consciously.

[138] You might be acting something out unconsciously that it's a tragedy, a catastrophe, or worse than that.

[139] And you should understand what it is that you're up to.

[140] You might think, well, I know what I'm up to.

[141] It's like, no, you don't.

[142] You're a complicated creature.

[143] You're an unbelievably complicated creature, and you are not transparent to yourself, and it isn't necessarily the case at all that you know what you're up to.

[144] You know, and if your life is miserable beyond your ability to tolerate it, then it might be that you're playing the wrong sort of part.

[145] Now, you know, I mean, people get unlucky and I'm fully aware of that.

[146] I know that people who are through who people can suffer dreadfully through no fault of their own.

[147] There's no doubt about that.

[148] There's an arbitrary element to life, but it's also certainly the case that you can bring on yourself and others a lot of misery that's unnecessary and that happens a lot and that's a part as well.

[149] Okay, so the world's a stage.

[150] Then the question might be, and you play a part and you play a part whether you know what the parties or not.

[151] Here's another idea.

[152] Let's say you haven't written your part.

[153] Well, then someone else has, or something else has.

[154] And another thing I learned from Jung, which really scared me as well, once I started to understand the psychoanalysts, you know, Jung said, people don't have ideas.

[155] Ideas have people.

[156] And that was a very, once I understood the psychoanalyst, that became very terrifying, because like cognitive psychologists, when they think about the brain, they kind of use a computer model.

[157] You're an information processor, right?

[158] And you have modules, cognitive modules, say, or emotional modules for that matter.

[159] But the psychoanalyst, that isn't really the way they looked at the world.

[160] The way they thought of your psyche was that you're composed of a lot of different sub -personalities and sub -beings.

[161] And they're sort of, they're aggregated together into something with some unity, and that's you.

[162] But those sub -components of you, those things are alive, and they have a will, and they have a desire to live.

[163] Well, Nietzsche said, every drive tends to philosophize in its spirit.

[164] And so you can be possessed in some sense by elements of your being that you don't have fully under control.

[165] Now, you know that, everyone knows that, because you do stupid things when you get angry, right?

[166] Or vengeful, you know, you think, oh my God, how could I do that?

[167] How could I think that?

[168] Or maybe you're having trouble controlling your diet and you get upset, you go to the refrigerator and you eat like a quart of ice cream and a loaf of bread.

[169] That's what happens to people.

[170] That's what happens to people with eating disorders.

[171] And, you know, they go into kind of a trance and they just eat everything.

[172] And then they kind of come to and they think, what the hell was that?

[173] That was the last thing I wanted to do.

[174] And, you know, you do that if you're foolish in love and if you do that if you're possessed by a passion.

[175] And it's very easy to become possessed by elements of your own being that that you don't have fully under control.

[176] And then some of those elements are systems of ideas, you know, that are in you.

[177] That's Dawkins' idea of meme, essentially.

[178] But he didn't take it as far as the psychoanalysts took it, because a meme, a system of ideas that's shared culturally, can inhabit you like a being, and direct your actions.

[179] And that's what happens in the case of ideology.

[180] You know, people who have an ideology say, this is what I believe.

[181] It's like, oh, no, no, no, that thing has you.

[182] in its grip and you're a puppet.

[183] You think, I think this.

[184] It's like, no, you don't.

[185] It thinks you.

[186] That's what happens.

[187] And you know that.

[188] If you, you know, if you look at what happened in places like Nazi Germany, everyone wonders, what the hell happened, man?

[189] What happened there?

[190] It's like, well, everybody got possessed by a set of ideas, powerful ideas, right?

[191] And they, they murderous ideas, genocidal ideas.

[192] And you can't say so much that the Germans had those ideas, as you can say that those ideas had the Germans.

[193] And the same thing with the Soviet Union.

[194] The same thing with Mao is China.

[195] Anytime you're under the sway of an ideology, something has you, and it's making you play a part.

[196] And you might ask, well, is that a part you want to play?

[197] Hard to say.

[198] Hard to say what you want.

[199] So I'll read this little poem from Marx now.

[200] So it was interesting to me for the reasons that I told you about, that art, poetry is the birthplace of ideas.

[201] ideas, and ideas can possess you.

[202] So it's like, well, what was Marks up to exactly?

[203] Well, maybe we can find out a little bit by reading his poems.

[204] His early poem when he was a young man. It's called Invocation of One in Despair.

[205] So, a God has snatched from me, my all, in the curse and rack of destiny.

[206] All his worlds are gone beyond recall.

[207] nothing but revenge is left to me on myself revenge all proudly wreak on that being that enthroned Lord make my strength a patchwork of what's weak leave my better self without reward I shall build my throne high overhead cold tremendous shall its summit be for its bold work, superstitious dread for its martial blackest agony.

[208] Who looks on it with a healthy eye shall turn back, struck, deathly pale and dumb, clutched by blind and chill mortality.

[209] May his happiness prepare its tomb.

[210] And the Almighty's lightning shall rebound from that massive iron giant.

[211] If he brings my walls and tower down, eternity shall raise.

[212] them up defiant.

[213] It's a hell of a poem.

[214] Literally.

[215] You know, it reminds me, and I haven't done enough background research to find out if there's a connection.

[216] It reminds me a lot of the poetry in Paradise Lost.

[217] And Paradise Lost is a very famous poem, and it's about the rebellion of Satan against God.

[218] And it's an attempt by Milton around the canonical Judeo -Christian in writings that make up the narrative substructure of our culture.

[219] There's a cloud of images and stories that are not really written down, but they're just part of our cultural heritage.

[220] The idea of hell, for example, is one.

[221] And really the idea of the devil, which is almost discussed not at all in the biblical corpus.

[222] Very, very, very, very few references.

[223] Almost none.

[224] But there's this cloud of ideas about evil and so forth that have aggregated themselves in a poetic sense and in an imagistic sense around this core set of narrative writings.

[225] And what Milton tried to do was to articulate all those, and that's why he wrote Paradise Lost, and it's about the highest angel in God's heavenly kingdom.

[226] Something approximately equivalent to rationality, I would say, attempting to displace what's transcendent with its own kingdom.

[227] And in doing that, at least in part, as in revenge against God.

[228] It's something like that.

[229] And this poem really reminds me of that.

[230] And I don't know if Marx was reading Paradise Lost at that point or not.

[231] In some sense, it doesn't matter, because Paradise Lost had such a walloping impact on European culture that Marx would have been familiar with its themes implicitly from everything else he read anyways.

[232] So, but it's quite a telling poem because the person who wrote it is a very, very angry, desperately angry, you know, and hopeless, and then worse, out for revenge.

[233] And then worse, out to build a structure that would extract that revenge.

[234] It's like, well, you know, it's a...

[235] What happened with Marx is quite the damn mystery, the way his ideas unfolded in the 20th century.

[236] You know, it's not so obvious why that happened.

[237] And, you know, there was the cover story, and that was the compassion story, for the downtrodden, which is part and parcel of the Marxist story.

[238] And then there's the...

[239] Well, then there's what happened when that hypothetical compassion manifested itself in the world.

[240] And that was absolutely brutal.

[241] It's brutal beyond comprehension, right?

[242] At least 100 million people died.

[243] And we should be clear about what it meant to die.

[244] I was...

[245] What it meant to die under communism.

[246] I was...

[247] looking online the other day for critiques of capitalism because it's common now when anybody puts forth an argument about the murderousness of communism and the stats that are associated with that 100 million deaths, for example, that's from the Black Book of Communism which is a very good scholarly reference about what happened in the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

[248] It's common now, that people who are attempting to revive the spirit of Marxism, and there seem to be more of them all the time, to make counterclaims that capitalism killed just as many people.

[249] And then they, usually the stats are something like X number of people died of starvation, and X number of people died because they had lack of, you know, they didn't have access to clean water, they didn't have access to proper medication.

[250] And so, I mean, if you stack up those deaths beside the deaths that were produced by the communists, then you can, you know, you can even the scales.

[251] But it's quite the piece of logic, as far as I'm concerned, because there's a big difference between the fact that people die and even the fact that perhaps they wouldn't have to die if other people intervened and saved them and actually killing people.

[252] Like, that's seriously, man, that's a big difference.

[253] And one of the logical flaws there is, like, everybody dies.

[254] You can't blame that on capitalism.

[255] Now, you might be able to say, well, you know, capitalists could have been better at distributing their resources more effectively so that more people were protected against a mortality that emerged too soon.

[256] And, you know, I suppose there's some truth in that critique because none of us are perfect and none of our systems are perfect.

[257] And perhaps it's possible that those who over the last hundred years have generated some, excess wealth could have been more intelligent and and what would you say?

[258] Intelligent and wise and thoughtful and far -seeing and done better with their money than they did.

[259] Fair enough, but that is not the same as lining people up and shooting them and torturing them and actively killing them and that's what happened with the communists.

[260] And so we need a...

[261] And so this moral equivalence of the communists the communist system and the capitalist system is, it's preposterous.

[262] Now, one of the things that's also quite interesting in that light is what's been happening economically around the world, especially in the last 15 years, because things have really transformed themselves in very interesting ways.

[263] So, you know, the wall didn't fall till 1989, right?

[264] So really, that's when the Second World War ended, as far as I'm concerned, is in 1989.

[265] You know, the dramatic part of it ended in 1945, but the Cold War raged until 1989.

[266] And that was an extension of World War II.

[267] And, you know, it was constantly bubbling up all over the world.

[268] It bubbled up in Korea, and it bubbled up in Vietnam and Cambodia.

[269] And throughout Africa, and all through South America, you know, as the capitalists and the communists fought for control over people's...

[270] Psychees and also their territories and and then that didn't really stop until 1989 and so from then onward there wasn't the same Tremendous pressure from the radical left to warp and twist governments all over the world into the collectivist into into into into into the collectivist vision let's say and so what's been the consequence of that that the removal of that ideological pressure, or at least the partial cessation of that ideological pressure.

[271] Well, there wasn't a lot of, things didn't change a lot for a while after that, but that's not surprising.

[272] You know, when something falls apart, well, there's going to be a bit of a catastrophe in its aftermath, no matter what it is.

[273] And then it takes a while for the new situation to sort of manifest itself.

[274] And, you know, what's been happening over the last, let's say, since the year 2000, it's only a decade after the wall fell down, what's been happening, happening since the year 2000 is actually quite miraculous.

[275] And so let me lay that out a little bit.

[276] So I first figured this out.

[277] I worked on a UN committee about four years ago.

[278] It was a committee set up by the UN Secretary General to produce a document that was like maybe an overview of something approximating economic, sustainable economic development, whatever that means.

[279] It's a hard thing to, what is sustainable is really, really hard to figure out.

[280] That was the idea, and you can kind of see the rationale for that.

[281] It's like, you don't want to do something today that completely screws you over in a week, right?

[282] You don't want to do something in a year that makes things worse five years from now.

[283] So if you're sensible, whatever you do today also works tomorrow and next week and next year and 10 years from now, and maybe works for you and your family and your community as well, all at the same time.

[284] So it's trying to operate within that system of multiple constraints that you might regard as something approximately.

[285] remaining sustainable.

[286] So we were trying to wrestle with that.

[287] What would it be like what would it mean to have a sustainable fishery, for example, or maybe a sustainable energy policy, etc., etc., to start thinking over some reasonably long period of time, which even in itself is even a complicated problem, because it's not obvious what period of time you should think over.

[288] You might say, well, we should think over a thousand years, because we have the long -term vision.

[289] It's like, you don't know what it's going to be like in 10 years.

[290] You know, at the rate of technological transformation right now is so unbelievably extreme that I don't think we can even see very clearly 10 years down the road, so it's hard to plan for like a thousand years.

[291] You know, so anyways, that's all very complicated.

[292] But we were producing this document, and I got the opportunity to, first of all, watch how a document like that was produced.

[293] You know, it's like, well, who works on a higher level?

[294] level plan like that.

[295] Well, all the people that were on the committee were former heads of states, the people who were technically appointed to the committee.

[296] And then they all produced hierarchies of people underneath them who actually worked on the document.

[297] Because those people, like if you're the ex -president of France, you're busy.

[298] You're busy.

[299] Like, you're moving around, man. You're occupied all the time.

[300] You don't have time to spend two years thinking about a new plan for sustainable global development.

[301] So even though you're moving around, man, you're occupied all the time.

[302] You don't have time to spend two years thinking about a new plan for sustainable global development.

[303] So even though you're you might be the figurehead on the committee, you don't do any of the work.

[304] And so it gets passed down to the people that you're associated with until it gets to someone who will actually do it.

[305] Well, who are those people?

[306] Well, they're usually, sometimes they're academics, sometimes they're political bureaucrats.

