You have an Endless Potential

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 29 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator.

[2] This is a podcast done in Dublin, Ireland, recorded on October 21st, 2018.

[3] The lecture this week is fun.

[4] Dad goes into a bit of his background at the beginning of it.

[5] An update on ThinkSpot.

[6] Think Spot.

[7] The social media platform dad is in.

[8] involved with was launched last Monday.

[9] Be sure to sign up on the website at thinkspot .com to wait for an invite.

[10] They're inviting 10 ,000 people in each week.

[11] 250 ,000 people have already signed up.

[12] You can annotate books, videos, podcasts, support your favorite content providers, and join an intellectual community that doesn't exist elsewhere.

[13] I have a page, Jocko Willink is on there, dad is, of course, an author that is amazing, writes really great kind of murder mystery books.

[14] That's a terrible way of describing it.

[15] Thrillers, more like, kind of like of the Born series.

[16] Greg Hurwitz is on there.

[17] Sign up and use the code Lion Diet, one word, to get invited in faster.

[18] Yes, I stuck my promo code in there, but it's just so listeners can get invited in faster than everybody else who's trying to get into ThinkSpot.

[19] I've named this podcast, You Have an Endless Potential.

[20] You have an endless potential, a 12 Rules for Life lecture by Jordan B. Peterson.

[21] Well, thank you.

[22] You sound like people who need to get out more.

[23] Although wandering around Dublin, that's the last thing you'd ever think that Dubliners need to do.

[24] So I'm going to talk to you tonight about my book, 12 Rules for Life, and also about my first book, because they're tangled together, and hopefully something approximating a coherent way.

[25] But I was thinking backstage about whether or not I had a good Irish story.

[26] And I actually do.

[27] I have a really good Irish story.

[28] It's really a weird story.

[29] So I thought I'd tell it to you.

[30] So my full name is Jordan Barrett Peterson, and that's a pretty good Scandinavian name, except for the Jordan part, but Barrett is a Scandinavian name, and so is Peterson.

[31] And my father is Norwegian, and my mother is German and English.

[32] And my dad grew up in a log cabin in the prairies in Canada.

[33] His parents moved into Saskatchewan, part of the prairie, very northern prairie in North America.

[34] They moved there in, I believe, 1905, and set up a homestead and built a house.

[35] to log cabin, and he grew up there, and his first language was actually Norwegian, and so my father is kind of happy about his Norwegian heritage, and he visited Norway, and my sister worked there, and so that's part of our family lore, I suppose.

[36] So, now, about, my dad is still alive, by the way, he's about, he's 82 now, I think, and doing quite well, so is my mother, And anyways, about 10 years ago, something like that, he went to visit my sister in California, and she lives down there in Silicon Valley, near San Francisco.

[37] And he got quite ill. He developed pancreatitis, and that can be quite nasty.

[38] And he was in the hospital, in the Stanford Hospital, where my sister also worked as a nurse.

[39] and he was really not in good shape and he was delirious for about a week and on high doses of medication and the strangest thing happened and this is a strange thing so the first thing you have to know to make sense of this story apart from the fact that my father is Norwegian is that he doesn't sing so now I can remember him singing the odd song in the car when we drove around when I was a kid rare occasions he would sing the lucky old son.

[40] It's an old folk song.

[41] But other than that, no. He doesn't sing.

[42] And he's a very classically masculine person, I would say.

[43] But what happened in the hospital was that he started singing Irish folk songs.

[44] Like, not in Gaelic.

[45] Thank God.

[46] But Irish folk songs, and quite a few of them.

[47] And my mother was absolutely shocked.

[48] and in tune as well.

[49] And my mother was very shocked by this because, well, he didn't sing, and if he was going to sing, like Irish folk songs weren't part of his background.

[50] So that was damn strange.

[51] So, but he recovered and stopped being delirious and stopped singing Irish folk songs.

[52] So that was all well and good.

[53] We filed that under incomprehensible phenomena, not to be thought about again, until my daughter got interested in her genetic heritage.

[54] And so she ordered a kit online.

[55] My daughter, as you may know, if you read 12 Rules for Life, has been quite ill, and she was trying to track down what might be wrong with her.

[56] And so she ordered this kit called 23 and Me, which does a genetic analysis.

[57] and she had my grandparents and me and my wife and so on, also get tested, get our DNA tested.

[58] Now, there's one other part of this story that you need to know.

[59] So my grandfather, so my dad's father, was adopted.

[60] So we don't know anything about his heritage going back, but he lived in a Norwegian community, and so we assumed that his parents were Norwegian.

[61] So anyways, my dad got his DNA tested and he was 30 % Irish.

[62] So, you know, there was a sneaky Irishman lurking in the background a couple of generations back, but we thought that in keeping with the whole Irish folk song episode was something surreal.

[63] to say the least.

[64] So, anyways, it turns out that I'm not Norwegian -English -English -German, I'm Norwegian -Irish -English and German, so, yeah.

[65] So, which I suppose accounts for my immense love of beer in my youth, which I've had to unfortunately give up, which is a very painful thing to come to Dublin and to go by the Guinness Brewery and not to be able to, you know, some of that but that's life.

[66] So anyways, I'm very happy to be here, ridiculously happy to be here, as a matter of fact, and it's been fun to wander around the city.

[67] And this is the second time I've been here in this year, right?

[68] Because I came here and had first discussion with Sam Harris.

[69] And as far as I know, that was the largest philosophical gathering, let's say, a public philosophical gathering ever.

[70] Apparently, the promoter is trying to get that entered into the Guinness Book of World Records.

[71] which is a strange, you know, it's the largest philosophical gathering.

[72] It's like, that's a strange category.

[73] But lots of strange things have happened, so that's just one more of them.

[74] And anyways, I'm very happy to be here, and so now I'll spend the rest of the time, I suppose, talking about things that are perhaps a little bit more serious.

[75] But that's my Irish story, and I really don't know what to make of it.

[76] So as Dave pointed out, this is the 86th cities.

[77] that my wife and I have been, Dave's been along for about 60 of the events, I think.

[78] So I've spoken to about 270 ,000 people live, I guess, since February.

[79] So that's really something.

[80] All of this is really something, right?

[81] To see people come out to engage in, well, something approximating a serious psychological or philosophical discussion.

[82] It was by no means obvious to anyone, I suppose, likely, including all of you, that there would be a public, there would be public demand for such a thing, but it turns out that we might actually be smarter than we gave ourselves credit for.

[83] And, well, it's possible, like, one of the things that I've really thought through, because I've been trying to understand why this is, like, how it is that this is happening.

[84] And, you know, it would be, I suppose, beneficial to my ego in the very short term to assume that it could be credited to me. But I think it's mostly a consequence of a technological, of the technical.

[85] technological revolution that's characteristic of online video and podcasts, essentially, because one of the things that's happened is the bandwidth cost for the dissemination of information in large scale has fallen basically to zero.

[86] So for the longest period of time, you still see this if you go do TV.

[87] I still do network TV and that sort of thing now and then, although I tell you, it feels like stepping back into 1975 doing that.

[88] It really does, it's really starting to feel like an archaic technology, because it's It's so scripted and so stilted because of that and so difficult to have a genuine interaction with the person that you're talking to, partly because they don't actually get to have a genuine interaction, because the medium that they're dealing with, broadcast television, is so expensive that they're not allowed to take any chances.

[89] And every second counts, right, because every second is expensive, and so everything has to be scripted and ready.

[90] And so, whereas with YouTube, it's like, no, bandwidth is basically free.

[91] So you can talk about things for a long time.

[92] And then it turns out that people actually want to listen to discussions that take a long time, right?

[93] And not an hour, which is a long time by TV standards, but like three hours.

[94] So you have people like Jill Rogan, whose podcast gets an amazing 1 .5 billion downloads a year, right?

[95] Which makes Rogan, as far as I can tell, the most powerful interviewer who's ever lived, likely by an order of magnitude.

[96] And so, and you know, you see this also happening in other technological domains.

[97] For a long time, it was sort of a rule of thumb on television, that you were really pushing your audience's capacity for sustained attention if you showed them a 90 -minute movie.

[98] Right?

[99] That was about that.

[100] That's what people could tolerate.

[101] It's like, well, that turned out just to be just unbelievably wrong.

[102] I don't know how many of you have watched Game of Thrones, but like, how long is that?

[103] What is it?

[104] Up to 90 hours?

[105] It's got to be at least that, and it has an incredibly complex set of plot lines, and it's just one of many shows like that.

[106] People will binge watch these things, perhaps not all 90 hours in a row, but it's not like, well, you're watching it for 10 minutes, and, you know, then your attention span is gone.

[107] and you have to rest for a day.

[108] People are much more sophisticated consumers of auditory and visual material than we ever thought.

[109] And so that's pretty cool.

[110] And I think it's a genuinely compelling revolution in some sense.

[111] I started thinking a lot about YouTube.

[112] I would say, I guess it's almost two and a half years ago.

[113] I put up my YouTube channel in the year 2013.

[114] And I did that because I had done some videos for a television station in Canada called TV Ontario.

[115] And they had, I worked for a show there called The Agenda, which was a public news show, and a pretty good one.

[116] But I also did lectures for this series called Big Ideas.

[117] And the guy who produced that, Odeck Schemberg, really should have been working on YouTube, but it was a little early for that.

[118] And what he did was have public intellectuals, about 200 of them, just deliver a lecture and filmed it and put it on TV.

[119] And he tried to get TVO to be interested in building that into something online, you know.

[120] But I'm afraid, like I said, I'm afraid he was about five years ahead of the curve.

[121] In any case, they didn't.

[122] And big ideas went along anyways, and it is posted on YouTube.

[123] But what happened to me was I did five Big Ideas lectures, and all five of them stayed in the top 20.

[124] most popular of all the lectures.

[125] And so, I thought that was kind of interesting.

[126] You know, it's a data point.

[127] And then I did a TV, 13 -part TV program with TV on my book, Maps of Meaning, which was, so I taught this course, Maps of Meaning, since 1993.

[128] I taught it at McGill first when I was there as a graduate student, to other graduate students, not as a credit course, but just as a seminar that people were interested in.

[129] And then I taught it at Harvard for six years.

[130] It was a very popular course there, and then I offered the course for almost 20 years at the University of Toronto, and it was also a very popular course.

[131] The most common comment from students was that the course had completely changed their lives.

[132] It completely changed the way they looked at the world, and that didn't surprise me that much in some ways, because figuring out reading and thinking about what I was teaching in that course completely changed my life.

[133] So it seemed that if I was propagating the information properly, it would have the same effect.

[134] And it's also not that surprising that if you're capable of presenting people with hypothetically profound philosophical and psychological material, especially material that's clinically relevant, that would have some effect on their lives because that was the point.

[135] That's why people came up with the material to begin with.

[136] But in any case, it is what happened.

[137] And so, viewing that, I got a bit of a reputation in Ontario and a bit, you know, a smaller reputation in Canada, but people became somewhat familiar with what I was doing, and they seemed pleased with it, which was very surprising to me, partly because of its complexity, and partly because when I was working as a panelist, I have rather pronounced opinions, let's put it that way.

[138] And it isn't obvious that when you have...

[139] pronounced opinions that people are going to respond positively to them, but people did, and so that was quite a shock to me, and still is quite a shock.

[140] So then I thought, well, YouTube came along, and I thought, but what is this medium?

[141] It's like you can put video online.

[142] What does that mean?

[143] Well, no one knew.

[144] You know, YouTube looked like a cute cat video repository for about a decade, and maybe that's okay, because it's harmless to watch animals do anything.

[145] entertaining and amusing things, but it's not something that you would necessarily take seriously.

[146] So I started just recording my lectures with an iPad and a Lavalier mic, really low -tech stuff, but the content was there.

[147] One of the things that's really interesting about YouTube, I find, and maybe this is characteristic of modern consumers of online media, is YouTube viewers actually don't like high production quality.

[148] They don't trust it.

[149] Like, they like good audio.

[150] And of course, because it's just annoying.

[151] And sometimes I don't have good audio for a variety of reasons.

[152] But it's just annoying to listen to something if it's hard to listen to.

[153] But they don't really like complex edits, and they don't like high production values.

[154] Partly because I think most of them know how to do that themselves, or many of them do, so they're not impressed by it technically.

[155] And they also don't really trust it.

[156] What they trust is, here's the whole story, make up your own mind.

[157] And that's good.

[158] And that's, I think, one of the reasons Rogan is so popular.

[159] It's just he talks to people.

[160] Whatever happens he puts online.

[161] And then you get to make up your own mind, as opposed to, say, NBC News, who interviewed me a year ago for 90 minutes, and then made a seven -minute version where they did virtually everything right up to cutting single words and putting them in sentences that they wanted me to say.

[162] And really got pilloried for it, because the people on YouTube who were watching were savvy enough to see exactly what had happened, and then actually compared the edits to the actual interview, you know, one -on -one when NBC released some more of it.

[163] In any case, I put up these videos of my classes, uncut, on YouTube, and by March of 2016, I had had a million views.

[164] And I thought, and the mean viewing time was 20 minutes.

[165] It's not a great statistic mean viewing time, because that isn't what you want to know.

[166] Because most people will click on a video and then just go to the next one.

[167] So the typical person is probably watching for like five seconds.

[168] But obviously, a lot of people were watching for a lot longer than that, because the average wouldn't have got up to 20 minutes.

[169] And so I thought, well, look, not only are people watching this, like clicking on it, they're actually watching.

[170] I thought, well, what is this?

[171] 12 million, one million views.

[172] What do you think when you get a million of something?

[173] Well, if you sell a million books, that's a home run, right?

[174] That's just, that never happens, and you never get...

[175] A million people never read a scientific paper.

[176] I mean, that never happens.

[177] A million is a lot.

[178] And so, it made me think, because there was also no metric for appreciating what that might meant, what that might mean.

[179] But it struck me as significant.

[180] And then I thought about it, I thought, oh, I see what's going on here, maybe.

[181] This is a Gutenberg revolution.

[182] This is as important as the printing press.

[183] Why?

[184] Because the spoken word now has the same reach and longevity as the written word.

[185] And that's never happened before in human history.

[186] So what does that mean?

[187] Well, the answer is we don't know what it means.

[188] It means something like whatever the printing press meant, and that turned out to be quite a lot.

[189] But it might be extraordinarily significant.

[190] Think, well, first of all, if you want to write a book, that's like three years' work, minimum, like flat -out bloody work just to write it, and perhaps a lot more than that.

[191] And then it's two years of trouble editing and publishing.

[192] And then, so it's a five -year enterprise.

[193] Minimum.

[194] And then the probability that it's going to succeed is, like, zero.

[195] You just can't believe how many books.

[196] are published every year and the vast majority of them sell virtually no copies and some of that's associated with quality but there's an arbitrary element to it too so but if you want to make a YouTube video that's 20 ,000 words long so that would be you know maybe two hours you can do that in one day and publish it I mean that's a whole staggering difference in terms of of effort and complexity.

[197] Now, it kind of means that we're flooded by YouTube videos, but we're flooded by books anyway.

[198] So that doesn't really make that much difference.

[199] But another issue with regards to video and podcasts as well, because, you know, the podcast market is actually much bigger than the YouTube market.

[200] I think it's about 10 times as big.

[201] People don't pay much attention to podcasts yet as a cultural phenomenon, but they really are something.

[202] I mean, lots of young people now listen to podcasts instead of music and that's really saying something because music has been the dominant I would say the dominant cultural form for young people since probably the 1950s so that's a big shift and then you can also watch YouTube videos or listen to podcasts sped up and so one of the advantages to books if you can really read is you can read faster than then you can listen but if you can listen that three or four times the normal rate and I have students who do that twice is kind of my topic but they've got really practiced at it.

[203] Then you're starting to hit the same efficiency as reading.

[204] And then you can listen to a podcast when you're doing the dishes or when you're mowing the lawn or when you're driving to work.

[205] Or when you're driving, I have lots of people who come to my lectures and afterwards say, well, I'm a long -haul trucker, I'm a machine operator, and all I do is listen to podcasts all day.

[206] It's like, well, you're not going to read a book while you're driving a long -haul truck, but you can listen.

[207] And so it's found time as well.

[208] So that's another technological revolution.

[209] All of a sudden, everybody has an hour a day, an hour and a half a day.

[210] Some people far more than that, commuters who have, and they can just use that time now to engage in intellectually compelling material.

[211] And they are doing that.

[212] So that's absolutely, well, who knows what that means?

[213] But one of the things it means is that, well, here's one of the things it might mean.

[214] Here's another thing to consider.

[215] You know, like, I have a good relationship with books.

[216] I love books.

[217] But I've loved books ever since I was, like, three years old.

[218] And it was partly because my father spent a lot of time teaching me to read.

[219] And I made friends with books when I was very, very young.

[220] And I'm a very, what would you call it?

[221] I'm a very practiced reader.

[222] So they're part of what's familiar to me. I always read before I go to bed at night, for example.

[223] And I feel that if I'm sitting down reading, I'm doing something productive.

[224] And not everyone feels that way, even though it is.

[225] productive to sit down and read.

[226] It's a minority of people who are really comfortable with books.

[227] Like hardly anybody buys books, not that many people read, and even of the people who read a small minority buy books.

[228] So it's a minority taste, and it's an elite taste in some sense.

[229] And part of that's because so many people don't become familiar with books.

[230] My friends, when I grew up, I grew up in a working -class community.

[231] And I had lots of friends who had, their families had zero books in the house.

[232] and one of my friends in particular, who is by no means an unintelligent person.

[233] He's a very smart person, a very good storyteller, and he's done a lot of interesting things with his life.

[234] He was functionally illiterate.

[235] Even by the time he hit grade 10, he'd never read a whole book in his life.

[236] It wasn't that rare, and it's not that rare.

[237] But so, you know, it's a minority of people who can read, who do read, and it's a minority of people who can read really fluently and who are comfortable with books.

[238] But God only knows how many people can watch and listen.

[239] Like everybody can listen You know, I mean, every kid can listen to a story Everybody can watch a drama or a movie So maybe 10 times as many people Will watch or listen as would read And so maybe that opens up a huge market for intellectual discourse That was never there before And maybe that's a really good thing.

[240] I mean, it's possible So anyways, I think that that's part of what's accounting for all this And the content is all.

[241] important obviously because you need to be able to use the medium in something approximating a compelling manner and to deliver to people information they find necessary and useful but we don't want to underestimate the significance and importance of the technological revolution that underlies this I also think that and I'll close this part of the discussion with this I've also been thinking a lot about political polarization because I've not really been convinced that especially looking at the US that things are as polarized as they look.

[242] You know, I mean, Trump obviously got elected, and that's odd, because Trump is an anomalous and strange political figure.

[243] But I don't think he's not, it's not like Satan himself has landed on the earth.

[244] You know, it's not a, it's not the apocalypse.

[245] I don't see that the Americans are more polarized than they were under Nixon, let's say, or perhaps even under Reagan.

[246] And 50 % of Americans voted Republican and 50 % voted Democrat in the last election, just like they have for every election for the last 20 years.

[247] Now, the candidate choice was a little on the undesirable side.

[248] You could make that case, although the American economy is booming like it hasn't been since the, I would say, the mid -1960s, so that's quite an interesting phenomenon.

[249] But I don't really see that there's any evidence that the Americans have polarized to that greater degree.

[250] And so what's happening?

[251] Well, I think what might be...

[252] And there was an article in The Atlantic Monthly, which I'm going to talk to you about a little bit in the Q &A period, indicating quite clearly that the vast majority of Americans, and I'm considering them proxies for Western people in general.

[253] The vast majority of them are moderate.

[254] So there's about 8 % radical leftists and about 6 % radical right -wingers and everyone else is in the middle wondering what the hell is going on with the radical leftists and the radical right -wingers.

[255] And so there isn't any evidence for tremendous increases in number of people at the polarized edges of the political distribution as well.