[307] They're people that, for one reason, have a little bit of extra time and interest, but none of them are trained to do this.

[308] Because no one's trained to produce a global plan for economic, sustainable development.

[309] Nobody has that training.

[310] So none of the people doing it know what the hell they're doing.

[311] So, and it's not that surprising because it's a complicated problem.

[312] So that was interesting to watch.

[313] And then we got the first draft of the document, and it was awful.

[314] It was awful.

[315] It was like it was written in 1984.

[316] It was a Cold War document.

[317] It was North against South, you know, the privileged North against the underprivileged South, and it was capitalist against socialist.

[318] No sense that, you know, that there could be cooperation between, those two ends of the political distribution.

[319] No sense that the South was not what it was in 1984.

[320] I mean, the developing world has developed a lot since 1984 and is developing extraordinarily quickly.

[321] And, you know, I mean, is China more of an economic powerhouse than the United States?

[322] Well, no, but China plus India might be.

[323] You know, I mean, the tide is turned in many ways, so it was unbelievably outdated.

[324] So we thought, well, we'd rewrite the narrative, and not so much look for oppressors and victims and all of that horrible nonsense, but to see if we could put together a document that was predicated on the idea that everybody could work together in some loose, what would you call it, some loose association of goodwill and that we could make things better instead of just pointing to whose fault everything was.

[325] And so we rewrote the underlying narrative.

[326] And that was interesting, too, because one of the things I learned, this is a rule that I didn't write in 12 rules, but it was one of the possible rules.

[327] Opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.

[328] So one of the things you learn if you do that sort of thing, that sort of thing I was talking about, is that if you actually do the writing, then you win.

[329] Because for someone to do something about that, they would have to do the writing.

[330] and it's just easier just to take what you've written than it is to write a whole different thing and so you might think well why the hell do I have to do the writing and the answer is well because then you get to do the writing and it's an interesting thing if you're at work I mean I don't think that you should allow people to take advantage of you I think that's a big mistake but you know if you're angry because excess responsibility has been dumped on you you know independent of whether or not you're being taken advantage of that's a different issue you might reverse that and think well, where the responsibility is, that's where the authority is.

[331] And if it happens to fall to you, that makes you indispensable, man. That gives you a stake in the game.

[332] So that was quite interesting.

[333] So I got a chance to read about, I don't know, 200 books in the months that I was working on this document.

[334] And most of those were books on economic development, but also on ecological matters.

[335] So I was interested in climate change and overfishing and deforestation and the demolition of decline in speciation, extinction, you know, all the things you hear about that are looming catastrophes that bedevil the human race and the planet, some of which we're responsible for.

[336] And I read a bunch of everything I could get my hands on, including books by people like Bjorn Lomburg, who put himself forward as the skeptical environmentalist.

[337] I would highly recommend Bjorn Lomberg, by the way.

[338] He wrote a book called How to Spend $75 billion to Make the World a Better Place.

[339] And it's a really, really smart.

[340] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 24 of the Jordan v. Peterson podcast.

[341] I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter, collaborator, manager, and currently on a week -long fast just to see what happens.

[342] And I feel good.

[343] 83 hours in at the moment.

[344] I've still been exercising, just live in my life.

[345] It's way easier than expected.

[346] I've been doing fasting for the last three months, between 18 and 24 hours, 48 hours, and I swear the more I do it, the easier it gets.

[347] I did a dexas scan last week, which measures body fat accurately and muscle tissue and bone density, and we'll see what a week of salt water does to me. I don't think it'll do a lot, to be honest, but that will be fun to put up on YouTube.

[348] not going to get into a weekly update about family because honestly things are still crazily up in the air.

[349] We'll know more next week and I'll update you then.

[350] Something I learned recently that might be helpful, random piece of information, did you know cold showers or cold water immersion lowers cortisol levels?

[351] If you're having trouble sleeping, it should help with that too.

[352] That's my tip of the day.

[353] So that's about it for now.

[354] Please enjoy this podcast, a 12 Rules for Life lecture from 2018, recorded in Winnipeg.

[355] For you Americans who don't recognize Winnipeg, it's in the middle of Canada.

[356] Nobody really visits there.

[357] Will you pass through it if you drive from Toronto to Vancouver, though, the places people do visit.

[358] I'm just kidding.

[359] Winnipeg, you rock.

[360] I was able to title this week's episode, so I've titled it, The World is Your Oyster.

[361] Enjoy.

[362] When we return, the world is your oyster, a 12 Rules for Life lecture by Journey.

[363] v. Peterson.

[364] Thank you very much all of you for coming here tonight.

[365] It's wonderful to see you all and it's great to be in Winnipeg so I hope we have a fine time tonight.

[366] I've been using these lectures as an opportunity because they are an opportunity I mean to have serious conversations with people.

[367] It might be strange to think about a lecture as a discussion or a conversation but it is a conversation you know if unless you're just reading it.

[368] or working off pre -prepared notes.

[369] You know, if you're just addressing the audience and you're watching everybody and listening to people, listening to the watching individuals, but listening to the whole crowd as well.

[370] And you can tell how people are responding and you can see if people are following the arguments.

[371] And so, you know, when you participate in the conversation, there's a lot of nonverbal participation as well.

[372] The way you hold your eyes and, well, the way you move, I know when I've got the audience, engaged, that it's silent.

[373] Nobody rustles around, nobody moves.

[374] You know, their tension is focused on the front so I can tell when I'm in the right place, so to speak, conceptually and when everyone's on board.

[375] I get a chance to keep working on the ideas that I've been working on for 30 years in real time, which I really like doing.

[376] And so it's a chance to think on my feet.

[377] And I'm going to talk a fair bit about the book tonight.

[378] about 12 rules and a little bit about my other book, Maps of Meaning, which I put out an audio version, June 12th.

[379] And if you found 12 rules for life useful, then you might take a shot at listening to Maps of Meaning.

[380] It's a hard book, but the audio version, I think, makes it more accessible.

[381] So, I'm going to run through those themes, and then I was reading some poetry today, too, so I thought I might share that with you.

[382] I'm sure you're thrilled about that idea, but this is poetry written by Carl Marx.

[383] I didn't know he wrote poetry, and so I found, I stumbled across some of the poems that he wrote when he was a young man. And, you know, I noticed with my, my book, my first book, Maps of Meaning, actually started as a poem.

[384] It was about 20 pages long.

[385] And I was trying to express some ideas I had about, well, I was kind of obsessed with the Cold War and about what I knew about Nazi Germany, both of those things.

[386] And They were plaguing me, along with questions about the meaning of life in the face of its suffering.

[387] And I wrote a poem about it.

[388] And then I noticed that often my undergraduates, who are really trying to wrestle seriously with an essay, with an idea if they were going to write about something that really gripped them personally, is that sometimes they would start by writing poetry.

[389] It was often very bad, the poetry.

[390] But that wasn't really the point.

[391] And then at the same time, along the same years, I suppose, I also spent a lot of time trying to understand the role of art in literature, in cognition, in human thinking, because obviously engaging in artistic production, including writing of such things as poetry, is actually a form of thinking, right?

[392] I mean, you kind of get the idea, which is a misbegotten idea, that what artists do is produce beautiful things, and that's the purpose of art, and it's not.

[393] The purpose of art is to think, and the productions are the secondary consequence of the thought process, and they kind of encapsulate the thought process.

[394] Like what artists do, visual artists say, painters, is they teach you how to see, and they really do that.

[395] That's what they do.

[396] They're perceptual geniuses, and when you look at their art, you learn how to look at the world.

[397] You learn what's beautiful and what isn't, and you learn what's remarkable about individuals and what's remarkable about landscapes, what's beautiful, all of those things.

[398] And poetry is like that, too.

[399] And so when people wrestle with ideas, they first encounter what they don't understand, because that's what you have to think about.

[400] You don't have to think about what you already understand.

[401] You've managed that.

[402] You have to think about what you don't understand.

[403] And then thoughts have to have a birthplace because they don't just magically appear in your head, with no preparation.

[404] Like, that isn't how thinking works.

[405] Thinking is very, very complicated.

[406] And the first way that you encounter what you don't understand is through imagination.

[407] And that's the domain of art. And what artists, real artists, do is they go out to the frontier and they reconceptualized perception and using imagination.

[408] And they lay the ground for fully articulated knowledge.

[409] That's what artists do.

[410] And poetry is a very interesting medium.

[411] because it stands halfway between the image and the fully articulated word.

[412] Because, of course, poetry is richly image -laden and also saturated in emotion.

[413] And so it's often the case if you're trying to express an idea, it's not always the case, but it's often the case that if someone is trying to express an idea, they'll do it in song or they'll do it in poetry before they can express it as full -fledged philosophy.

[414] And so you're grappling with an idea and that manifests itself in being gripped by motivation and emotion and then that produces a burst of imagination and then that can be represented visually or it can be represented in poetry and then maybe it can be represented in story and only after that can it be fully articulated.

[415] And so that's how thought works.

[416] It goes from the absolute unknown itself to the relatively unknown that would be the domain of imagination and dream and then from that, fully articulated verbal representations are extracted.

[417] And that's actually how your brain works, and your right hemisphere is involved mostly.

[418] Mostly, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but it's close enough.

[419] Your right hemisphere is involved in that initial imaginative grappling process that's emotion -laden and image -laden.

[420] And then as you work on it, especially as you articulate it, then your left hemisphere dominates more and more in terms of the representations.

[421] So that's the process by which thought generated.

[422] That's also why you see that artists are on the forefront of conceptual revolutions, you know, like the Renaissance, for example, which laid the groundwork for the emergence of the modern West, was an artistic movement to begin with, right?

[423] It was great artists, especially in Northern Italy.

[424] There was this absolute flowering of staggering art. One of the things you saw, for example, in Northern Italy, in the Renaissance, was, and this was when medieval times shifted to modern times, you know, the religious images that medieval people use, were very iconic, right?

[425] You look at medieval art. It's very iconic.

[426] It looks very old fashion to us, 12th and 13th century stuff before that even.

[427] You know, it's almost cartoon -like, and very, very iconic images of Christ, for example.

[428] They're generic images, in a sense.

[429] But as soon as the Renaissance hit, then all of a sudden you saw these religious figures become humanized, so they actually took on individual, recognizable individual characteristics.

[430] And there was a revolution in an idea that accompanied that, because what it meant was that the divine images in some sense were being brought to earth and transformed into something that was much closer to the individual, to the everyday individual.

[431] And it was that idea that laid the groundwork for the generation of the spread of democratic ideas, at least in part, the idea that each individual was important enough to be regarded as the locus of political responsibility.

[432] And that was all laid out by the artists first.

[433] They were grappling with that.

[434] And that's why these paintings from Northern Italy, the Renaissance paintings, they're so unbelievably valued by people.

[435] You know, I was in this museum in New York, and I don't remember which one it was a while back, and it was quite a room.

[436] There were paintings in that room by great masters like Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Botticelli and these great, great Renaissance artists.

[437] There was probably, maybe there was a dozen paintings in the room, and each of those paintings would have been worth, who knows, a quarter of a So I was standing in this room with like three billion dollars worth of paintings.

[438] You know, and you think there's incredibly expensive artifacts, in an incredibly expensive building on prime real estate in the middle of the most expensive city in the world, unbelievably highly valued, and people from all over the world making pilgrimages to see them.

[439] It's like something's going on there, right?

[440] That's not trivial.

[441] There's no way you spend that much time and effort and money, right?

[442] Serious money, like dead, serious money.

[443] There isn't more expensive artifacts.

[444] facts that we know of than high -quality art. You know, paintings go for $200 million.

[445] It's like, what's going on with that, you know?

[446] I mean, obviously, there's status symbols to some degree, but the question is, why are they status symbols, you know?

[447] And so, so anyways, that's a bit of a, what would you call, meditation on the utility of poetry, you know?

[448] And so, I'm going to start with a bit of a poem from Shakespeare.

[449] There's a specific reason for it, so I'll just read it.

[450] It's just a fragment, and most of you've probably heard this, so it's from as you like it.

[451] All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.

[452] Well, that's worth taking apart.

[453] And Shakespeare, of course, his writing is well regarded as close to immortal as anything that human beings produce might be.

[454] And the reason for that is that it's endlessly dense.

[455] That's one way of thinking about it.

[456] You can dive into it like you can into anything profound and never come up again.

[457] It's just connected to everything.

[458] And he makes a set of propositions here, and you can just zip by them without really noticing what they are.

[459] But it's helpful to notice what they are.

[460] All the world's a stage.

[461] Okay, well, that's a metaphysical presupposition, that.

[462] And it's not a trivial one.

[463] It might even be an ontological presupposition.

[464] So ontology is the study of the structure of being.

[465] And so Shakespeare's actually making an ontological argument.