[256] I think what might be happening, and this is something to keep in mind, although I'm not sure about this, so YouTube and podcasts and obviously online written media are presenting and Google as well, are presenting a huge challenge to mainstream media outlets.

[257] So I know that in the UK, the London Times announced this month and a half ago, more people get their video news online now from online sources, not from networks, than rely on the classic networks.

[258] So that's shifted in the last two months.

[259] And of course, podcasts produce are terribly competitive with radio because it's on demand.

[260] And everyone can write a blog.

[261] And so it's very difficult to be a journalist, like a credible mainstream journalist, when you have 100 ,000 competitors.

[262] And then there's also the problem that companies like Google have figured out how to pull all the revenue that used to go for advertisements for supporting newspapers.

[263] So the mainstream media is having a terrible time of it.

[264] I'm actually not sure that anyone watches TV anymore.

[265] I think that people have their TVs, I think older people who are alone have their televisions on.

[266] And that's not the same as watching it.

[267] It's just, I really believe that.

[268] I have reason to believe that.

[269] I'm not going to go into, why?

[270] But I have reason to believe that.

[271] First of all, I know some people like that, and that's just anecdotal.

[272] But I've had some recent experiences with network television that indicated to me that it doesn't have near the power that is even claimed for the remnants of it.

[273] Well, so what happens as the mainstream media deteriorates, let's say, or loses its grip on the attention of all of us?

[274] I think the answer is, well, first of all, they start losing their budgets, and they lose their ability to fact check, and they lose their ability to pay their journalists.

[275] You know, Time magazine no longer pays its journalists.

[276] That's not good, right?

[277] That's not a good business model.

[278] And then they're losing their grip on public attention because they don't have a monopoly.

[279] So what do you do when you lose your grip on attention?

[280] And the answer is, well, you go for the easy stories, first of all, because you don't have the resources to chase the difficult ones.

[281] And the second thing you do is chase clickbait.

[282] And so anything contentious attracts attention.

[283] And so I think what's happening is that a disproportionate amount of attention even in the mainstream media is being devoted to the radicals on the far right and the radicals on the far left and the only reason for that is it's the only way that the mainstream media sources can keep their attention quota up but it's a bad long -term game right because all that happens over time is that people cease to trust the sources even less they start trusting them even less than they do now and so basically what's happening is these companies are exhausting the credibility of their brands in a last -ditch attempt to remain somewhat relevant, and the way that looks to everyone else is that everything's polarized.

[284] But it isn't obvious to me that everything is polarized.

[285] So we'll see about that.

[286] Okay, so that's a bit of a discussion about why we might be here and how that came about.

[287] And so the positive side of it seems to be that if you present people with relatively sophisticated, long -form information, that they have a very deep hunger for it, that's much more independent even of educational background than anyone would have guessed.

[288] And so that's super cool, as far as I'm concerned.

[289] It's been really something to go all over and see how profound that desire for engagement is.

[290] I mean, Sam Harris discussions were a really good example of that, because I talked to Sam four times, twice in Vancouver, 3 ,000 people each time, 8 ,500 people in Dublin, and then about 6 ,500 in London.

[291] And, you know, the audiences were on board for the entire discussion, two and a half hours long each session, even though the discussions were cumulative across time.

[292] And I don't know how many people have watched them online now.

[293] It's certainly in the millions if you added up cumulatively across the platforms.

[294] And those were, you know, those were fairly tough discussions.

[295] And not on topics that you would think would be particularly gripping.

[296] I mean, on religion versus science, that's one way of conceptualizing our discussion.

[297] But it was also on the relationship between facts and values.

[298] It doesn't sound like something that would bring down the house, you know.

[299] And people are partying in the street because they get to go see a lot.

[300] long discussion on the philosophical relationship between facts and values.

[301] It's like, we've really been waiting, we've been gnawing at the bit, waiting for this for a very long time.

[302] Turns out that you were, but who knew?

[303] Who knew?

[304] So, so I think that's very optimistic.

[305] And, uh, all right, so let's talk, let's talk about, let's go to the book.

[306] Let's go to 12 rules.

[307] And, um, I'll start with rule 12.

[308] I'm going to work backwards, I think.

[309] The Rule 12 is pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

[310] And often what I do with my lectures is I try to extend what I've been thinking about beyond what I've been able to think so far.

[311] So I can use them as an opportunity to test new ideas and to clarify what I'm already thinking.

[312] And to do that in real time and then to sort of watch people and see if I'm on track.

[313] Because you can tell if you're talking to an audience if you're on track.

[314] Because if you are, then people aren't rustling around, making noise.

[315] And so you can listen for silence, and then you can watch people one at a time and see if they're following.

[316] And you can tell, if they are, just like you do if you're having a conversation.

[317] People are nodding, or they're shaking their head, or they're looking away and bored, or they're checking their iPhones.

[318] That's bad.

[319] You don't want that to happen.

[320] But silence is a really good marker.

[321] And I often have a question that I'm trying to address.

[322] that sort of serves as a focal point for the discussion.

[323] And I thought tonight that the focal point would be vulnerability.

[324] Because vulnerability is a major, the major problem, perhaps, right?

[325] The fact that people can be hurt and that we all will be hurt, you know.

[326] And that things end for us.

[327] That's the fundamental hallmark of vulnerability.

[328] We're finite, right?

[329] That's a big deal.

[330] It's one of the defining characteristics of life.

[331] It's certainly one of the only certainties of life.

[332] And so vulnerability is a very...

[333] It's a primary existential problem.

[334] And it's a uniquely human problem because, of course, animals are vulnerable in the same way that we are, except they don't know it.

[335] And that's actually a big difference.

[336] It's a huge difference to have the shadow of death over you during your entire existence.

[337] And it makes us peculiar creatures.

[338] One of the things, I'm actually amazed at human beings.

[339] You know, when I worked as a clinical psychologist, which was for a long time, I was never surprised that my clients were out of kilter psychologically, that they had anxiety disorders or that they were depressed or that they had something seriously wrong with them.

[340] The people that I was always amazed at were the people who didn't.

[341] And it's partly because of my affinity, I would say, for existential psychotherapy.

[342] You know, Freud believed that if you had psychological problems as an adult, it was because something untoward, in some sense, it happened to you developmentally.

[343] There was various things that might happen, poor parenting or traumatic experiences, that kind of thing.

[344] And that's fine, as far as it goes.

[345] But the existential psychotherapists in the 1950s, who were admirers of Freud, but also critics of his perspective pointed out that, look, there's enough trouble in life just in terms of how life is constituted to pose a serious challenge to the integrity of people's mental health, not least the fact that we're vulnerable to physical and mental illness and that we're also finite.

[346] Life itself presents a sufficient existential challenge to destabilize you.

[347] And that's on the roughest end, the problem of insanity and physical illness and death.

[348] But there's also the problem of having to put up with yourself, which is a very difficult problem, and also having to put up with other people.

[349] And the malevolence that's part of that and the betrayal.

[350] I mean, I know that's not the whole story, obviously.

[351] That's only the negative part of the story.

[352] But none of that is trivial.

[353] Lots of people are rejected constantly throughout their lives.

[354] I've had plenty of clients who never had a...

[355] anyone to talk to.

[356] Like, never, you know?

[357] And they were just, they were just dying, sometimes literally, dying to have the 35 years of conversation they needed to have to straighten out their psyches.

[358] You know, and so people can be very lonesome and very isolated, rejected by other people, completely independent of all the other problems that make up life.

[359] And so vulnerability is a very big problem.

[360] And you really confront that, I would say, when you have children that's because like adults are vulnerable but they're at least somewhat competent they can take care of themselves in the world to some degree but children well they're more vulnerable than adults and they can't take care of themselves and they have this kind of innocence too you know you see this maybe part of this is cynicism with adults you see them get into trouble and part of you thinks well you know if you would have just comported yourself with a bit more nobility and intelligence, then you wouldn't have fallen into that particular hole.

[361] And so it's kind of not good that you're in the hole, but, you know, you could have been a little smarter.

[362] And sometimes that's fair, and sometimes it's not.

[363] You know, it's easy to make that judgment because I think it's less painful to ascribe blame than it is to notice that sometimes a hole emerges underneath people that has nothing to do with their own doing.

[364] You know, and that's frightening because it's so arbitrary, but it's also frightening because it sort of implies that it might happen to you, and you'd rather think that it isn't going to.

[365] So, but with kids, it's like, well, when bad things happen to children, when they become ill, for example, there's no rationality now for that that seems to really fit, you know?

[366] I spent a lot of time in sick kids hospital in Toronto because my daughter was very ill, and my daughter was very ill. ill, but compared to some of the kids that were in the sick kids' hospital, she was like a shining beacon of health, you know, because, well, because no matter how bad it is, no matter how bad it is, you can bloody well be sure there's someone out there that's got it substantially worse, and if you want to see that, then you can go to a hospital for sick children, and you can see the children, and you can see their parents, and it's bloody brutal, you know, because we spent time near multiple organ transplant wards, for example.

[367] You know, that's a rough place to be.

[368] So, you know, one of the most fundamental existential problems that confronts people is the vulnerability of children.

[369] Because it's conjoined with their innocence.

[370] That's the multiplier, right?

[371] It's not just the suffering, it's the suffering and the innocence.

[372] It just seems unfair.

[373] In the brothers Karamazov, there's a character, it's Dostoevsky's famous book, which I would highly recommend.

[374] It's an absolutely brilliant book.

[375] It's an unbelievably compelling read.

[376] It's a great audiobook.

[377] You can really see Dostoevsky's sense of humor in an audiobook, and it doesn't come across so much when you read it.

[378] But Ivan is a charismatic character, very admirable person, and a devout.

[379] He's not exactly an atheist.

[380] He's someone that just doesn't like God, and the reason he doesn't like God, although he comes across as an atheist as well, as he says, because of the complete inexcusability of the suffering of children.

[381] And he recounts a number of events that actually occurred in Russia about the time that Dostoevsky was writing the brothers Karamazov.

[382] He recounts one story about this young girl who had very cruel parents, and they locked her overnight in an outhouse when it was very, very cold, And she froze to death while she was praying, essentially, and asking out loud, the neighbor's hood, heard, apparently, for forgiveness, you know.

[383] And so he said, well, that's just, it's unacceptable that things can be that way, whatever the rationale.

[384] And so that was his argument, not so much that there wasn't a God, but sort of against God.

[385] And that's a very compelling argument, either against God or against the existence of God, is why can things be.

[386] constituted so that the innocent have to suffer.

[387] And that's, I don't know if there's a harder question than that, really.

[388] And especially when it faces you personally.

[389] And, you know, it will face all of you to some degree personally, because I doubt if there's a single person among you who hasn't been faced with the illness of a child in one form or another.

[390] Sometimes it's more brutal than others, but everyone has a taste of that.

[391] And even if you don't have it with regards to children, you see your parents get old, and that seems to be pretty good.

[392] damn rough.

[393] It really seems unfair that the hardest things that you have to do in your life, when you're 85 and older, let's say, also come when you're the least able to cope with them in some sense, right?

[394] It's hard to reconcile yourself to that.

[395] And to think of being as such as a justifiable enterprise in the face of such suffering.

[396] And I really thought about that a lot when I was, well, when I had kids, first of all, I think I started thinking about it.

[397] Actually, more with my son than with my daughter, for one reason or another, maybe because he was getting into a few more scrapes when he was little than she did.

[398] Hard to say why, but it doesn't really matter.

[399] I remember thinking about my son when he was about three, and he was a very cute kid, and I really liked him a lot.

[400] I still like him, thank God.

[401] And I think it was after maybe he had had some kind of altercation with another kid.

[402] I think that might have been what got me thinking about this or maybe I was thinking about the dangers that he might encounter like running out into a parking lot if we went shopping or something like that or you know a little three -year -old kid is pretty mobile and very very cute and attractive especially if they're reasonably well -behaved but they could get into terrible trouble very rapidly and there's something that's like painful about that so I thought well I was also thinking about my father at the same time, paradoxically.

[403] I was thinking, well, okay, we're going to reconstruct the world so that the vulnerability that characterizes the people that you love no longer exists, because you're not happy with it, obviously, because it produces pain and suffering, and arbitrary pain and suffering.

[404] Let's just get rid of it, hypothetically.

[405] So I thought, well, I thought, well, okay, so we take my son, and what's the problem?

[406] Well, he's small.

[407] That's a problem.

[408] So, we make him not small.

[409] Now, he's 20 feet tall, instead of 3 feet tall.

[410] And he's breakable, and so that's not good.

[411] So we just replace the breakable parts.

[412] So now he's 20 feet tall, and he's made out of titanium.

[413] Something impermeable, you know, something robotic, let's say.

[414] And, you know, one of the things I should point out is it's not easy to exactly understand what sort of fantasies driver.

[415] I mean, we are diligently pursuing the augmentation of human intelligence by robotic intelligence.

[416] But it's also not clear exactly that we're not diligently pursuing the replacement of human beings by intelligent machines.

[417] And it's not so clear that part of the reason that we're doing that is because we're not very happy with the flesh and blood vessels that we are with all their inadequacies.

[418] I had a friend who eventually committed suicide, you know, and he had these dreams, he used to tell me about them.

[419] They weren't good dreams, and he would dream that he was the only person on these massive ships that were traversing their way across space, that were all entirely automated.

[420] You know, it was very mechanistic dreams.

[421] And underneath that, there was sort of a vision of being without the messiness of humanity, right?

[422] That that could all be eradicated.

[423] And, you know, we've tried to eradicate ourselves several times with a fair bit of success, and we came very close, say, during the period of the Cold War, and so the idea that we might be motivated by the desire to reduce or even eliminate our intrinsic vulnerability by whatever means possible.

[424] That is not a far -fetched notion.

[425] So in any case, so I thought about, well, my son, now he's 20 feet tall, and, you know, he's made out of titanium, and replaceable parts would be a good thing, so we might as well throw that in it.

[426] And he's not as smart as he could be or as wise, so if we could replace his limited intelligence with something approximating a robotic intelligence and artificial intelligence that knew as much as an artificial intelligence might, then problem solved, right?

[427] Except no. No, the problem isn't solved, Because this is the thing that's so strange, is that every time you take away a vulnerability, you take away part of what it is that you actually love.

[428] You know, and I was thinking about my parents, because they're getting older, and I've done these thought exercises a number of times in my life.

[429] I like to play with arithmetic.

[430] People hate arithmetic.

[431] And so I love using it in my clinical practice, so I'll give you an example.

[432] Well, because it's arithmetic is horrible.

[433] It's horrible because it tells you what your life is like.

[434] And so, for example, here's a quick example.

[435] So imagine that every time you come home from work, it's unpleasant.

[436] You know, you come home and no one greets you, and the house is kind of in disarray, and your kids are crying and miserable, and your wife or your husband, whoever's taken care of the kids, is unhappy and sort of dumps the load on you.

[437] That's like 20 minutes every day.

[438] That's what happens when you come home.

[439] You think, okay, well, let's do the arithmetic.

[440] Okay, so that's 140 minutes a week.

[441] So let's call that two hours.

[442] So that's, call it 10 hours a month for ease of mathematical calculation.

[443] So it's 10 hours a month, so times 12, that's 120 hours.

[444] I forgot that right?

[445] That's 120 hours a year.

[446] That's three work weeks of time.

[447] and there's only 48 work weeks of time, period.

[448] So that's like one -fifteenth of your working life.

[449] Okay, fine.

[450] Now you spend 8 % of your life having an absolutely bloody, brutally miserable time every time you come home.

[451] And maybe that goes on for like five years.

[452] It's like, that's not good at all.

[453] One of the things I learned from doing this kind of arithmetic, it kind of, there's an echo in, in, in, in, in, in the Sermon on the Mount about attending to the evils of the day.

[454] Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof.

[455] What does that mean?

[456] It means that the things that repeat every day are your life.

[457] And if one thing that repeats is that you have a miserable experience every day, then that's like 10 % of your life.

[458] And it's only a little bit of the day, but that's the wrong way to think about it because it repeats.

[459] So I had a client who was spending like 40 minutes a night fighting with his kid to get him to go to bed.

[460] And since the average parent only spends 20 minutes of one -on -one time a day with their young children, that's the statistic, he was spending twice as much time as the average parent spends with a child fighting with him.

[461] And the probability that they were going to like each other at the end of that was zero because you can't fight with someone two months of work weeks a year and like them.

[462] So, we did the arithmetic and said, okay, well, look, you've got to fix this.

[463] It's going to require some conflict to fix it.

[464] It's not going to be very fun for a week.

[465] You're going to have a war about bedtime, you know, a conflict about it.

[466] But maybe you could solve it, and then you won't have to have two months of misery with your son every year for the next five years.

[467] And God only knows where that will lead to.

[468] So, in any case, back to the vulnerability.

[469] So, I was thinking about my son, and I was thinking about my father, and I was thinking about the arbitrary things about people that we love.

[470] And, you know, we love their foibles and their limitations as much as we love their potential and their capacity.

[471] And it's that weird admixture of potential and limitation that makes the person.

[472] The limitation, of course, produces all the suffering, so that is not so good.

[473] But if you get rid of the limitation, then you get rid of the person.

[474] And that seems to be a very bad idea.

[475] You know, if I was thinking this was the arithmetic element.

[476] So one of the things that I've done in my life with regards to my parents is because I don't see them that often.

[477] They live 2 ,500 miles away from me, which is far even by Canadian standards.

[478] And so maybe I see them twice a year, something like that, maybe three times, and they're 80, and so I'm going to see them, well, let's say they live 15 more years.

[479] That's longer than the typical lifespan, but we could say that, 15 more years, twice a year, 30 times.

[480] So you're bloody well better to pay attention, because you've got 30 times to get it right, and that's it.

[481] That's arithmetic.

[482] That's the utility of arithmetic to know where the finite boundaries of your life is.

[483] My wife and I figured a couple of years ago, we should have never done this.

[484] This is why you don't do.

[485] We figured, well, we're 56, I guess.

[486] So maybe that's 25 more years, reasonable years, 20 maybe, who God only knows, it's not that many.

[487] Say it takes you three to five years to have a real adventure, you know, like I really.

[488] sort of profound adventure.

[489] Well, that means you got four left.

[490] That's not very many.

[491] Or maybe you're optimistic.

[492] You got six.

[493] It's like, that's six.

[494] That's not very many.

[495] It's good to do the math.

[496] It's good to know what constraints the limitation places on you.

[497] Well, so back to limitation.

[498] Well, it doesn't look like, it looks like limitation.

[499] That's a bad thing, man, because it produces all this suffering, on this unnecessary suffering, but then even if you had your wish, you can't magically wave a wand and make it go away, because if you made it go away, you would destroy exactly what it is that you value.

[500] And, you know, I see this with my parents, too, because they're sort of set in their ways to some degree.

[501] By the time you're 80, you're sort of who you are, and some of that's really lovely, and some of it's somewhat tragic, I think, as is the case with all of us.

[502] But, you know, If one of my parents ceased to exist, I would be very upset at the funeral.

[503] I think, you know, altogether, I miss that person.

[504] Foybles and all.

[505] I miss the totality of them.

[506] I miss the combination of their limitations and their potential, even though I might have hoped and perhaps do hope with everyone that I love, that they can transcend their limitations with their potential.

[507] That's not the same.

[508] That transcending the limitation doesn't seem to be the same as.

[509] eradicating it.

[510] And so I thought, well, so then I thought, and I tried to outline this in the 12th rule, well, what does that mean that we actually think about limitation, you know, because we certainly can become cynical by observing it, because I think observing unfair suffering is on the part of ourselves or others is one of the things that makes us better and then makes us cynical, and then sometimes makes us cruel and destructive as well.

[511] And you can understand why that would happen to people.

[512] I mean, people have brutal lives, man. And so, you know, lots of times in my clinical practice, people have done or had things done to them that were untoward.

[513] And then they explain why.

[514] And I think, oh, yeah, well, you know, you had your reasons.