[466] He said, all the world is a stage.

[467] Okay, so what does that mean exactly?

[468] Because that's not the same as saying the world is, what do you say?

[469] the world is fundamentally a material place.

[470] That's a completely different claim.

[471] The world is a stage.

[472] That's a particular way of looking at the world.

[473] And so what do you do on a stage is, well, you play your part.

[474] And each person plays their part.

[475] And so there's something very technically very interesting about that claim, because what Shakespeare is suggesting is that the world is best conceived of as a forum for action.

[476] Because, of course, that's what the stage is for.

[477] or a stage is a place that you act things out.

[478] And there's a secondary consideration that emerges out of that is that, well, if the world's a stage and you play your part, then what should your part be?

[479] What's the proper part to play?

[480] And you might say, well, maybe that's the fundamental question of life.

[481] You're on the stage.

[482] It's a drama of life and death.

[483] That's clearly the case.

[484] You play your part.

[485] Well, two questions.

[486] What is the part you're playing?

[487] That's the first question.

[488] One of the things I learned from Carl Jung, which really shocked me, you know, Jung said, everybody acts out a story, a myth, actually.

[489] That was his more fundamental claim.

[490] So myth is like a fundamental story.

[491] You act out a myth whether you know it or not.

[492] Well, that's an interesting claim.

[493] And his secondary claim was, you should know which myth you're acting out.

[494] Because it might not be one you would choose consciously.

[495] You might be acting something out unconsciously that it's a tragedy, a catastrophe, or worse than that.

[496] and you should understand what it is that you're up to.

[497] You might think, well, I know what I'm up to.

[498] It's like, no, you don't.

[499] You're a complicated creature.

[500] You're an unbelievably complicated creature, and you are not transparent to yourself, and it isn't necessarily the case at all that you know what you're up to.

[501] You know, and if your life is miserable beyond your ability to tolerate it, then it might be that you're playing the wrong sort of part.

[502] Now, you know, I mean, people get unlucky, and I'm fully aware of that.

[503] I know that people who are through, who people can suffer dreadfully through no fault of their own.

[504] There's no doubt about that.

[505] There's an arbitrary element to life.

[506] But it's also certainly the case that you can bring on yourself and others a lot of misery that's unnecessary.

[507] And that happens a lot.

[508] And that's a part as well.

[509] Okay, so the world's a stage.

[510] Then the question might be, and you play a part, and you play a part whether you know what the part is or not.

[511] Here's another idea.

[512] Let's say you haven't written your part.

[513] Well, then someone else has, or something else has.

[514] And another thing I learned from Jung, which really scared me as well, once I started to understand the psychoanalysts, you know, Jung said, people don't have ideas.

[515] Ideas have people.

[516] And that was a very...

[517] Once I understood the psychoanalyst, that became very terrifying, because like cognitive psychologists, when they think about the brain, they kind of use a computer model.

[518] You're an information processor, right?

[519] And you have modules, cognitive modules, say, or emotional modules, for that matter.

[520] But the psychoanalyst, that isn't really the way they looked at the world.

[521] The way they thought of your psyche was that you're composed of a lot of different sub -personalities and sub -beings.

[522] And they're sort of, they're aggregated together into something with some unity, and that's you.

[523] But those sub -components of you, those things are alive, and they have a will, and they have a desire to live.

[524] Well, Nietzsche said, every drive tends to philosophize in its spirit.

[525] You know, and so you can be possessed in some sense by elements of your being that you don't have fully under control.

[526] Now, you know that, everyone knows that, because you do stupid things when you get angry, right?

[527] Or vengeful, you think, oh, my God, how could I do that?

[528] How could I think that?

[529] Or maybe you're having trouble controlling your diet, and you get upset, you go to the refrigerator, and you eat like a quart of ice cream and a loaf of bread.

[530] That's what happens to people.

[531] That's what happens to people with eating disorders.

[532] And, you know, they go into kind of a trance, just eat everything.

[533] And then they kind of come to, and they think, what the hell was that?

[534] That was the last thing I wanted to do.

[535] And, you know, you do that if you're foolish in love, and if you do that if you're possessed by a passion.

[536] And it's very easy to become possessed by elements of your own being that you don't have fully under control.

[537] And then some of those elements are systems of ideas, you know, that are in you.

[538] That's Dawkins' idea of meme, essentially.

[539] But he didn't take it as far as the psychoanalysts took it, because a meme, a system of ideas that's shared culturally can inhabit you like a being and direct your actions and that's what happens in the case of ideology people who have an ideology say this is what I believe it's like oh no no no that thing has you in its grip and you're a puppet you think I think this it's like no you don't it thinks you that's what happens and you know that if you look at what happened in places like Nazi Germany everyone wonders what the hell happened man, what happened there?

[540] It's like, well, everybody got possessed by a set of ideas, powerful ideas, right?

[541] And they murderous ideas, genocidal ideas.

[542] And you can't say so much that the Germans had those ideas, as you can say that those ideas had the Germans.

[543] And the same thing with the Soviet Union, the same thing with Maoist China.

[544] Anytime you're under this way of an ideology, something has you, and it's making you play a part.

[545] And you might ask, well, well, is that a part you want to play?

[546] Hard to say.

[547] Hard to say what you want.

[548] So I'll read this little poem from Marx now.

[549] So it was interesting to me for the reasons that I told you about, that art, poetry is the birthplace of ideas, and ideas can possess you.

[550] So it's like, well, what was Marx up to exactly?

[551] Well, maybe we can find out a little bit by reading his poems.

[552] His early poem when he was a young man, it's called Invocation.

[553] of one in despair.

[554] So, a God has snatched from me, my all, in the curse and rack of destiny.

[555] All his worlds are gone beyond recall.

[556] Nothing but revenge is left to me. On myself, revenge all proudly wreak on that being, that enthroned Lord.

[557] Make my strength a patchwork of what's, weak, leave my better self without reward.

[558] I shall build my throne high overhead, cold, tremendous, shall its summit be.

[559] For its bulwark, superstitious dread, for its martial blackest agony, who looks on it with a healthy eye shall turn back, struck, deathly pale and dumb, clutched by blind and chill mortality.

[560] May his happiness prepare its tomb.

[561] And the Almighty's lightning shall rebound from that massive iron giant.

[562] If he brings my walls and tower down, eternity shall raise them up.

[563] Defiant.

[564] It's a hell of a poem.

[565] Literally.

[566] You know, it reminds me, and I haven't done enough background research to find out if there's a connection.

[567] It reminds me a lot of the poetry in Paradise Lost.

[568] And Paradise Lost is a very famous poem, and it's about the rebellion of Satan against God.

[569] And it's an attempt by Milton around the canonical Judeo -Christian writings that make up the narrative substructure of our culture.

[570] There's a cloud of images and stories that are not really written down, but they're just part of our cultural heritage.

[571] The idea of hell, for example, is one, and really the idea of the devil, which is almost discussed not at all in the biblical corpus, very, very, very few references.

[572] Almost none.

[573] But there's this cloud of ideas about evil and so forth that have aggregated themselves in a poetic sense and in an imagistic sense around this core set of narrative writings.

[574] And what Milton tried to do was to articulate all those, and that's why he wrote Paradise Lost.

[575] And it's about the highest, angel in God's heavenly kingdom, something approximately equivalent to rationality, I would say, attempting to displace what's transcendent with its own kingdom.

[576] And in doing that, at least in part, in revenge against God, it's something like that.

[577] And this poem really, really reminds me of that.

[578] And I don't know if Marx was reading Paradise Lost at that point or not.

[579] In some sense, it doesn't matter, because Paradise Lost had such a walloping impact on European culture.

[580] that Marx would have been familiar with its themes implicitly from everything else he read anyways.

[581] So, but it's, it's quite a telling poem because the person who wrote it is a very, very angry, desperately angry, you know, and hopeless, and, and then worse, out for revenge.

[582] And then worse, out to build a structure that would extract that revenge.

[583] It's like, well, you know, it's a, what happened with Marx is quite, the damn mystery, the way his ideas unfolded in the 20th century.

[584] You know, it's not so obvious why that happened.

[585] And, you know, there was the cover story, and that was the compassion story, the compassion for the downtrodden, which is part and parcel of the Marxist story.

[586] And then there's the...

[587] Well, then there's what happened when that hypothetical compassion manifested itself in the world.

[588] And that was absolutely brutal.

[589] It's brutal beyond comprehension, right?

[590] At least 100 million people died.

[591] And we should be clear about what it meant to die.

[592] I was, I was, what it meant to die under communism.

[593] I was, uh, looking online the other day, um, for critiques of capitalism, because it's, it's common now when everybody, when anybody puts forth an argument about the murderousness of communism and the stats that are associated with that, the hundred million deaths, for example.

[594] That's from the black book of communism, which is a very good scholarly reference about what happened in the Soviet Union and Mao's China.

[595] It's common now that people who are attempting to revive the spirit of Marxism, and there seem to be more of them all the time, to make counterclaims that capitalism killed just as many people.

[596] And then they, usually the stats are something like X number of people died of starvation, and X number of people died because they had lack of, you know, they didn't have access to clean water, they didn't have access to proper medication.

[597] And so, I mean, if you stack up those deaths beside the deaths that were produced by the communists, then you can, you know, you can even the scales.

[598] But it's quite the piece of logic, as far as I'm concerned, because there's a big difference between the fact that people die and even the fact that perhaps they wouldn't have to die if other people intervened and saved them, and actually killing people.

[599] Like, that's seriously, man, that's a big difference.

[600] And one of the logical flaws there is, like, everybody dies.

[601] You can't blame that on capitalism.

[602] Now, you might be able to say, well, you know, capitalists could have been better at distributing their resources more effectively so that more people were protected against a mortality that emerged too soon.

[603] I suppose there's some truth in that critique because none of us are perfect and none of our systems are perfect and perhaps it's possible that those who over the last hundred years have generated some excess wealth could have been more intelligent and what would you say intelligent and wise and thoughtful and far -seeing and done better with their money than they did.

[604] Fair enough, but that is not the same as lining people up and shooting them, and torturing them, and actively killing them.

[605] And that's what happened with the communists.

[606] And so we need a...

[607] And so this moral equivalence of the communist system and the capitalist system is...

[608] It's preposterous.

[609] Now, one of the things that's also quite interesting in that light is what's been happening economically around the world, especially in the last 15 years, because things have really transformed themselves in very interesting ways.

[610] So, you know, the wall didn't fall until 1989, right?

[611] So really, that's when the Second World War ended, as far as I'm concerned, is in 1989.

[612] You know, the dramatic part of it ended in 1945, but the Cold War raged until 1989.

[613] And that was an extension of World War II.

[614] And, you know, it was constantly bubbling up all over the world.

[615] It bubbled up in Korea, and it bubbled up in Vietnam and Cambodia.

[616] And throughout Africa, and all through South America, you know, as the capitalists and the communists fought for control over people's psyches and also their territories.

[617] And then that didn't really stop until 1989.

[618] And so from then onward, there wasn't the same tremendous pressure from the radical left to warp and twist governments all over the world into the collectivist, into the collectivist vision, let's say.

[619] And so, what's been the consequence of that?

[620] The removal of that ideological pressure, or at least the partial cessation of that ideological pressure?

[621] Well, there wasn't a lot of...

[622] Things didn't change a lot for a while after that, but that's not surprising.

[623] You know, when something falls apart, well, there's going to be a bit of a catastrophe in its aftermath, no matter what it is.

[624] And then it takes a while for the new situation to sort of manifest itself.

[625] And, you know, what's been happening over the last, let's say, since the year 2000, it's only a decade after the wall fell down, what's been happening since the year 2000 is actually quite miraculous.

[626] And so let me lay that out a little bit.

[627] So I first figured this out.

[628] I worked on a UN committee about four years ago.

[629] It was a committee set up by the U .N. UN Secretary General to produce a document that was like maybe an overview of something approximating economic, sustainable economic development, whatever that means.

[630] It's a hard thing to, what is sustainable is really, really hard to figure out.

[631] But that was the idea, and you can kind of see the rationale for that.

[632] It's like you don't want to do something today that completely screws you over in a week, right?

[633] You don't want to do something in a year that makes things worse five years from now.

[634] So if you're sensible, whatever you do today also works tomorrow and next week and next year, and 10 years from now, and maybe works for you and your family and your community as well, all at the same time.

[635] And so it's trying to operate within that system of multiple constraints that you might regard as something approximating sustainable.

[636] So we were trying to wrestle with that.

[637] What would it mean to have a sustainable fishery, for example, or maybe a sustainable energy policy, et cetera, et cetera, to start thinking over some reasonably long period of time, which in itself is even a complicated problem because it's not obvious what period of time you should think over.