[515] Even if maybe that wasn't the best set of choices you could have made, it was, it wasn't some whim.

[516] You had your reasons.

[517] I think, well, what do we, what do we deeply believe when we, when we think about limitation.

[518] I think, well, do you love people?

[519] Are there people in your life that you love?

[520] And the answer is, hopefully, the answer is yes.

[521] If the answer is no, I would say, well, you at least wish that you had people in your life that you loved, like you'd want that.

[522] So if you haven't had it, well, that's really too bad for you.

[523] It's a terrible thing.

[524] But generally, people have had that, at least in a couple of instances.

[525] You know, and maybe you care somewhat for yourself.

[526] in the same way, and in an analogous way, you should.

[527] You think, well, then because you love someone and because you're willing to grieve when they're gone, then the judgment that you seem to be making fundamentally below your thoughts, you know, at the level of emotion and engagement, is that that person's life, you're glad that person existed, despite everything.

[528] Because otherwise, you wouldn't grieve when they were gone.

[529] you'd think, thank God.

[530] Well, even for them, you'd think, thank God.

[531] And I mean, sometimes when someone dies, you do think that, because they've had a very miserable time of it for, you know, the years that it takes them to die, and you think, well, really, that's a relief.

[532] But it's a relief because their suffering is over.

[533] It's not like you're overjoyed that they're gone because it would have been better that they never existed at all.

[534] I mean, now and then you find someone like that.

[535] But it's very rare, you know, it's very rare.

[536] I know that I spent a lot of time studying the behavior of terrible people.

[537] And one subcategory of terrible people that I studied were serial killers.

[538] And a lot of serial killers, when they were caught, asked for the death penalty.

[539] And so they were in the category of people who even viewed themselves as creatures who should have never been.

[540] But that's a pretty extreme situation.

[541] And so we won't consider that typical or diagnostic.

[542] So generally, and so this has made me think a lot because there's a very strange characteristic of limitation.

[543] We might ask ourselves, I think we should ask ourselves, is it useful to have limitations?

[544] Okay, so then you might say, well, we want to do more than think about that.

[545] We want to look at how we act about the fact that we have limitations.

[546] Okay, so the first way is that we actually like each other despite and sometimes because of our limitations.

[547] Children are more limited than adults, even though maybe they have more potential, and we really like children.

[548] Like, they're a joy, you know.

[549] I mean, not always, obviously, and they're plenty of trouble, and they're difficult and all of that.

[550] But I still think that, especially if you can regulate their behavior in some quasi -civilized manner to some minimal degree, that children are much more joy than they are trouble.

[551] And my experience has been certainly as a parent and watching other parents that children pay you back for the painstaking trouble that you have to take with them with the spontaneous miracle of their being.

[552] And we keep having children, so we seem to think that, maybe fewer than we used to, but we seem to think that that's the case.

[553] And we grieve when people are gone.

[554] And so what that seems to indicate is that we think the damn game is worthwhile, even though it's difficult.

[555] And so that, okay, so that's worth thinking about.

[556] And then another thing that's sort of worth thinking about is that we actually like limitations because we play with them all the time.

[557] In fact, generally when we play, what we do is play with limitations.

[558] So one of the examples I like to use, you can go look this up because I think it's quite funny.

[559] You know what a haiku is, right?

[560] It's this ridiculous poetic form that you get three lines and I think in total it's 17 syllables and each line has to have a certain number of syllables.

[561] I don't remember what it is.

[562] And then there has to be accents in the right places as well because otherwise it's not a haiku and you might think, well why in the world would you even bother doing something so ridiculous just write your damn three lines down and then go wash the dishes or do something useful?

[563] But no, there's a challenge in the constraint.

[564] It's right.

[565] Can you say something of poetic utility using this terrible constraint.

[566] It's a challenge.

[567] So it's a challenge that you can rise to meet.

[568] And so it's engaging.

[569] So it's engaging to rise to meet a challenge.

[570] And so one of sites that I used to spend some time on because it was so absurd was there's this archive online of haiku devoted to spam the luncheon meat.

[571] Right?

[572] And I think it's quite funny.

[573] because there isn't anything that you can think of, I don't think, that is less likely to inspire poetic excess than spam, right?

[574] It's like it's way down there on the list of romantic substances.

[575] And yet I think there's some 25 ,000 haiku in the online spam haiku archive.

[576] And it's so people, you know, they take this crazy restriction, a haiku, and then they add this insane additional restriction to it.

[577] And then what they produce is poetic humor.

[578] It's a very funny sight, as you might imagine.

[579] So if you're looking to be stupidly amused one day, you might want to go check it out.

[580] It's really comical, the flights of romantic fantasy that people engage in when they're contemplating their favorite pork luncheon meat.

[581] But we do this all the time, you know.

[582] We play chess, and you might say, well, why don't we just change all the chess men into queen?

[583] It'd be a much more fun game when every character could do everything that the most powerful character could do.

[584] It's like, well, fine, except then you can't play chess.

[585] And the weird thing about, it's so strange, is you put these crazy limitations on chess, what you can move, the night moves in an L shape of all the ridiculous things, and then all of a sudden there's billions of chess games you can play.

[586] Right?

[587] And so we make these little artificial work, We do this on online video games, too, which I think is extremely interesting, because they're not really games, they're really simulations, and they're very complex simulations, and the creation of those simulations is now primarily what drives computational technology forward, right?

[588] So we're putting a tremendous amount of effort into making these online simulations, and what happens when you walk into an online game is that you adopt a new set of limitations, and then that opens up a whole new universe of possibilities, and you'll do this.

[589] that just for amusement.

[590] It's like you try on different sets of limitation to keep you in the game.

[591] So that's interesting.

[592] And so then I read this wonderful commentary at one point about God.

[593] And it's like a Zen cone, except it's Jewish.

[594] So it's a Jewish Zen Coen, I suppose.

[595] And here's how it goes.

[596] I think I wrote about this in 12 Rules for Life.

[597] I certainly wrote about it in Maps of Meaning, because it really hit me when I first read it.

[598] Now and then you read something, and it just, I don't know, it fills a hole.

[599] It connects things together that need to be connected.

[600] And this was one of them.

[601] It said, okay, you take a being with the classical attributes of God, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence, right?

[602] Can do anything and be anything at any time.

[603] It's like, what does it lack?

[604] Nothing, obviously, by definition.

[605] It's like, no, it lacks limitation.

[606] And that was the explanation.

[607] Why was God interested in creating?

[608] The idea was that there was something about that that defined the relationship between the infinite transcendent and the human being, is that there's something advantageous to only being what you are, that you couldn't get if you were more than that.

[609] So there's this profound notion that the encapsulation of something of potential within extreme limitation opens up avenues of possibility that wouldn't exist without those limitations and that's well that was I would say that was one of the things that I read that really changed the way that I looked at the world I thought oh well right isn't that interesting is that there's actual advantages profound advantages in limitation and they're and they're They're built into the structure of being itself.

[610] There'll be no being without limitation because there's nothing to do without limitation.

[611] There's nowhere to go.

[612] There's no story.

[613] So what seems to be the case is that limitation is necessary for being, and then a question emerges out of that, which is, well, if limitation is necessary for being and being is at least in principle a good or could be, then is there a mode of being that allows limitation to be good.

[614] Because then you can have your cake and eat it too, right?

[615] You get to have the adventure, and you get to, at least, what would you say?

[616] Resign yourself, it isn't even that.

[617] It isn't, embrace, you can't say that.

[618] You can't say embrace the suffering.

[619] It exists in a manner that justifies the suffering that's a necessary precondition for limited being.

[620] You see, and I think that's the function of religious systems, is to try to find out what that mode of being is.

[621] So you get to have your cake and eat it too.

[622] And so, and I do think, I actually think we know about what this is.

[623] And again, in that way of knowing that's deeper than what we think, because we acted out.

[624] And one of the things that I've been suggesting to audiences with a fair bit of success is that, well, so you have the problem of limited being and the suffering that goes along with that and then there's a worse problem that comes along with that which is that the suffering and failure and betrayal that goes along with limited being also produces I think it produces malevolence because you think well what twists people up and bends them against being it's like well what suffering they regard as unacceptable and cruel you know if you take someone and they torture themselves or they're tortured by others and in an arbitrary manner, and they're too hurt, then it's very easy for them to become bitter and to become resentful and then to become cruel and then to become destructive.

[625] And so that's a pathway to malevolence.

[626] So limitation handled improperly also produces, I think it produces evil.

[627] And I'm not trying to justify evil by saying that you can lay it all at the feet of suffering because I don't think that's true, but that's a common pathway.

[628] And it's an understandable pathway.

[629] You know, like if you were terribly abused when you were a child, you might come out of that with a certain amount of resentment and hatred.

[630] Now, it's not helpful, and it's not good, but it's bloody well understandable.

[631] So you have this problem of limitation, and out of that come the twin problems of suffering and malevolence, and then you're tasked with the necessity of how to handle that.

[632] And one of the themes that runs through 12 Rules for Life and also through Maps and Meaning is that, Meaning is the antidote to limitation, let's say.

[633] And not happiness, because happiness doesn't work when you're suffering.

[634] Obviously, happiness cannot be the antidote to suffering, because it doesn't exist in those dire situations.

[635] What exists, well, it's something like the sense of being engaged in a fully worthwhile enterprise, as something that's worth making sacrifices for.

[636] And then you might say, well, what might that be?

[637] And you could say, well, let's look at how we look at things and see if we could figure it out.

[638] And I would say, well, one part of that, obviously, is you're looking for a pathway through life.

[639] And one of the ways that you find that is by looking at who you admire and would want to emulate.

[640] People are very imitative creatures.

[641] It's one of the things that really distinguishes us from other animals.

[642] Language is one, certainly.

[643] Upright stance, prehensile, thunds.

[644] Opposable thumbs, not prehensile, opposable thumbs, large cognitive capacity, language.

[645] There's lots of things, but one of the things that really distinguishes us is we imitate unbelievably well.

[646] It's the scaffold for all our cognitive development.