[638] You might say, well, we should think over a thousand years because we have the long -term vision.

[639] It's like, you don't know what it's going to be like in 10 years.

[640] You know, at the rate of technological transformation right now is so unbelievably extreme that I don't think we can even see very clearly 10 years down the road, so it's hard to plan for like a thousand years.

[641] You know, so anyways, that's all very complicated.

[642] But we were producing this document, and I got the opportunity to, first of all, watch how a document like that was produced.

[643] You know, it's like, well, who works on a higher -level plan like that?

[644] Well, all the people that were on the committee were former heads of states, the people who were technically appointed to the committee.

[645] And then they all produced hierarchies of people underneath them who actually worked on the document Because there are those people Like if you're the ex -president of France You're busy You're busy like you're moving around man You're occupied all the time You don't have time to spend two years Thinking about a new plan for sustainable global development So even though you might be the figurehead on the committee You don't do any of the work And so it gets passed down to the people that you're associated with until it gets to someone who will actually do it.

[646] Well, who are those people?

[647] Well, they're usually, sometimes they're academic, sometimes they're political bureaucrats.

[648] They're people that, for one reason or other, have a little bit of extra time and interest, but none of them are trained to do this because no one's trained to produce a global plan for economic, sustainable development.

[649] Nobody has that training.

[650] So none of the people doing it know what the hell they're doing.

[651] So, and it's not that surprising, it's a complicated problem.

[652] So that was interesting to watch.

[653] And then we got the first draft of the document, and it was awful.

[654] It was awful.

[655] It was like it was written in 1984.

[656] It was a Cold War document.

[657] It was North against South, you know, the privileged North against the underprivileged South, and it was capitalist against socialist.

[658] No sense that, you know, that there could be cooperation between those two ends of the political distribution.

[659] No sense that the South was not what it was in 1984.

[660] I mean, the developing world has developed a lot.

[661] since 1984 and is developing extraordinarily quickly.

[662] And, you know, I mean, is China more of an economic powerhouse than the United States?

[663] Well, no, but China plus India might be.

[664] You know, I mean, the tide is turned in many ways, so it was unbelievably outdated.

[665] So we thought, well, we'd rewrite the narrative, and not so much look for oppressors and victims and all of that horrible nonsense, but to see if we could put together a document that was predicated on the idea that everybody could work together in some loose, what would you call it, some loose association of goodwill and that we could make things better instead of just pointing to whose fault everything was.

[666] And so we rewrote the underlying narrative.

[667] And that was interesting too, because one of the things I learned, this is a rule that I didn't write in 12 rules, but it was one of the possible rules.

[668] response opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated so one of the things you learn if you do that sort of thing that sort of thing I was talking about is that if you actually do the writing then you win because for someone to do something about that they would have to do the writing and and it's just easier just to take what you've written than it is to write a whole different thing.

[669] And so you might think, well, why the hell do I have to do the writing?

[670] And the answer is, well, because then you get to do the writing.

[671] And it's an interesting thing.

[672] You know, if you're at work, I mean, I don't think that you should allow people to take advantage of you.

[673] I think that's a big mistake.

[674] But, you know, if you're angry because excess responsibility has been dumped on you, you know, independent of whether or not you're being taken advantage of, that's a different issue, you might reverse that and think, well, where the responsibility is, That's where the authority is.

[675] And if it happens to fall to you, that makes you indispensable, man. That gives you a stake in the game.

[676] So that was quite interesting.

[677] So I got a chance to read about, I don't know, 200 books in the months that I was working on this document.

[678] And most of those were books on economic development, but also on ecological matters.

[679] So I was interested in climate change and overfishing and deforestation.

[680] the demolition of decline in speciation, extinction, all the things you hear about that are looming catastrophes that bedevil the human race and the planet, some of which we're responsible for.

[681] I read a bunch of everything I could get my hands on, including books by people like Bjorn Lomburg, who put himself forward as the skeptical environmentalist.

[682] I would highly recommend Bjorn Lomburg, by the way.

[683] He wrote a book called How to Spend $75 billion to Make a World the world a better place and it's a really really smart book so and that's not very much money by the way because there's like seven billion of us so that's like what 75 10 bucks each it's just nothing you know mostly what he found was that we shouldn't be concerned about things like climate change and we shouldn't even be concerned about overfishing which is a real problem or deforestation or any of that what we should really be concerned with is getting enough nutrition and health care to small children.

[684] The return on that from an economic perspective is 250 to 1.

[685] And it kind of makes sense, right?

[686] Because, you know, out there in the developing world, there's a lot of potential geniuses, let's say.

[687] You know, and I'm not trying to elevate geniuses to a point of, what would you say, value among ordinary people.

[688] That's not the point I'm making.

[689] The point I'm making is that, you know, now and then a genius comes along who offers something to the world that so absolutely remarkable, that everyone is better off for it.

[690] And you don't know who that's going to be.

[691] It could be any one of those little tiny kids, right?

[692] They all have brains.

[693] They're all unbelievably complicated creatures.

[694] And the fact that they're not all being, what would you say, encouraged, they don't all have the minimal resources necessary to manifest at least their physiological peak is a real catastrophe for everyone.

[695] And that's also why the return on investment for early childhood care is so absolutely high.

[696] And what Lomburg did was say, well, he took a bunch of economists, some Nobel -winning prize -winning economists, he took the UN goals, there's about 150 UN development goals, which is way too many.

[697] 150 goals is no goals, right?

[698] If you have 150 goals, it's like, I'm not talking to you, I'm certainly not working with you.

[699] It's like, you have 150 goals.

[700] Like, if you have like two goals, or if you at least have a hundred and hierarchy of goals, this is the most important thing, this is the second most important thing, the third most important thing, well then we could work together, but 150 goals, you're just a chaotic mess.

[701] And the UN actually had 150 goals, and they would not prioritize them, because as soon as they prioritized one goal over another, they annoyed the people who had the secondary goal.

[702] So, why is that goal more important than my goal?

[703] Well, some goal has to be more important because we can't do all these things at once.

[704] Well, you're not sacrificing my goal.

[705] Well, then we can't do anything.

[706] Well, that's okay, as long as you don't sacrifice my goal, right?

[707] So that's the stasis.

[708] And so what Lomberg did, because he's smart, is that he took teams of economists, some of them were Nobel Prize winning economists, and he said, okay, here's the deal.

[709] You've got a finite pot of money, $75 billion.

[710] It was 50 to begin with, but he updated it because, you know, times went on and inflation knocked the value the currency down a little bit.

[711] And he said, okay, here's the deal.

[712] Take these 150 UN goals and analyze them economically and figure out where you get the most bang for the buck.

[713] It's like we're not going to be able to do all 150.

[714] We don't have infinite resources.

[715] We have finite time.

[716] We have finite resources.

[717] Prioritize.

[718] And the best way to prioritize, use money to prioritize, not because it's such a great way of prioritizing, but because we don't have a better way of doing it.

[719] So you can only use the best thing you have at your disposal, no matter how bad it is, and money isn't perfect, but it has its utility.

[720] It's a universally accepted standard of value.

[721] That's something.

[722] And so he said, well, rank order the priorities in terms of return on investment, justify how you do the calculations.

[723] Then he had all 10 teams do that.

[724] And then he averaged across the teams and came up with a final ranking.

[725] It was pretty smart, hey?

[726] It's like, well, we might as well take our resources and do the most we can with them in the shortest period of time.

[727] And what he found out, I think four of the top ten goals had to do with the improvement of early childhood health around the world.

[728] So that was quite cool.

[729] It's like, well, what should you be concerned about?

[730] Climate change?

[731] Doesn't look like it.

[732] First of all, you don't know what the hell to do about it.

[733] Like, what are you going to do about it?

[734] And not only that, the measurement error in climate change is so large 50 years out that even if you did, whatever it is that you think that you should do now at whatever cost, you wouldn't be able to tell 50 years from now if what you did had any effect, because the measurement error is so high that it's going to wash out in the measurement.

[735] Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about the climate.

[736] That's not my point.

[737] My point is we don't know what to do about it.

[738] And there's a bunch of other problems that we have that are really pressing that we do know what to do about, and we could solve them.

[739] And so we could solve them effectively, and we know how to do it.

[740] And, well, okay.

[741] So, more importantly, more importantly, reading Longberg, a variety of other people, too, and there's been about 10 books published in the last 10 years, all documenting the same thing.

[742] Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now is one of them.

[743] And Hans Rosling, who's a great data visualizer, a Scandinavian guy, just wrote another book.

[744] Facts, I can't remember the name of the book, unfortunately, at the moment, but it's Hans Rosling.

[745] And Matt Ridley has written a book as well like this.

[746] And there's a number of them.

[747] And there's an organization online that tweets constantly, Human Progress .org, and then Matt Ridley does this world in data.

[748] And these people are doing empirical analysis of the rate of economic growth around the world.

[749] And since the year 2000, we have been getting richer worldwide at a rate that's absolutely unprecedented in the history of mankind.

[750] There's nothing to compare it to.

[751] And no one knows.

[752] The world in data people, or was it human...

[753] I think it was human progress, did a poll in the United States.

[754] So here's a fact, okay?

[755] So one of the millennium goals was to have the number of people in absolute poverty between the year 2000 and 2015.

[756] Because that's a major league goal, right?

[757] Because people have been poor forever.

[758] And not just a little poor, like seriously starving poor.

[759] There were famines, major famines in developed countries in Europe in the 20th century, in places like Sweden, in places like Italy.

[760] Well, not just after World War II.

[761] Like famine was the norm.

[762] And, you know, in 1895, the average person in the Western world lived on less than a dollar a day in today's money, which is less than half of the current UN criteria for absolute poverty.

[763] And so that was everyone, man, everyone up to 1895, was so goddamn poor, you cannot even imagine it, right?

[764] And suffered everything that went along with that, right?

[765] Terrible mortality in childbirth, right?

[766] Terrible mortality for babies, also for mothers, right?

[767] Very low probability of reaching an old age.

[768] You were unbelievably likely, if you were a kid born around, you know, a 10 -year -old in 1895, very likely to lose one parent before the age of 10.

[769] and pretty damn likely to be without both of them by the time you were 15.

[770] And there were hardly any people that were well off.

[771] And even the ones that were well off, it's like, they weren't that well off, man. They didn't have toilets.

[772] Right, I mean, and everybody laughs about that.

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

[774] They didn't have toilets.

[775] That's a big problem.

[776] And they didn't have central heating.

[777] And they didn't have air conditioning.

[778] It's like, central heating's a bit.

[779] Well, you Canadians, you're all Canadians.

[780] You know what it's like.

[781] Central heating, man. Yeah, that's good.

[782] It stops you from dying for like six months of the year.

[783] It's a big deal, you know.

[784] And they didn't have refrigeration.

[785] You should try living without a refrigerator for a week.

[786] You think you're poor.

[787] It's like, you're not poor.

[788] You have a refrigerator.

[789] You're rich, man. And it's not some little ratty refrigerator that costs you like a year's celery and has one cubic foot of space in it, which was what the first refrigerators were like.

[790] It's a great big, bloody refrigerator.

[791] You can put a whole moose in it.

[792] And so, and you you think, well, everybody's got a refrigerator.

[793] It's not a big deal.

[794] It's like, just because everyone has it doesn't mean it's not a big deal.

[795] It's a really big deal.

[796] You know, and I think it was the people at Human Progress wrote a little essay a while back, pointing out that you're probably better off as a member of the, say, you're barely in the middle class.

[797] You're probably better off than John Rockefeller was in 1895.

[798] So you're better off as a member of, you know, just kind of an entry -level member of the middle class now than the richest person in the world in 1895 so so that's that's really something to think about and so okay so that's how poor everyone was in 1895 and man we've been getting richer like oh like nobody's business since then it's been this exponential curve you know and some parts of the world got richer first but and some people got richer first but you got to think that through it's like well of course some countries got richer first.

[799] What do you expect?

[800] Everybody's going to become, go from not rich at all, absolutely poor, they're just going to make one leap everyone.

[801] All seven billion people are all of a sudden going to be rich.

[802] It's like that isn't going to be how it works.

[803] Some countries were going to get rich first, and within those countries, some people were going to get rich first.

[804] But now you think about the rate of technological advancement that's upon us.

[805] You know, it was probably, what, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, that big screen TVs came out.

[806] And when they first came out, they were like, you know, you got a 50 -inch TV.

[807] It was a status symbol.

[808] It probably cost you $15 ,000, something like that.

[809] And, you know, you got to have one, and you got to have one if you were rich.

[810] But it was like, four years later, five years later, they're basically free, right?

[811] I mean, how many screens have you guys thrown out in the last five years?

[812] Right?

[813] It was like, oh no, my screen is this thick.

[814] Well, first of all, it was this thick.

[815] Oh, no, my monitor is too thick.

[816] Better throw that away.

[817] Well, now it's this thick.

[818] Oh, no, that's too clunky.

[819] Now, they're this thick.

[820] It's like, they're so cheap, you can just throw them away.

[821] And now everybody has a 65 -inch screen.

[822] And you wouldn't have had those if the rich people wouldn't have had them first.

[823] That's the other thing that's kind of interesting about rich people that no one ever thinks about.

[824] It's like, rich people are necessary to buy expensive things first.

[825] Because otherwise, you can't produce.

[826] a market, you know, like the people who built the large screen TVs had to sell the first ones for like $25 ,000 each, so that they could get so cheap that everybody could have them for free.

[827] And so this is something I've been thinking about with regards to inequality, is that, you know, one of the advantages to making some people, to giving some people large pools of cash, or to allow them to accrue that, or to encourage them to accrue that, is so that when a new consumer product enters the market at a high cost, there's actually a market for, so that the people who produce it can generate enough of them to saturate the wealthy market so they can drive down the price so that everybody else can have them.

[828] So what if it was the case that the price all of us pay to have cool things is that there has to be rich people?

[829] I mean, it seems, I'm not sure about this, it's an idea that I've been just toying with over the last few months, but it's not obvious to me that it's false.

[830] And like, who cares if you have to wait four years for your damn 50 -inch flat -screen TV?

[831] It's not like you're sitting there without a refrigerator.

[832] you've got a refrigerator, you know?

[833] So, okay, so everybody was bloody dirt, horribly dirt poor in 1985, even in the developed world where, you know, things were better than they were in the rest of the world because it was horrible in the West, but it was absolutely brutally catastrophic everywhere else.

[834] And so, and then, you know, this technological miracle occurred, and a lot of that's a consequence of free market principles, a lot of it, a huge amount of it.

[835] And so, well, you know, we started to get rich.

[836] And we got richer and richer and richer and richer.

[837] And then the gap between the West and the rest of the world grew.

[838] And, you know, that allowed for us to criticize ourselves to some degree.

[839] It thought, well, maybe what the West is doing is exploiting everyone.

[840] And that's why we're rich.

[841] And, you know, there's a certain amount of truth to that because no system is perfect.

[842] And when you produce a corporation or a government, or there's a certain amount of exploitation that's bound to go along with it because no human structures are without their imperfections.

[843] But in the final analysis, the West is rich because it's extracted resources and made the rest of the world poor argument is not correct because everybody started brutally poor.

[844] And not only that, everybody started brutally poor and almost everybody suffered under tyrannical governmental structures.

[845] And so the baseline for human existence is starvation and catastrophe under the yoke of tyranny.

[846] And whenever that isn't happening, it's a bloody miracle.

[847] And so you can't just put that at the foot of some system.

[848] You can't say, well, that's a consequence of capitalism or the West.

[849] It's like, no, it's not.

[850] That's the default condition of existence.

[851] It's way easier to starve under tyranny than it is to be wealthy in freedom.

[852] It's way more likely.

[853] And the fact that anybody got to the point where they were free and then also, wealthy.

[854] It's like we should just be constantly amazed beyond comprehension that anything like that ever happened even once.

[855] And the cool thing is it's happening everywhere.

[856] So the millennium goal for the UN was to have the number of people in absolute poverty from the year 2000 to the 2015.

[857] And we did it three years earlier.

[858] Think about that.

[859] Half as many people were in absolute privation over a 12 -year period.

[860] Here's the projection.

[861] By the year 2030, there won't be anybody on the planet who's absolutely in poverty.

[862] Right?

[863] That's 12 years from now.

[864] We'll have been done with that.

[865] And so that's just...

[866] I can't figure out why that isn't a headline every day.

[867] 300 ,000 more people no longer in poverty.

[868] Right?

[869] That'd be a good headline to wake up to.

[870] Here's something.

[871] That's cool.

[872] the child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as the child mortality rate in Europe in 1950 that's how narrow the gap has become that's a 60 year gap that's all that's left between the least developed part of the world and the most developed part of the world and the rates of death of women and childbirth have absolutely plummeted around the world and more and more people have access to fresh water and more and more people have access to vaccines and more and more people have access to food.

[873] We have enough food for everyone.

[874] And here's something else, you know.

[875] We're going to overpopulate the planet.

[876] We're all going to die.

[877] It's like, no, we're not.

[878] That's wrong.

[879] We're going to peak at $9 billion.

[880] That's what the demographic projections indicate, because what seems to have happened, and no one guessed this.

[881] All you have to do to bring population under control is educate women.

[882] As soon as you educate women, instead of having eight children, you know, four of whom die, they have two children, both of whom survive, or they have 1 .5 children.

[883] It's not even replacement.

[884] So not only are we going to peak at $9 billion sometime in the next 40 years, but then the population is going to decline precipitously.

[885] In 50 years, the big problem will be that there aren't enough people.

[886] So when we have enough food to feed all those people, like we're going to have to be careful and continue doing what we're doing, but we have enough food for everybody.

[887] And not only that, we're becoming more productive in our ability to generate food all the time.

[888] So not only do we have enough already, but food is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and all things considered of higher quality, you know, now that doesn't mean that the quality couldn't be improved, but compared to potato peelings, you know, and gruel, and dirty water, which was like the standard diet for people for a very long period of time, we're not doing too bad.

[889] So, okay, so back.

[890] We'll go back to Shakespeare.

[891] All the world's a stage, right?

[892] So what I was doing in some sense with that part of the lecture was setting the stage.

[893] You know, you think, well, if you're going to play your part, you should know what the stage is.

[894] Like, where are you exactly?

[895] What's going on around you?

[896] And it's hard to say, you know, and it's very easy to be pessimistic.

[897] And I think we're, oh, the human progress people also polled Americans to find out how many people knew that the rate of poverty had fallen by half between the year 2000 and 2012.

[898] 95 % of Americans have no idea that that happened.

[899] And I suspect most of you didn't know that.

[900] And I suspect that there's a substantial percentage of you who doubt whether it was actually true and question, well, were they gerrymandering the definition of absolute poverty?

[901] And it's an arbitrary definition, but you've got to define it in some manner.

[902] and no matter how you define it, it fell by half.

[903] So that's a great thing.

[904] But people don't know.

[905] Why don't they know?

[906] I don't know the answer to that.

[907] Part of me thinks, maybe there's a couple of things going on.

[908] One might be, I think one of the things that happened since the 1970s was that the prosperity of the developing world was purchased at the relative expense of the North American and European work because one of the things that you've seen happen since 1970, there's some arguments about this because your money buys higher quality items now.

[909] So even if you have the same amount of money as you did in 1970, the things you can buy are better.

[910] So even if you have the same income, it might be that you're richer now.

[911] But it's hard to calculate those things.

[912] But independent of that, working class wages have remained pretty flat since the 1970s.

[913] You know, and the bargain with the working class in North America and in Europe was something like, work hard, and your children will have a better life than you do.

[914] And maybe even your future self will be better off than you are now.

[915] But that's kind of flatlined, and there's a lot of reasons for it.

[916] And so I think what that's done is produce a certain amount of disenchantment in the West that the radical leftist types have been capitalizing on.

[917] And so even though all around the world, things are getting better at a rate that's so fast that you probably couldn't improve it if you tried, the West seems to be at odds with itself about its moral, what would you say, its morality and its vision and the propriety of its mode of operating in the world.

[918] And, you know, I think that's a catastrophe, actually, because as far as I can tell, the reason that this economic miracle is taking place and has started, say, since the year 2000, is because the damn radical leftist collectivists lost in 1989, they stopped mucking up the planet, increasingly governments around the world are experimenting with free market solutions and a certain amount of freedom.

[919] And as a consequence, people are getting rich way faster.

[920] You know, that's what happened in China.

[921] You know, what happened in China, you know how the open markets started to develop was a bunch of farmers met in secret, collectivized farmers, who were producing nothing, and starving, as a consequence, met in secret and decided that they were going to parcel out their collective plots privately.

[922] And the punishment for doing that was death when they started to do it.

[923] But they met clandestinely in secret, and they parceled out their plots.

[924] And they all decided that you could keep what you grew.

[925] And all of a sudden, man, they were producing food like mad.

[926] And of course, the authorities got curious about that and found out what they were doing and, you know, and began to do what you'd expect the communist totalitarians to do, but they needed the damn food.

[927] And so they decided, weirdly enough, to leave these people alone and to encourage that kind of experimentation.

[928] And that was the genesis of the origin of the free market experiments in China.

[929] It was just a couple of farmers who, you know, took it upon themselves to risk their own lives, to try to do something that was actually, productive.

[930] And so the communists introduced free market principles into the Chinese system.

[931] And, well, the rest is history.

[932] You know what's happened to China over the last 40 years.

[933] It's just, it's a miracle beyond comprehension.

[934] Same with South Korea, right?

[935] Which was, South Korea was an unbelievably poor place and underdeveloped.

[936] And now it's an economic powerhouse in India, which is completely ungovernable.

[937] I mean, you know, we have trouble in Canada with two languages.

[938] It's like, I think there's 300 languages in India, right?

[939] And an absolute plethora of religious beliefs and an immense population.

[940] I mean, it's a complicated place, man. And nonetheless, India, it's like, it's cruising.

[941] There aren't people starving, or if there are, there's a lot fewer than there were.

[942] And in China, well, people don't starve.

[943] There's plenty of food for everyone in China.

[944] It's like, what a miracle that is.

[945] Who would have ever guessed that was going to happen?

[946] And so, we have every reason to be optimistic.

[947] And so, all right, so let's say that sets the stage.

[948] What's the stage?

[949] We're in a world that could continue to radically improve if we don't do anything stupid and muck it up.

[950] Right?

[951] And so the thing about this poem I read of Marx is like there's dark motivations in that, you know.

[952] Marks pretty much lays out his desire to demolish and destroy.

[953] He's vengeful.

[954] He wants to tear things down.

[955] And I see that as a threat in the West, you know, we don't have, we don't, our institutions, many of our institutions, don't seem to either understand what we have or appreciate it or be humbly grateful for it or to regard it as the miracle that it is.

[956] And that's very, very dangerous because it is a miracle.

[957] And it's a particular kind of miracle.

[958] It's the sort of miracle that I was trying to lay out in dramatic terms, at least in part, in 12 rules for life.

[959] It's like, well, why does what we do in the West work?

[960] Well, I think the first reason is, and this is what I think we got really right.

[961] And I think in the West we articulated this more comprehensively than had ever been articulated in the history of the world.

[962] What's the primary level of analysis when you're trying to understand the structure of reality?

[963] Well, that's Shakespeare's point.

[964] All the world's a stage, and every individual comes out and plays his or her part.

[965] That's the right level of analysis, the individual.

[966] You set up your society predicated on the idea that the individual is of ultimate value.

[967] And that's, to some degree, that's a matter of rights.

[968] And here's something I think we've done wrong, technically speaking, in our political systems, probably in our international development as well.

[969] When we're talking about the primacy of the individual, we concentrate on rights.

[970] But I think that's wrong.

[971] I think what we should do is concentrate on responsibility instead.

[972] And so, okay, so it's interesting.

[973] So it's interesting, you know, you might ask yourself, well, why would everyone clap about that?

[974] Well, it's really a serious question because rights, I mean, hey, man, that's what you get to do.

[975] Like, the world's your oyster.

[976] It's like, so why not clap about that?

[977] Well, responsibility, that's a whole different story.

[978] It's like, that's a burden for you, man. It's like, get out there and do your part.

[979] There's important things for you to do.

[980] There's a heavy weight on you.

[981] And you need to bear up underneath it.

[982] It's like, well, why would you clap about that?

[983] Well, it's a good, because, and I'm asking this seriously, because one of the things I've noticed, this has really blown me away.

[984] I can't really come to terms with it, is that I've been trying to figure out why what I've been talking about has resonated with people.

[985] There's a technical reason.

[986] The technical reason is these new media forms, like YouTube and podcasts, have enabled long -form, like global, long -form philosophical discussion.

[987] That's never happened before, right?

[988] TV, you get six minutes or 30 seconds, right?

[989] And so if you have a complicated message, you have to sound bite it to 30 seconds or maybe to six minutes.

[990] With YouTube and podcasts, you can talk about complicated things for a very long time.

[991] And it turns out that people want that.

[992] Interestingly enough, there's a huge market for that.

[993] We're smarter than we thought.

[994] Our technology made us look stupider than we are.

[995] And I think part of the reason that what I've been doing is successful is because I've been fortunate enough to be an early adopter in a new technological space that was relatively uninhabited.

[996] And so that's a useful thing to know.