[647] And the question is, well, who do you imitate?

[648] And the answer is, well, you imitate people that you admire.

[649] And then the question is, okay, that's a pathway to being, that's how you learn to act.

[650] children mimic their parents or other people that they admire.

[651] Who do you admire?

[652] Spontaneously, and the easiest way to answer that question is to look at who you don't admire first.

[653] Because it's often easier to see things against the negative than the positive.

[654] I don't think that we spontaneously admire people who don't take responsibility for themselves.

[655] I think we regard that as a minimum precondition for admirable being.

[656] At least you should do what you can to account for your own being, right?

[657] You should be able to take care of yourself.

[658] You should strive to take care of yourself.

[659] Maybe you can't, because you're too hurt.

[660] But that's a separate category.

[661] You're doing your best, but it's just, you're in an impossible situation.

[662] People can understand that.

[663] I'm talking about people who abdicate responsibility for themselves and throw that lot onto someone else.

[664] And I don't think anyone except someone who's determinately psychopathic and criminal finds that admirable.

[665] And so the next thing you might notice is that, well, it isn't just people who take responsibility for themselves, who are admirable, it's people who are so good at that that they can also take responsibility for their family, let's say.

[666] And then maybe you could even go beyond that, and you could take responsibility for your community.

[667] You could do all those things at the same time.

[668] Responsibility for you, responsibility for your family, to put your family straight, if you can do that and to help it function, and then to play the same role in the community.

[669] think someone who's managing all that's like that's an admirable person.

[670] You think, well, that's interesting.

[671] It's interesting.

[672] You admire that.

[673] You'd spontaneously imitate it.

[674] If you had the wherewithal, if you had the discipline and were willing to do it, it would at least call to you as admirable.

[675] That's a meaningful pathway through life.

[676] So the pathway through life is the meaning that's associated with responsibility.

[677] And I think that that's accurate, that's the proper antidote to the travails of existence.

[678] And then this has made me into an optimistic person, you know, and it's a strange kind of optimism, because it's the optimism of someone who's truly desperate.

[679] That might be one way of thinking about it.

[680] There's this old idea.

[681] I really only figured out what this idea meant, as I was doing these lectures, there's this old idea that you need to go into the, abyss to find the monster and rescue your father from within its entrails, let's say.

[682] You see that in the movie Pinocchio, for example.

[683] It's echoed in the idea that, in the hero myth, that you can confront the dragon and free the gold.

[684] It's the same idea, that there's something of extraordinary value lurking in the most dangerous thing that you could possibly contemplate or face.

[685] And I really like that idea, partly because I'm a clinician.

[686] And one of the things you know as a psychologist, if you're a psychologist who knows anything that a psychologist should know, is that what you do to help people cope with their lives is to encourage them.

[687] And you do that by showing them that they're stronger and braver than they think.

[688] And the way you do that is by finding out what they're afraid of and avoiding.

[689] And they define that themselves.

[690] You know, if you're going in a certain direction and you want to get there and you run into something that you're avoiding, then you're not going to get there, so you need either to switch directions or stop being afraid, one of those two things, and so they're self -defined fears.

[691] What you do with people is that you help them break down what they're afraid of and avoiding into manageable, digestible bits, let's say, and practice confronting them.

[692] And what happens inevitably, even with people who are terrified beyond belief, and you can find people who are so anxious, I've had clients who couldn't use the telephone, right?

[693] They were too terrified to use a telephone.

[694] I had clients who couldn't have coffee with me in a restaurant, even though I was their therapist, right?

[695] They were far too terrified.

[696] Guys I had my clinical practice who'd never spoken to a woman, apart from times when that was brute necessity, because they were far too terrified to do that.

[697] It's amazing how frightened people can be.

[698] And it's also amazing how rapidly they can move forward in the face of those fears, once they start to practice doing that.

[699] And it's curative to confront the limitations that terrify you.

[700] And the question is, well, what if you did that completely?

[701] Because that might be the way out of it.

[702] It's like, well, you don't want to get rid of the limitations because we already said, well, they have some value.

[703] It's like, okay, well, but it's a high price to pay.

[704] It's no joke.

[705] So you're still stuck with the problem.

[706] You can't hand wave and say, well, these limitations.

[707] They allow for the wondrous nature of being, and so everything's okay.

[708] It's like, no, it's not okay.

[709] There's still pain and suffering and malevolence, and those are not trivial things.

[710] So, what do you do about that?

[711] Well, that's chapter one in 12 Rules for Life, right?

[712] Is that you stand up straight and take it on voluntarily and assume that dire as things are, and they're dire.

[713] You're up to the damn game.

[714] And what's so interesting, and this is what's made me optimistic is, I actually think that's true.

[715] I think that we are these weird amalgams of limitation and potential, and the potential has a transcendent element, and I mean that technically.

[716] I mean that there's more to you than has yet been revealed, and God only knows how much more there is.

[717] You're not going to exhaust it in your lifetime, no matter how hard you try.

[718] There's more potential that you have access to than you can possibly realize.

[719] And you know that, because every time you put yourself in a situation, where you demand more of yourself than you are currently manifesting.

[720] If you do it humbly, you can't set yourself an impossible task, but you can set yourself a task that moves you beyond where you are, and you can inevitably accomplish it, especially if you make the task small enough.

[721] So you have this endless potential.

[722] Now, potential reveals itself in the reconstruction of your being.

[723] That's the rescuing of your father from the belly of the beast, right?

[724] You find out, you make yourself into the full manifestation of your ancestral possibility.

[725] That's within your grasp, and I think that that's true metaphysically.

[726] I think it's true psychologically.

[727] I think it's true biologically.

[728] And the way that you do that is by voluntarily confronting the suffering and malevolence that's a consequence of limited being, and that way you get to have your cake and eat it too.

[729] You have all the possibilities that limitation, in combination with potential, opens up for you, and you have the means of coping with it.

[730] And then you might think, well, is that just naive, you know?

[731] And the answer to that is, well, no, actually.

[732] It's not naive, because what you see in the clinical literature is that people who turn around and confront the things that have terrified them, even if they have post -traumatic stress disorder, even if they've been really hurt, and they turn around and voluntarily face the things that have hurt them, and true malevolent so often, not just suffering, but true betrayal and evil.

[733] They get better and that's a fact and it doesn't seem to be a limited fact and so while there's a couple of things that are interesting about that the first is If you turn around and confront what's terrifying you then it gets smaller and you get bigger and there doesn't seem to be a real limit to that But and that's a psychological truth.

[734] So that's where you find meaning in the meaning in your life that sustains you through the pain of the limitation But it's actually better than that even surprisingly enough because not only Do you feel better, let's say, psychologically, because you're more courageous, not because you're less afraid?

[735] When you go through this process, you don't get less afraid.

[736] You get braver, and that's way better, because there's plenty of things to be afraid of.

[737] So you're just not going to get rid of fear.

[738] You can be hurt.

[739] You shouldn't get rid of your fear.

[740] It's foolish to not have the fear.

[741] But you could master it.

[742] That would be something.

[743] And then you have the advantage of the fear without it being crippling.

[744] Well, you face it, and then that imbues your life with significance and meaning.

[745] You face that by responsibly adopting the burden of vulnerability and the attempt to transcend it and to deal with the malevolence that it generates.

[746] And not only does that work psychologically, because it makes you more courageous and gives you something profound to do, which is great to have something profound to do, but it also actually works, too.

[747] practically speaking it's not just that when people turn around and confront the terrible things they need to confront that they feel better psychologically they make the world better you know and we've made the world better in a lot of ways I would say not every way because well what the hell do we know we've got problems we're ignorant and we have problems that confront us that are beyond our capacity to solve at the moment but we live way longer than we used to that seems like like a good thing.

[748] We're healthier while we're living those longer lifespans.

[749] Most of us aren't starving.

[750] There are more middle -class people in the world than non -middle -class people.

[751] Now, across the entire world, that happened, you know, the measurements not precise, but that seemed to happen this year.

[752] So, you know, between the year 2000 and 2012, we have the number of people living in absolute poverty worldwide in 12 years.

[753] The UN projects that by the year 2030, at the current rate of international economic development, there won't be anyone on the planet who lives in what we would consider deprivation by today's standards.

[754] That will be gone, 18 years from now.

[755] You know, we've knocked mortality rates, child mortality rates down in Africa.

[756] They're now down at the same level they were in Europe in 1952.

[757] So that's something absolutely unbelievable.

[758] That's within the span of a single life.

[759] And there's much more good news on the horizon.

[760] We're knocking the hell out of the five remaining infectious diseases.

[761] You know, we could conquer malaria, hopefully tuberculosis.

[762] There's a number of polio, with any luck.

[763] If we weren't politically foolish, polio would already be gone.

[764] There's all sorts of things that we can do by turning around and confronting the problems that face us, that actually get rid of the problems as well as giving us a proper pathway to follow throughout life.

[765] well, and so that's part of an extended discussion, I would say, of Rule 12, right?

[766] Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

[767] Well, that's a meditation on vulnerability and its utility, but also on the fact that you can find within that vulnerability the strength to transcend it.

[768] And to me, I understand the vulnerability, at least to some degree.

[769] I know that people suffer, and I know that malevolence exists, and I don't believe that I underestimate the depth of suffering, although, you know, I should be very careful about saying that, because no matter what suffering you've seen, you can be bloody sure that there's worse out there.

[770] So it's something you never, in some sense, get to the bottom of, and it's the same with malevolence.

[771] But terrible as those things are, and they're plenty terrible, it does occur to me, it does seem to me. And I think the evidence for this is compelling.

[772] It might even be overwhelming that despite how terrible the limitations are, the potential that we have access to is sufficient to deal with it.

[773] And so that's one of the ideas that I've been trying to develop in maps of meaning and also in 12 rules for life, and one that I thought I would share with you tonight.

[774] So, thank you very much.

[775] We could have ended it in Dublin.

[776] So I put that...

[777] Yeah, we got it.

[778] Yeah, we got it, we're good.

[779] So, all right, there's a ton of questions here, but basically everyone wants to have a pint with you.