[997] But the other thing that I've noticed, because at the beginning of this talk, I said, you know, I'm always watching individuals when I'm speaking with them, but also listening to the crowd.

[998] And one of the things I've noticed is that whenever I talk about responsibility, especially end its relationship with meaning, the crowd goes completely silent.

[999] And it's happened in every single venue that I've talked to.

[1000] It's a reflection of the fact, the same, it's reflecting the same thing that drove you to applaud when I talked about responsibility.

[1001] It's like, I think we've talked about rights for so long in the West that were exhausted by the discourse.

[1002] And we need the corrective, because there are no rights without responsibilities.

[1003] They're the same thing.

[1004] Your rights are my responsibilities.

[1005] They're the same thing.

[1006] But there's something that's deeper, I think, than that.

[1007] And this is, I think, the other issue that struck a chord with people.

[1008] The stage I said, said, you know, you can't lay the suffering of the world at the west, at the feet of the west, because the suffering of the world is built into the structure of the world.

[1009] Starvation, death, brutality, all of that.

[1010] That's the easy default.

[1011] That's the state of the world.

[1012] And it takes tremendous work to produce a count.

[1013] a counter position to that, to make sure that everyone has enough, and to make sure that our institutions are free and flourishing.

[1014] That's hard.

[1015] And so it's hard to do it practically, but it's also hard to do it psychologically, because if the state of the world, the fundamental bottom level of reality is something like suffering, I think it's suffering tainted with malevolence, it's something like that, then you also need something psychological to set against that, or you end up in a situation like Marx, you know, where he's outraged at the structure of the world, and desires to wreak havoc and take revenge as a consequence, which he seems to have done extraordinarily effectively, if you don't have that meaning, then it's very difficult to reconcile yourself to the conditions of existence, right?

[1016] Because even if you're fortunate, and as we all are, even if you're fortunate, your life is still very hard, you know, you're fragile in all sorts of ways, so is your family, you're going to face the death of the people that you love, and yourself for that matter.

[1017] And there's going to be some bloody rough times along the way.

[1018] And they'll be rough enough so that they'll make you feel like shaking your hand at the sky and just asking what the hell's going on.

[1019] And so you need something to set against that.

[1020] You need a meaning to set against that, to justify your life in the face of that suffering.

[1021] And I think that that's why people are happy about the discussion of responsibility.

[1022] Because it's actually not rights that give your life meaning.

[1023] It's responsibility.

[1024] And to know the connection between responsibility and meaning, especially once you know the connection between meaning and the antidote to suffering.

[1025] It's like, well, what's the antidote to suffering?

[1026] Well, it isn't lack of suffering, man, because that ain't happening.

[1027] So, I mean, you can stave it off and the less starvation the better, let's say.

[1028] But fundamentally, there's an eradicable amount of suffering that's going to be associated with your life.

[1029] Well, you need something to set against that, something that's a vision that's sufficiently noble to make the suffering worthwhile, something like that, even to yourself, to stop you from becoming bitter, and then you think, well, where do you find that meaning?

[1030] It's not in your rights.

[1031] Your rights allow you to do whatever you want.

[1032] And doing whatever you want is actually, that's sort of what an impulsive teenager does.

[1033] You know, just do whatever you want.

[1034] It's like, no, that isn't how it works.

[1035] You can tell that by looking at people that you admire or even looking at yourself when you admire yourself in those rare moments that you might dare to do that you know it's like well who do you look up to well you certainly don't look up to people that don't take care of themselves for starters like if someone has to take care of you as a grown man it's like I mean unless you've been cut off at the knees you know unless some terrible tragedy has befallen you you're just not living up to your responsibility and your cost you're not who you could be and you're taking from someone else no one admires that, unless you're a psychopath, no one admires that.

[1036] Well, that's what psychopaths do, and so, you know, they might find that admirable, but no one else does, and they're relatively rare, and they're generally not very successful.

[1037] So it's a bad strategy.

[1038] So, well, you have to keep running away if you're a psychopath, because people figure out who you are, and then they won't have anything to do with you.

[1039] So if you're a psychopath, you're a nomad, and, you know, you can go around being a parasite, and it sort of works, but not really, and so it's not the attitude to to found a whole state on, let's say, or a family or a relationship with yourself.

[1040] And so you admire people spontaneously that take responsibility for themselves, but then that's not all of it.

[1041] You know, the people you really admire, you think, well, he's a good man or she's a good woman.

[1042] And not only, you know, is she sensible and secure in herself, but she's got something left over for her family.

[1043] So she's conducting her life responsibly and taking care of her family.

[1044] It's like good for her and under difficult circumstances.

[1045] And then maybe you meet someone who's even gone a little farther than that and they kind of got their own life under control and they've got their family's life put in pretty decent order.

[1046] And then they have a little left over for the community, right?

[1047] So they're out there trying to do decent things.

[1048] And, you know, most of the people that I've met, not everyone, but most of the people that I've met who have excess wealth.

[1049] And I've met a lot of people like that now, especially in places like Silicon Valley.

[1050] Most of those people spend a substantial amount.

[1051] out of time trying to figure out what good things they could do with their excess money.

[1052] And it isn't because they're good people exactly, although sometimes that's the reason, it's because it's actually, if you have money, well, what are you going to do?

[1053] How many yachts do you need?

[1054] One is more than enough.

[1055] You don't even want to have one, actually, because they're more trouble than they're worth.

[1056] But if you have one, you certainly don't need two.

[1057] It's like, what are you going to do?

[1058] Well, maybe you could do something useful with your money.

[1059] Maybe there's people whose careers you could help foster.

[1060] Maybe there's a business that you could build.

[1061] There's some major problem in the world that you could try to solve.

[1062] Bill Gates, you know, he's trying to kick the slats out of the five biggest transmissible diseases.

[1063] That's a hell of a thing.

[1064] Maybe we should give him $60 billion.

[1065] It's like, which we already did.

[1066] It's like, you know, but he gave us these personal computers in return, which wasn't such a bad trade.

[1067] And now he's off there trying to get rid of malaria.

[1068] Well, if the cost of getting rid of malaria is that Bill Gates has to have $60 billion, it's like, that's a pretty good bargain.

[1069] And he's actually making headway.

[1070] You know, we'll probably get rid of polio in the next couple of years.

[1071] If the bloody Islamic terrorists would stop harassing people who are doing vaccinations, we'd already have that done.

[1072] But we might be able to get rid of the five big transmissible diseases in next 15 years.

[1073] That'd be a hell of an accomplishment.

[1074] And so, you know, you've got the responsibility for you.

[1075] You've got responsibility for your family.

[1076] If you want it, you've got responsibility for your community.

[1077] And you can have people finger wagging at you saying, you know, you should take your responsibility seriously.

[1078] And that just produces a kind of who are you to tell me what to do sort of response, you know?

[1079] And I think that's where the conservatives have fallen down, the classic conservatives, because they get a bit finger -waggy and fundamentalist about the whole thing.

[1080] But you can make a much better case.

[1081] You can say, look, life's rough.

[1082] man for you and everyone else and you could do something about that you like you couldn't do everything about it but you could you could definitely do something about it and you could certainly make it a hell of a lot worse that's in your power so you can make it worse for you and for everyone else that's you've got that if you wanted you could at least not do that that would be something and then well that would be something like you could just refrain from making things worse that'd be a nice start but then you could really push yourself a bit and no, no, I'm actually going to aim to make things better.

[1083] I'm going to take responsibility.

[1084] And the way I'm going to do that is to take responsibility.

[1085] So here's, there's a couple of great ideas that the West has.

[1086] So the first idea is the individual is sovereign.

[1087] There's something divine about each person.

[1088] There's a locus of ability in each person that's so valuable that the integrity of the state itself should be founded on recognition of that.

[1089] And that is one of the great and mirableness.

[1090] miraculous human ideas.

[1091] To think that's the case for everyone.

[1092] It's amazing that anybody ever came up with that idea.

[1093] And even more amazing that we basically all share that idea and that we founded our state on it, and that it works.

[1094] It works.

[1095] You found a state on that idea.

[1096] It works.

[1097] And then associated with that idea is that that sovereign individual has a sovereign ethical responsibility, twofold.

[1098] One is to work diligently to eliminate unnecessary suffering in the world.

[1099] You certainly do.

[1100] do that if you're taking care of your family, right?

[1101] I mean, you want to protect your children from undue suffering, not from everything, not from challenge, certainly, but from base misery, you know, and that's the same for you and perhaps the same for your community.

[1102] And the other thing to do is to constrain malevolence, right, to work to eradicate evil in you, first in you, first and foremost in you.

[1103] That's a big enough job, man. You constrain it in yourself, you'll start to constrain it everywhere else.

[1104] You wrestle with that in yourself.

[1105] And so that's expressed in the New Testament story of, at least in part of Christ encountering Satan in the desert, right?

[1106] And what, foregoing the temptations of power in order to constrain malevolence, but it's portrayed as a psychological drama.

[1107] And so that's responsibility.

[1108] It's like, well, the world is a bitter place in many ways, and the bitterness is made worse by the malevolence of you and everyone else.

[1109] And so what do you, and then that can drive you to despair, certainly, drive you to madness, right?

[1110] And worse, it can drive you to murder, it can drive you to genocide, it can drive you to torture, like it does, and it's not surprising.

[1111] Well, what do you do about that?

[1112] When you do in about face, and you think, the world is characterized by suffering and malevolence, but the meaning, there's meaning to be had, and the meaning to be had is in the responsibility, and the responsibility is to alleviate the suffering and constrain the malevolence.

[1113] And that puts an aim in your life.

[1114] And weirdly, this is so strange.

[1115] This is the strange part of it is that if you turn around and you adopt that responsibility, despite its daunting nature, voluntarily, then that instantly produces the meaning that works as a medication against the suffering.

[1116] Even if you don't dispense with the suffering, it's like at least you have a challenge that's worth living for, right?

[1117] Nietzsche said, he who has a why can bear any how.

[1118] It's like so, and I'll end with this.

[1119] I figured something out the other day, and it took me like 30 years to figure this out.

[1120] So some of you have watched my lectures, and you know a lecture about Pinocchio, for example, and there's a deep mythological idea in Pinocchio, and the idea is that you should rescue your father from the belly of the beast.

[1121] It's something like that.

[1122] And so I've been thinking about that.

[1123] It's like, well, why would the spirit of your father be lying latent in the belly of a beast?

[1124] What What possible sense would that make?

[1125] And you all know this is true.

[1126] You know this, because you watch things like Pinocchio, and you watch a puppet, marionette, who's being pulled by strings that aren't his, descend to the depths of chaos and rescue his father, and that makes sense to you.

[1127] Who knows why?

[1128] But it does.

[1129] And you watch the Lion King, and you see the same thing with Simba, because when he undergoes his maturation transformation at the end of the movie, he follows the shaman down into the depths of the jungle path and looks in the reflective pool.

[1130] into the depths and then sees his father echoed in the sky, and his father tells him to remember who he is.

[1131] And that's fine with you, you gather that.

[1132] It makes sense archetypally.

[1133] The question is, why?

[1134] Okay, so here's an idea.

[1135] So you need to confront challenges.

[1136] That's how you grow.

[1137] That's how you become stronger.

[1138] The clinical evidence for that is clear.

[1139] Then you can think of the notion of challenge itself, so that's also part of the stage setting.

[1140] The notion of challenge itself is that you stand on the abyss and you face the abyss.

[1141] And that's your own death, for that matter.

[1142] That's the suffering and the malevolence of the world, the darkness of the world.

[1143] And in the darkness, you see a terrible monster, and that's a thing that will take you down.

[1144] And then you go down there into it, and what happens when you get inside it is you find the spirit of your dead father?

[1145] And what does that mean?

[1146] Well, one of the things we know is that if you face things, you get stronger.

[1147] Now, it's partly because you learn.

[1148] You never learn without difficulty, right?

[1149] Because you learn by facing challenges that you haven't yet faced.

[1150] And so it's difficult.

[1151] You get more informed as you face challenges that you haven't faced.

[1152] So there gets to be more to you.

[1153] You get to be more like a complete human being, right?

[1154] You get to be more like the embodiment of the ancestral spirits.

[1155] It's something like that by challenging yourself.

[1156] So the question is, well, what would you become if you face the ultimate challenge properly?

[1157] Well, you'd become the ancestral father.

[1158] It's something like that.

[1159] But there's something even more remarkable about this.

[1160] So one of the things that biologists have figured out, neurologists and geneticists have figured out in the last 10 years, this is so cool, if you go to somewhere that you haven't been, so you challenge yourself, new genes that haven't been turned on in your brain turn on, and they code for new proteins, and they make new structures.

[1161] And so part of your potential, because you have potential, whatever the hell that means, part of your potential is locked in your genetic code, and it won't turn on, until you put yourself in a situation of challenge.

[1162] And so you actually transform physiologically as a consequence of facing things voluntarily.

[1163] You turn parts of you that aren't on, on.

[1164] And so the question might be, well, if you face a little challenge, parts of you turn on, and you learn.

[1165] But if you face a bigger challenge, even more of that happens.

[1166] You know that if you go to the gym, the heavier the weights you lift, the more you start to develop, assuming you're careful.

[1167] It's not that mysterious.

[1168] the question would be, well, who would you be if you face the ultimate challenge?

[1169] And the answer to that would be, well, you would be everything you could be.

[1170] And the question then would be, well, who would you be if you could be everything you could be?

[1171] And the answer to that would be, you would be the person that could tolerate the tragedy of being.

[1172] That's who you'd be.

[1173] You'd be the person who would take responsibility for that.

[1174] You'd be the person that would constrain the malevolence in your own heart and work for the betterment of being.

[1175] That's who you would be.

[1176] That's why your father is to be found.

[1177] in the bottom of the abyss.

[1178] Thank you.

[1179] What do you think, man?

[1180] Forty -five done.

[1181] Now, what do we got?

[1182] Like another 40 comment?

[1183] 16 stops in Europe.

[1184] The revolution has begun, huh?

[1185] Yeah, 40 more cities, probably.

[1186] Something like that.

[1187] Maybe more over the next six months.

[1188] Lots of cities.

[1189] What are you going to do in August?

[1190] You're going to relax a little bit?

[1191] Yeah, I think so.

[1192] I think so.

[1193] I've got...

[1194] I've got a talk in Regina on the 14th and one in Saskatoon on the 16th, so it's this leg that's finished, but I don't have any other public talks during that period of time until September 5th, and then we start going down the East Coast, right, because we've got 20 cities lined up along the East Coast, smaller cities.

[1195] Partly what I'm going to do is, I was just figuring this out today.

[1196] I had the great honor of being asked to write the introduction to the 50th, version of the Gulag archipelago, which is going to be published in 2000, in the fall.

[1197] And so I finished that today and got it off, so that was good.

[1198] And I heard from the Solzhenitsyn family this week, and they were very happy with the introduction.

[1199] So that was a big deal, because it was a daunting task to write something that vaguely deserved to be associated with a book like that.

[1200] And one of the things we're going to do to publicize, I suppose, the existence of the new version.

[1201] It's also the 100th anniversary of Sojanit's birth this year.

[1202] And so those two things dovetailed very nicely is I'm going to read the introduction as a YouTube video, and I'm going to put images with it.

[1203] So I'm going to spend...

[1204] I think that'll be fun because I like editing video.

[1205] It's really challenging and interesting.

[1206] And so I'll put together a little documentary.

[1207] and get that ready for release in November, and I think that would be relatively, I wouldn't call it entertaining thing to do for the next while, but it'll be very engaging.

[1208] And we're working on getting the videos out from the Sam Harris talks, and so that should happen in the next little while.

[1209] We're trying to figure out how to distribute them properly and what to do with them.

[1210] And I'm going to New York tomorrow, and I'm going to speak to, I'm going to be on PBS, invited me, which is quite strange, because the liberal left media has had nothing to do with me except the odd, well, more than odd, hit piece.

[1211] And, you know, they're basically continuous, but I'm going to be on front line tomorrow next day, and then on a Fox show after that, so that's New York.

[1212] And I'm working on negotiating the contract for my next books as well this month.

[1213] So...

[1214] You do realize the question I asked you is, how do you relax?

[1215] Well, you know, I really enjoy this tour, but it's, you know, there's no time for error.

[1216] There's no space for mistakes.

[1217] And my wife and I have been touring and she's been extraordinarily helpful and keeping everything on track.

[1218] So just not having that responsibility for travel and this at the end of the day will be relaxing.

[1219] and I'm less, I'm also less stressed about the media noise around me because, you know, for a long time, it's gone like this, and I've never been sure if I was going to get taken out by something like that New York Times piece, but so far I haven't been taken out, and it doesn't look like, I will never say that.

[1220] it isn't obvious that the situation is getting worse for me someone someone I know says choose your words carefully I think we just saw it right there don't tempt fate that's for sure all right you know I'm starting with this one because it has come up at every Canadian stop when will you run for prime minister actually it came up in America too but it did yeah Yeah, yeah, it did.

[1221] They're going to inflict me on unsuspecting Canadians.

[1222] A, it isn't clear I'm qualified.

[1223] I haven't had a political career.

[1224] I'm not a professional administrator.

[1225] There's a trillion things I don't know about how to run something complicated like a modern economy.

[1226] So that's, and it would be a daunting learning curve.

[1227] B, I can't speak French very well.

[1228] C. I have all these other things.

[1229] things that I'm doing that seem to be important.

[1230] And maybe I'm more suited for them.

[1231] I mean, one of the things I'm working on right now, some of you know this, perhaps, is that I wanted to build something approximating an online university.

[1232] And so I hired some people to do that recently.

[1233] There's three of us, three people hired very, very smart kids, very technologically savvy, man. They can solve problems like it's just nobody's business.

[1234] It's really something to see.

[1235] And we want to build universal education system, not a university, but something broader than that, because we thought there's no sense restricting it to the age range that would be in university.

[1236] There's just no reason to do that.

[1237] So we want to build a universal education system that will provide a high -quality university equivalent education for something between one -tenth and one -one -hundredth the cost with no administrative overhead.

[1238] And more importantly, we're going to set it up so that it will be impossible to mess with the grading scheme.

[1239] No ideological interference with the grading scheme.

[1240] None.

[1241] And so that project is perversely enough, actually ahead of schedule, which really staggers me, because we've only been working on it for about three months, full time, but we're a year ahead of where I thought we'd be at this point.

[1242] And so that's very exciting, and I'm very interested in devoting a substantial amount of time to that.

[1243] And so there's all these projects that I would have to put on hold if I decided to do something political, and it isn't obvious to me that that would be smart.

[1244] So I think I'll just keep doing what I'm doing, at least for the foreseeable future.

[1245] For the record, I think we can all agree if Trudeau can do it, he can do it, right?

[1246] You're there?

[1247] I'm going to drag you into this thing, kicking and screaming.

[1248] way or another.

[1249] Yeah, I don't know if that was a compliment, by the way.

[1250] Any advice for a parent navigating their children through the digital age?

[1251] Yeah, that's a tough one, man. Well, I've had some friends with teenagers, and they've run into vicious trouble because of what's happened with their kids online, like just absolutely horrible trouble, you know, because a kid can get in trouble online in ways that, well, so can adults, obviously.

[1252] But imagine if you were 13, imagine this, eh?

[1253] And you wrote down what you thought and let everybody know.

[1254] It's like, that's bad enough, man. Don't do that.

[1255] And then you wrote it down in a way that could never be erased.

[1256] And then everything you did was recorded so you could never forget it for the rest of your life.

[1257] Jesus, that's so dismal, man. Like, the best thing about being 13 is that you get to forget it.

[1258] So, I don't know.

[1259] I've been talking to my friends and the people who have been affected by this, trying to figure out what to do.

[1260] And it's really hard because, you know, you can't, your kids, teenagers, they're pretty sad little specimens if they don't have a smartphone, you know, in the broader culture.

[1261] So it doesn't look like something that's easy to deny them.

[1262] They also don't pick up the technological prowess then, and that's a mistake because, like, you better know how to use one of these things, because otherwise you're just gone.

[1263] You're lost.

[1264] But the technology is so dangerous.

[1265] So, you know, when I talk to my kids about experimenting with illicit substances, I said, look, you're probably going to experiment, but if you're stoned, I don't want to know it.

[1266] So if you're experimenting, you better keep yourself under control well enough, so I can't tell that you're screwed up, because otherwise you're not handling it properly.

[1267] And so, well, that seems to me to be about, right, like, what the hell are you going to do?

[1268] You're going to say, don't experiment?

[1269] It's like, I mean, we're going to make part legal.

[1270] It's already 95 % there, so it's pretty hypocritical to give that advice.

[1271] But you can help your kids.

[1272] The rule's got to be something like, don't do something so damn stupid that you ruin the rest of your life.

[1273] Right?

[1274] That's the fundamental rule with regards to playing with fire.

[1275] And maybe you can help your kids, maybe you can help make your kids sense.

[1276] enough so that they won't make any fatal errors playing with complicated technology.

[1277] You know, but I'm just as happy that my kids are old enough now so that they're not facing this.

[1278] The world was pretty digitized when they were, because they were 24 and 26.

[1279] You know, 10 years ago, social media was still around, but not like it is now.

[1280] So I don't have any easy answers for that, unfortunately.

[1281] Do you think you moved Sam Harris at all during your four talks?

[1282] oh yeah I think so but I think he moved me too you know I mean Harris is not an unreasonable guy he's a very articulate spokesperson for a particular perspective a powerful perspective the materialistic atheist perspective is an unbelievably powerful perspective so and he's very good at articulating it and Sam's heart is in the right place as far as I'm concerned like the reason that he wants to ground ethics in facts is so that we have a solid ethical structure.

[1283] You know, I just don't think that...

[1284] I don't think that the answers that he provides are sufficiently...

[1285] I think they're low resolution and they don't have sufficient poetic power.

[1286] And that's a big problem.

[1287] Because he overvalues rationality.

[1288] And I don't think we should undervalue it.

[1289] I'm certainly a fan of the Enlightenment.

[1290] I mean, I'm a scientist.

[1291] I use rational means all the time, and I try to be very clear in what I write and say.

[1292] But rationality is embedded in the body.

[1293] And the body is something that's far more complicated than mere rationality.

[1294] And it requires poetry and art, and it requires narrative, and it requires wisdom and dance and music and art. And all of those things that the rationalists tend to think of as mere epithenomena, something more fundamental.

[1295] And they're wrong.

[1296] They've got it backwards.

[1297] And so it isn't that I fault Sam for why he's doing what he's doing.

[1298] He would like to see the some total of suffering in the world reduced, and he's terrified of religious fundamentalism, and no wonder.

[1299] But I don't think that the answer provided by the materialist atheists has the motivational potency to serve as a bulwark against nihilism or totalitarianism.

[1300] And so that's why we differ.

[1301] And we had a real conversation.

[1302] You know, it lasted 10 hours, four sessions, 10 hours.

[1303] And, you know, we hit each other, I would say as hard as we could.

[1304] You know, also noting that we were trying to work towards the same end, which was a clearer discourse, and some development of some vision about how to proceed with this terrible problem of meaning.

[1305] But it wasn't like he didn't listen, you know?

[1306] I mean, it was a real conversation, and I think we're both more articulate than we were before the conversation.

[1307] Like this thing that I talked about tonight, why the father is in the belly of the beast, I don't think I would have figured that out if I wouldn't have talked to Sam for 10 hours.

[1308] And like, I'm really happy I figured that out.

[1309] That blew me away when I finally realized why that image existed.

[1310] That's really something, you know, and that's why it's useful to engage with people who are of good faith, who have opinions that are different from yours.

[1311] That's thinking.

[1312] That's what thinking is.

[1313] And thinking gets you places, places you need to go.

[1314] So it was definitely worthwhile, and yes, I think we were both moved by it, and I think the audience was as well.

[1315] We know some of your heroes who are long gone.

[1316] Do you have any living heroes?

[1317] IAN Hersey Ali, living heroes is rough because it takes a long time to figure out if someone's a hero, you know?

[1318] I mean, I have people that I respect, and scientists particularly, and lots of great scientists, but it takes a long time to establish a reputation, like a real reputation.

[1319] And so usually by the time you do, you're dead, just kind of unfortunate.

[1320] And so, but Ali, for sure, I mean, I thought her book, Infidel, was a staggering piece of work, and she's insanely.

[1321] grave, you know, and now and then you see these people that, you know, Douglas Murray's like that.

[1322] Murray, he's got a spine of steel, that guy.

[1323] It's really something to meet him because he's very affable, eagle -less guy, you know, not arrogant, soft -spoken, but if he has his mindset on something, there is no move in him.

[1324] And it's really something to meet people like that, you know, they're quite rare.

[1325] The girl from Wilford Laurier, I certainly admire her.

[1326] I mean, she's young.

[1327] She's just a kid, really, you know, early 20s.

[1328] And the university brought everything it had to bear on her.

[1329] And she basically crossed her arms and said, I'm not moving.

[1330] And then didn't.

[1331] And that's good for her, man. Impressive.

[1332] Man, there's a lot of good stuff here.

[1333] Boxers or briefs?

[1334] He asked me this before.

[1335] I told him, the reason I wear pants is so that I don't have to answer that question.