[780] That seems to be...

[781] Believe me, believe me, if I had my impulsive way, that's precisely what I would do after this.

[782] But it's not to be, unfortunately.

[783] Could you comment...

[784] Thank you.

[785] Thank you.

[786] It's one of those limitations that I'm struggling with.

[787] Could you comment on the recent poll discussed by the Atlantic Monthly on the unpopularity of political correctness?

[788] You touched on this a little bit.

[789] Well, this is a planted question, by the way, which I asked myself, because I wanted to discuss this with you.

[790] Let me take this.

[791] Well, I've done this.

[792] I've never done this before.

[793] So in these Q &As, but this is something I did want to point out because I think it's so remarkable.

[794] It touches on this issue of polarization that we sort of entered, opened this discussion with.

[795] So this was an article in the Atlantic Monthly that came out this week, and it was a review of a large -scale survey that was done by political scientists.

[796] I believe they were political scientists.

[797] So this is worth, this is, it's just, it's so comical, I think.

[798] The conclusion to this is so comical that, well, you just have to hear it to believe it.

[799] Okay, so the first question is, what percentage of Americans are progressive activists?

[800] And the answer to that appears to be something approximating 8%.

[801] That's on the left.

[802] And there's some equivalent number on the far right.

[803] So it's, you know, one in 15, say, something like that.

[804] So, 8 % are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical.

[805] By contrast, two -thirds of Americans don't belong to the extremes, and they regard themselves in some sense as an exhausted majority.

[806] These members, this majority group, quote, share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.

[807] So that's positive, obviously, because it's a majority, but it's not so positive because the noisy radicals have got the dialogue.

[808] So now some statistics.

[809] These are fun.

[810] Well, as far as statistics go.

[811] This is the sort of fun you have when you can't drink beer.

[812] So 80 % believe.

[813] that political correctness is a problem in the United States.

[814] And that includes 79 % of those who are under 24.

[815] So it's not young people that are driving this particularly.

[816] And then you can break it down by ethnicity and race, which isn't something that I particularly enjoy doing.

[817] But in this situation, it's necessary analytically.

[818] Because you might say, well, most people regard political correctness as a problem, but that's the oppressors that regarded as a problem.

[819] What about the people who are hypothetically dispossessed?

[820] Well, the most likely people to believe that PC political correctness is a problem are the minorities that are supposed to be its beneficiary.

[821] So that's pretty cool.

[822] So Asians, 82%, believe it's a problem.

[823] Hispanics, 87%, American Indians, 88%.

[824] And American blacks, 75%.

[825] So, now, and hypothetically, they're the target of the largesse that's part and parcel of political correctness.

[826] But they don't want it.

[827] So who does want it?

[828] Well, whites, rich white people with postgraduate degrees.

[829] So even 30 % of progressive activists think that political correctness is a problem.

[830] So that's pretty cool.

[831] But the people that are most likely to support it are precisely.

[832] PC activists are rich, highly educated, and white.

[833] Twice as likely to make more than $100 ,000 a year.

[834] Okay, so let's think about this for a minute, because it's so surreal.

[835] So one of the things I noticed about activist types on Ivy League campuses, they always have annoyed me. Well, there's a reason for it.

[836] It's like, if you're an undergraduate at Harvard, or Stanford or any of the Ivy Leagues, you're already part of the ruling class.

[837] Like, you might only be 18, but that just means you're a baby member of the ruling class.

[838] Like 40 % of Harvard graduates have a net worth of a million dollars by the time they're 40, and that's the stats from 1998, because that's the last time I knew about those stats.

[839] So it's like you're in there already.

[840] You've already been selected.

[841] And so what it means is if the...

[842] If you're in that, the upper echelons, in that manner, and you're an activist, this is what you want, as far as I can tell.

[843] You want all of the privilege and power to use the terminology that's part and parcel of this sort of dialogue.

[844] You want all of the privilege and power, and you want all the moral, what would you say?

[845] you want to accrue to yourself all the moral justification that also makes you an outstanding advocate for the oppressed.

[846] So you want both.

[847] You want to be at the top and you want to be the voice of those at the bottom.

[848] And to me, I think, well, that's a bit much.

[849] Like, you could have one of those.

[850] Like, if you want to be an advocate for the people at the bottom, then go out there and dispense with your long -term power and privilege and go do the work.

[851] And if you want to be part of the elite, then fine.

[852] But don't be part of the elite who's advocating for the downtrodden while you're being part of the elite, because that's too much to ask for.

[853] And that's exactly what I see happening with this.

[854] And so I think that's reprehensible.

[855] I don't think you get to do both of those things.

[856] But here's what's even more interesting, and I think this is insanely comical.

[857] So, part of the PC doctrine is that it's useful to view the world as oppressor and oppressed, depending on the group dimension, right?

[858] And that the oppressors are part of a patriarchal tyranny, and they're imposing their viewpoint on the dispossessed.

[859] Well, it turns out, according to this poll, that that's exactly what the radical leftist political correct types are doing.

[860] They're overwhelmingly white, they're overwhelmingly rich, They're overwhelmingly educated, and they're pushing forward a doctrine that the vast majority of the people who they are pushing the doctrine for, theoretically, object to.

[861] And so I think of it, if I was a postmodern neo -Marxist, I would say, well, that's the patriarchy in action.

[862] It's another form of neocolonialism.

[863] It's, it's, what do you call that?

[864] It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's benevolent patriarchy.

[865] It's the mask of benevolent patriarchy in action.

[866] We've got the wealth, we've got the education, we've got the racial status, and we know what's good for those people of color, even though they don't think so.

[867] Right.

[868] Jesus.

[869] Okay, so, and then I'm going to close this with one more observation.

[870] So this is from the scientific magazine Science, which is the preeminent scientific journal in the world.

[871] It's impossible.

[872] to get published in science.

[873] So, if you get published there, that's like, that's a home run if you're a scientist.

[874] One publication in science and your career is made.

[875] So it's very, very difficult to publish in science, especially if you're a psychologist, because they tend to publish harder science studies, preferably.

[876] So this week, another publication came out.

[877] So here's the question.

[878] This has been answered many times already, but people don't like the answer.

[879] or some people don't.

[880] So, there are differences between men and women that are psychological as well as physical.

[881] Now, the question is, what's the source of those differences?

[882] Now, there's only two possible sources.

[883] One is biology, and the other is culture.

[884] Okay, so then the next question would be, how much biology and how much culture and the politically correct types, the people who I objected to, for example, when they were making law in Canada successfully, insist that the differences are cultural.

[885] And not only do they insist that, they insist that all the differences are cultural, and that if you have any other explanation than that they are cultural, then you're a biological essentialist, and that's tantamount to being a fascist.

[886] Now, the problem with that is that it's wrong, and it's not just a little bit wrong.

[887] It's unbelievably wrong.

[888] And so, here's the evidence for that, at least in part.

[889] So what you would expect is the differences between men and women in personality and in interest, in preference, let's say.

[890] Those can be measured quite reliably, by the way.

[891] If you were right about your social constructionist hypothesis, what would happen is that as countries got richer and more egalitarian, and you can rank countries that way without too much problem.

[892] There's some measurement error, but you can get a pretty good approximation.

[893] Hardly anyone disagrees with the proposition that the Scandinavian countries in particular are the most egalitarian in their sociological outlook and political outlook in the world.

[894] Everyone agrees on that.

[895] The right -wingers agree, the centrists agree, the left -wingers agree.

[896] Okay, so then the question arises.

[897] Are men and women in the Scandinavian countries more the same?

[898] as in less egalitarian countries, or more different?

[899] And the answer is, they're more different.

[900] Okay, and that's not just a little answer.

[901] Okay, there are multiple studies demonstrating this with tens of thousands of people done by multiple researchers, none of whom were hoping for that outcome, and none of whom were ideologically predisposed to find it.

[902] Quite the contrary.

[903] They were all assuming and even hoping that as our societies became more egalitarian, that the differences between men and women would decrease.

[904] That's not what happened.

[905] They increased.

[906] And there's actually been three studies of this sort come out in the last month.

[907] The last two were of sufficient power, so the London Times announced, quite forthrightly, that this is perhaps the most well -documented finding in all of the social sciences.

[908] Okay, and then the science magazine published analysis of the so they made an index of wealth and egalitarianism that's index number one and then they made an index of preference difference between men and women and what they found was that the correlation between wealth and egalitarianism and preference difference was almost 0 .7 and so now I have to tell you what that means if you publish a paper in the social sciences and you get a correlation of 0 .3 that's an index of the relationship between two variables.

[909] So it's approximately the relationship between trait conscientiousness, it's a personality trait, and long -term economic success.

[910] It's about 0 .3.

[911] Pretty powerful correlation.

[912] That's larger than 95 % of the correlations published in social sciences studies.

[913] Correlation of 0 .7?

[914] It's like that never happens.

[915] Never.

[916] The most powerful correlation I know of is between IQ and learning rate.

[917] And that's about 0 .7.

[918] And that's it.

[919] That's the only one I...

[920] Oh, well, there's a correlation between inequality and crime that's actually quite high, too.

[921] But apart from those two, that's it.

[922] So not only is the correlation between increasing differences between men and women and wealth and egalitarianism positive and not negative, it's overwhelmingly massive.

[923] And so what that means is, this is what it means.

[924] It means the social constructionist are wrong, despite the fact that we've instantiated their viewpoint, particularly in Canada, into law, where we insist that biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual proclivity vary independently, which they do not, and that they're socioculturally constructed, which they are not.

[925] So, well, so that's this week's news.

[926] on the politically correct front.

[927] All right, you better have as good an answer for a question that we didn't pre -select.

[928] What institution, if any, do you feel is beyond recovery?

[929] I don't think the studies disciplines in the universities are recoverable.

[930] I think they're beyond recovery.

[931] I don't see anything about them that's credible or fixable.

[932] so that would be one example is Kanye West a genius well I don't know enough about like I'm hip hop isn't part of my cultural background let's say and I was old enough so that when it emerged it was a genre of music that I never really got familiar with there's some rap songs I like I like Eminem he's some of what Eminem does.