[1336] Don't point at me. These are the questions there, so many.

[1337] I know, and that one comes up a lot.

[1338] Is there one public policy that you could enact in Canada that you think might fix things?

[1339] No, not one.

[1340] No, it's too complicated.

[1341] And besides, you don't fix things.

[1342] That doesn't how things work.

[1343] you know what you do is you you look at a problem and then the deeper the more you look at it the more micro problems you see that it's made of right because you know there's this old story that if you cut off the head of a hydra then six more heads grow well that's the lot that's the world that's why that's a hero myth it's like you face a problem and you find out that it's a whole set of problems and then you look at each problem and you see that's a whole set problems.

[1344] That's the problem with ideology, because ideology says, we can solve all those problems at once.

[1345] It's like, no, you can't.

[1346] You don't even know what the damn problem is.

[1347] It's like, the problems are really complicated.

[1348] They're really, really, really, really complicated.

[1349] And so, you know, I would have a method.

[1350] I like Lomburg's method.

[1351] It's like, okay, well, the first thing we would do is say, well, what are the problems?

[1352] You know, what are the big problems facing Canada?

[1353] The gender wage gap, that's not one of them.

[1354] Okay, so despite the fact that it was referenced, the gender was referenced 385 times in the federal budget, you know.

[1355] So, well, what are the problems?

[1356] Well, that's a hard problem.

[1357] And I'm not being dismissive about that or treacherous intellectually.

[1358] There's a man named Hans Isaac who wrote a great book called Genius, and he's a great psychologist.

[1359] It was the world's most cited psychologist for a long time.

[1360] One of the things he pointed out was that the most difficult cognitive problem is to formulate the problem properly.

[1361] Because if you formulate a problem properly, you're a fair way to solving it.

[1362] So the first question would be, it's like, well, what are the problems that confront us as a nation?

[1363] Well, what you do is you'd do some information gathering to find out.

[1364] You'd have people, experts, common people, everyone's like, well, what are the problems?

[1365] What's wrong with us that we could fix?

[1366] well then you'd gather a nice conglomeration of problems and you'd think okay well how would we rank order these problems and could we generate sets of solutions to them and then could we test different solutions to see if they would work so I would say that the way to solve complex problems is to have a complex problem solving methodology and social scientists scientists in general have a complex problem solving methodology specify the problem, generate hypotheses about how it might be solved, test a variety of variance to see which ones work, specify your outcome measures properly.

[1367] That's how things should be handled.

[1368] And so I would never think that there is one thing that could be done because that isn't how the world works, man. Problems are complicated, they're high resolution, and generally what you do is solve micro -problems partially.

[1369] But if you do a bunch of that, things get better like it works incremental and that's you know that's one of the lessons in 12 rules for life is don't underestimate the utility of incremental improvement it's you because it starts to compound so it's okay to focus on a problem and decompose it into a micro problem until you you're biting off exactly as much as you can chew fix that then you'll build to fix the next thing and then you'll be to fix the next thing so it's a method and and it would be application of that method that would be the solution to the problem, yeah.

[1370] This is interesting.

[1371] As a therapist, have you ever been in therapy?

[1372] No. Well, look, yet it's complicated because I would say the answer to that is yes and no. One of the things I learned from reading Carl Jung, Jung said moral effort is a substitute for therapy.

[1373] something like that.

[1374] Well, that's because therapy is actually a moral process.

[1375] Why?

[1376] Well, because you go to a therapist because your life isn't what it could be by your own proclamation, right?

[1377] And that might be a physical thing.

[1378] You might be ill, and that has to be sorted out because people get sick, and, you know, there's lots of variants of depression and other disorders, too, that are mostly a consequence of physical illness, of one form or another.

[1379] and so that has to be sorted out but then people make strategic errors and they don't have a well -developed vision for their life and all of that so you help people through that and you know I did a lot of analysis of my own dreams and a lot of writing and thinking about things and so and I have a lot of communication with my wife and my friends as well my wife in particular I would say and that's been deeply therapeutic in the rough sense I mean, in the harsh sense, because, you know, we really have a close relationship, but it's a combat of relationship, you know, like she doesn't stand for any nonsense, and neither do I. And so that, and her less than me, even, I would say, which is a good thing.

[1380] It was funny, the kids used to come over to our house, you know, when they were teenagers, and we liked that.

[1381] We liked our teenagers, oddly enough, and we liked having their friends over, but there was a rule in our house and all their friends knew it, which was, you are welcome here, really.

[1382] But if you do something stupid and we never have to see you again as a consequence, that's perfectly okay with both of us.

[1383] And so, and when the kids first came over, they were, first came over and didn't know the house very well, they were mostly afraid of me. But after they'd been there for about a month, they were mostly afraid of Tammy.

[1384] So that's therapy, man. That's a relationship, right?

[1385] Yeah.

[1386] Yeah, it is, because you're stupid and ignorant, and so is your partner, and if you bash yourself against each other long enough, you both get tempered a bit, and maybe you're a little smarter, a little wiser than you might otherwise be, because you had to take that other person into account, and they had to take you into account, and you have to solve difficult problems together.

[1387] And so that's been good.

[1388] Like, we fought a lot, hard fights and vicious fights often, but productive, you know, because the goal of the fight was to not to have to have the fight again.

[1389] And those are hard fights, man, because sometimes they're about deep things, problems in life, problems that you're carrying forward as a flawed personality, problems that are part and parcel of your being because of your screwed up family, you know, because you carry multigenerational pathology forward with you.

[1390] And so that relationship has been very therapeutic, I would say.

[1391] So, as I said, yes and no. Tammy's here, by the way.

[1392] Give it up for Tammy.

[1393] She's here somewhere.

[1394] I like this one.

[1395] Yeah, well, one thing about that, too.

[1396] Like, because we put each other through the mill, I would say, and to some degree, because life also did that, our daughter was very ill for a long time, and so that was challenging.

[1397] We've been able to do what we've been doing for the last 60 days.

[1398] Like, we've had a very intense schedule and under very stressful circumstances, and we don't, we're fortunate in that we're not carrying so.

[1399] so much excess relationship baggage with us that that is compromising our ability to do this.

[1400] And so that's been extraordinarily helpful.

[1401] The combat, you know, that straightens things out is it's tense and it's conflictual.

[1402] People avoid that sort of thing all the time and they're related.

[1403] It's okay.

[1404] It doesn't matter.

[1405] We don't have to fight about that.

[1406] It's like, that's such a lie.

[1407] It's like, yes, you do.

[1408] You have to, you have to fight about it.

[1409] You have to straighten it out.

[1410] And people avoid that like mad.

[1411] And then the disagreements accumulate.

[1412] Then they turn into a terrible monster and they eat you.

[1413] And then you're in divorce court for like 15 years scrapping over your kids while you give your lawyers $300 ,000.

[1414] And then you have the fights you didn't have.

[1415] And it's expensive and horrible.

[1416] Yeah, I mean, I've seen plenty of this.

[1417] I'm a therapist.

[1418] I've seen plenty of this.

[1419] When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

[1420] Well, it varied.

[1421] I mean, I remember I don't know if I should tell you this, but I'm going to anyways.

[1422] Because I told a reporter this at Toronto Life, and he made, you know, he didn't treat it kindly, let's say.

[1423] He was kind of a son of a bitch, that guy.

[1424] Well, it's funny, because he was kind of a gifted writer.

[1425] He could actually write, but he didn't have any confidence in his own ability or that of his audience.

[1426] So he would tell a story about me, which was like an accurate story.

[1427] and then he would write like a paragraph about what you should think about what you just read which isn't what you do if you're a good writer right what you do is you just tell the story and you let your audience make up their own mind but he couldn't do that he'd tell the story which he could do he did his research and then he'd say well here's how you should think about this if you were a good person it's like so when he wrote this piece which i wasn't very happy about because i was very i think kind to him and welcoming and honest and you know he wrote this nasty little piece and I wrote to him I said you know you you perverted your own talent because you're actually pretty damn good writer and yet you didn't have enough confidence in your ability or that of your audience to separate the wheat from the chaff you had to tell them what good thinking people should think anyways when I was a kid one of the first political memories I have is Robert Kennedy's assassination and I followed that I think it was only about six when that happened.

[1428] I hadn't even been younger, but I think it was six.

[1429] Because it was quite shocking.

[1430] And I remember his funeral.

[1431] And there were hordes of people at his funeral.

[1432] And I thought, I'll have a funeral like that.

[1433] And I don't really know what to make of that, because it's a hell of a thing for a six -year -old kid to think.

[1434] So I don't know where that thought came from.

[1435] But it is an early memory.

[1436] And he assumed that that meant that I was narcissistic.

[1437] And I don't really think that's the issue it's like Kennedy was shot that's not exactly the sort of thing that you'd hope for so so but I always had some sense I suppose that I was going to be involved in large -scale enterprises of one form or another and I worked for the NDP when I was a kid from the time I was 13 till the time I was 16 and I ran for vice president of the Alberta NDP when I was 14 and and I wrote my own speech despite what people thought.

[1438] And so I thought about a political career for a long time.

[1439] I thought about a scientific career.

[1440] And then I decided that I was going to work as a psychologist, and all those things have come true to some degree.

[1441] I mean, there's a political element to what I've been doing, sort of secondarily.

[1442] But that's, well, that was sort of the scope of my ambition when I was a kid.

[1443] so I think it was partly my father's doing you know because my father was unbelievably my father is unbelievably good with little kids he's really he's got a gift for it you know and I think that I've learned that from him because I really like little kids and we get along great I get along with little kids right away I get along with teenagers too and my dad wasn't so good about that he didn't really trust teenagers but one of the things my father instilled in me or allowed to develop in me was he had an unshakable confidence that I could do whatever I set my mind to and he completely believed that now he was a harsh guy man like he had high standards and it was a weird weird with living with him because he thought that I could do whatever I set my mind to but nothing I ever did was good enough well it's a funny it's a really funny crucible you know because on the one hand it's extremely encouraging And on the other hand, it's hard because you never good enough.

[1444] But, you know, maybe that's not a bad combination.

[1445] It might be that because you need judgment in your life.

[1446] And who knows how high you should set the standards?

[1447] It's like, what makes you think that what you're doing is good enough?

[1448] Maybe you could do better.

[1449] So should I be on the side of you that's doing good enough?

[1450] Or should I be on the side of you that could be doing better?

[1451] And he was a disagreeable.

[1452] my dad, he's still alive, he's a disagreeable guy.

[1453] You know, he's not currying favor.

[1454] It's like, and there's some, that's an admirable trait, even though it's got its harsh side.

[1455] So, because it would have been a relief to me as a kid to have been able to do something that was good enough, you know.

[1456] And I'm not complaining about this.

[1457] It's genuine mystery to me. But that was certainly offset entirely by his belief that I could do whatever I set my mind to.

[1458] So he gave me a kind of unshakable, fundamental confidence, I would say.

[1459] And that's been a great gift to me. And one of the things I've seen, too, is one of the things that people tell me a lot in this tour, they thank me for the encouragement, you know, because I am lecturing to people and suggesting that they could be more than they are and that that's really part of them.

[1460] And many, many people thank me for that.

[1461] And one of the things I've realized is that not being encouraged sufficiently is the norm.

[1462] And I can't say that was my lot.

[1463] I was encouraged sufficiently.

[1464] So that was a great gift that I had from my parents.

[1465] Way to go, Dad.

[1466] Well, I just want to say to you guys, if you think Jordan has affected you, tried traveling the world with him for two and a half months and having him look at you while he's answering a lot of these questions, and I've said it to you privately, but I am a better person now than when we started this thing.

[1467] and I think it's important.

[1468] There was lots of room for him.

[1469] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1470] Sorry, Dave, you're saying yourself up for that one, man. I taught him a little comedic timing too, so give and take.

[1471] Really, this has been the, as we end this leg of it, and now we're going to take a month off.

[1472] This has been just the, I mean, professionally the thrill of my life, but personally, it's been, it's moved me, truly.

[1473] It's moved me, and I thank you for that.

[1474] And on that note, I'm going to get out of the way.

[1475] way and make some noise for Jordan Peterson, everybody.

[1476] 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.

[1477] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1478] See jordanb .peterson .com for audio, ebook and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1479] Also, subscribe to his email list if you're on his website.

[1480] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1481] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple podcasts, a comment or review, or share this episode with a friend.

[1482] Next week's episode is another 12 Rules for Life lecture from Regina, Saskatchewan, recorded on August 14th, 2018.

[1483] We're still making our way through the 12 Rules Canadian tour.

[1484] Hopefully you're enjoying it.

[1485] Talk to you next week, more updates than hopefully good ones.

[1486] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson.

[1487] on Twitter at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at jordan