[933] I mean, he's unbelievably skillful at what he does.

[934] I don't know enough about Kanye's art form to comment on it.

[935] People certainly think that he's a genius, and lots of people think that, and he's had a very long -term career, and you don't have a long -term career as a creative artist that's financially successful and stable without being remarkable in at least two ways, right?

[936] You have to be that creative.

[937] You have to be that good at sales and marketing.

[938] And and able to deal with people.

[939] You have to not collapse into yourself, you know, because of some lurking random problem or problem in character.

[940] So I have no doubt that he's a remarkable person, but I can't.

[941] I just don't know enough about the genre to say anything other than that.

[942] I really wanted to start the Kanye -Petersen feud tonight.

[943] How concerned are you that Google and YouTube will eventually kick you guys off?

[944] We talk about this all the time.

[945] I'm not so much concerned that they'll kick us off as I am concerned that they'll do underhanded gerrymandering, which I think is even more pernicious.

[946] It's like Google shut me down at one point, hey.

[947] They shut off.

[948] It was really an awful day because I've been using g -mail for a very long time, and I had like 40, I don't know how many Gmail, I don't know how many email messages I had in g -mail.

[949] I think I had 25 ,000 that were unanswered, something like that.

[950] And then my calendar, for years in the past, which is a record, and then for months into the future, they just shut it off one day.

[951] I couldn't get access to any of my email accounts.

[952] I couldn't get access to my calendar, and I couldn't get access to YouTube.

[953] So that was very annoying.

[954] And then they said, well, that I'd violated one of their guidelines.

[955] A robot had picked it up.

[956] Oh, good.

[957] Oh, good.

[958] You've bloody well programmed a censorship robot.

[959] Brilliant.

[960] And so, and then they said, so I contacted and they said, well, it's also been reviewed by human beings and it stands and there's no appeal.

[961] Oh, I thought, oh, that's good.

[962] You won't tell me what I did wrong.

[963] A robot figured it out.

[964] A human reviewed it.

[965] I don't know what happened and there's nothing I can do about it.

[966] That's the whole story, right?

[967] Well, it turned out there were some things that I could do about it because I phoned 15, 20 journalists in about an hour and then it became a national story in Canada.

[968] And then they decided that that was all a mistake, and they turned it back on about three hours later.

[969] So it turns out that if you're fortunate and annoying enough in that combination, then there is an appeal.

[970] But having said that, I'm actually less terrified by the prospect of a company that just says, up yours, you're done, than one that plays games behind the scenes.

[971] And so, now, that hasn't happened to me too much, and the reason that I know of, the reason for that is that I'm not advertising dependent.

[972] So when I put up my YouTube channel, I thought, well, I'm not going to use advertisements because they just didn't seem to me to be appropriate for the content.

[973] So I thought, I'm not doing that.

[974] Now, what I did instead, and this was more of an experiment than anything else, in March of 2016, I set up a Patreon account.

[975] And I did that mostly out of curiosity.

[976] Patreon was a new thing.

[977] And I've been very interested in how creative content producers can monetize because it's a very difficult problem if you're creative to ever generate any revenue, right?

[978] Most creative people, they just starve to death, you know, like it's...

[979] Well, some of them get spectacularly rich, but most of them just get nothing.

[980] And so it's a big problem.

[981] So I was monetized through Patreon because that became successful, and YouTube can't gerrymander that because they, to you, they demonetize you all the time.

[982] Yeah, and they demonetize Prager.

[983] you all the time.

[984] And, oh, this is not suitable for our advertisers.

[985] It's like, I really think it's so comical that the word demonize and the word demonetize are like the same word.

[986] You know, so I'm much more terrified of Google and YouTube, altering what people are allowed to perceive using algorithms that no one can detect.

[987] Because what they're building, this is a terrifying thing.

[988] And there are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who are plenty of black.

[989] bloody terrified about this, I can tell you, is that, you see, when you look at the world, there's all sorts of unconscious things going on in your neural circuitry that allow that to happen, right?

[990] I mean, you look at something and there it is.

[991] You think, that's easy, you just look at it, and there it is.

[992] It's like, it's not easy.

[993] You know, your brain is so complicated.

[994] There isn't anything anywhere that's close to as complicated as a single human brain, except another human brain.

[995] You're insanely complicated, and all that complexity is necessary to turn the world, which is a very complicated place, into what you see.

[996] And so lots of things are going behind the scene.

[997] Implicit perceptual biases, for example.

[998] A lot of what you see in the world is actually memory.

[999] So your memory informs your vision, and that's increasingly the case as you get older.

[1000] So unconscious biases produce your perception.

[1001] And hopefully, you're not so biased that you see things erroneously enough so that when you act on them, that you perish.

[1002] That's the limitation factor.

[1003] Now, what we're producing online is artificial unconscious.

[1004] That's what we're doing, because it takes all the information that there is and screens it to present to you.

[1005] But you don't know what the algorithms are.

[1006] And that's very bad.

[1007] And so it's the lack of clarity that's associated with that, that's much more frightening to me than the arbitrariness of the decisions.

[1008] Like if you know, if someone just says, no, it's like, okay, I know what you're up to.

[1009] You don't like me. You don't like what I'm doing.

[1010] It's your right.

[1011] You're a private company.

[1012] It's technically you're right just to say no. It's like, all right, fine, it's up front.

[1013] I see what you're doing.

[1014] but the demonetization game like that's a treacherous and nasty game you know and and it also breeds paranoia you know because well you have subscribers who write you consistently and tell you that they've been unsubscribed for example and you can't verify that there's hundreds of people who've said that but it makes you suspicious well that's not good either you don't want to generate suspicion and YouTube does weird things too, like when I launch a YouTube video, I get more comments than viewers.

[1015] It's like, okay, that's that a pesky arithmetic again.

[1016] And I think, well, look, we all know what a number means, right?

[1017] Like, a number means if 10, if the number 10 comes up and it says viewers, what that means is 10 people viewed this.

[1018] So we all have this contract, right?

[1019] We've decided what numbers mean.

[1020] One thing means one, two things means two.

[1021] A hundred doesn't mean, well, it's somewhere between a thousand and ten thousand, and when our algorithm sorted out, we'll update it.

[1022] It doesn't mean that, because then what you're doing is you're playing games with the function of number itself.

[1023] That's a very bad thing to do.

[1024] You know, and YouTube will say, and perhaps with a certain amount of justification, that, well, they don't want robots inflating the view.

[1025] use, like they're doing this to control fraud, but they're fraudulently using numbers themselves.

[1026] Well, that's not acceptable.

[1027] What happens if we can't trust numbers?

[1028] Like, that would be bad.

[1029] We can actually trust numbers.

[1030] They're solid.

[1031] Like, they might be more solid than anything else.

[1032] All of a sudden, now, well, a number means, well, whatever the people who've built in the algorithm want it to mean.

[1033] Well, no, not a good idea.

[1034] So that's one of the tremendous dangers of burgeoning artificial intelligence.

[1035] Here's a segue for you.

[1036] Could you take Sam Harris in a fistfight?

[1037] Everyone put your phone away while he answers this, please.

[1038] I'm thinking about it.

[1039] I'm thinking about it.

[1040] Yeah.

[1041] That's true.

[1042] I've got better reach.

[1043] I think it's conceivable that I'm meaner.

[1044] It's possible.

[1045] Although I'm not absolutely convinced of that, because Sam can be, he's got his vicious streak.

[1046] It's one of the good things about him.

[1047] Look, what would probably happen?

[1048] Like, we're both kind of old.

[1049] What would probably happen is we'd have like two rounds and we'd be so damn exhausted that we could hardly stand up and then we'd look at each other and realize how stupid it was and then we'd put our arms around each other and like go retire and oh, I'd have a sparkling water and maybe he'd have a beer.

[1050] He's got all his MMA moves.

[1051] You've got sort of Dr. Strange hands.

[1052] motion yeah you know and I have the power of prayer all right we got time for two more you once said that if a very old memory still makes you cry or emotional you still have worked left to do to confront it what's the best best method to do so yeah the best thing to do is to write it down and that that's the best thing is to write down what happened in as much detail as you can regardless of how painful it is and like don't push yourself too hard.

[1053] You could always do it over three or four days.

[1054] And you don't worry about the quality of your writing to begin with, although that becomes important as you proceed.

[1055] But you want to get down what happened, everything you can remember.

[1056] And then what you'll find is that some of the things that you thought bothered you don't bother you as much, and you get much sharper about what did bother you.

[1057] And that's helpful.

[1058] But then you also show yourself that you can confront it.

[1059] And this works even with very, very bad memories of very, very bad things.

[1060] the clinical data, and that's quite clear.

[1061] Then the other thing you have to do is you have to figure out why it happened.

[1062] And that's a tough one, man, especially if you were...

[1063] Like, maybe you were abused by your sadistic uncle.

[1064] Or maybe you were abused repeatedly, and maybe your parents knew about it and didn't say anything.

[1065] That's pretty bad.

[1066] It's like, so why did it happen?

[1067] Well, that's a rough one, man, because you need to develop a philosophy of malevolence to account for that.

[1068] Right.

[1069] And so, like, writing out the memory and then making a causal account of it can be unbelievably difficult.

[1070] I mean, if you're haunted by past catastrophe, you're haunted partly because you don't understand it.

[1071] It's like, well, how could this possibly happen?

[1072] Well, yeah, childhood sexual abuse, especially repeated sort of sadistic childhood sexual abuse, it's like, that's not an easy thing to come to a causal account of.

[1073] You really do need a deep philosophy of good and evil to even start to approach that in any reasonable sense.

[1074] But the thing is you do need that because your memory demands something, you see.

[1075] The reason that you remember things is so that you don't repeat your mistakes in the future.

[1076] And so what's a mistake?

[1077] Well, a mistake, and I'm not saying you're personally responsible for this precisely.

[1078] It's not like it's your fault, but you're stuck with it.

[1079] If something terrible happened to you in the past, your mind will not let that go until you figured out why it happened and how to avoid it in the future.

[1080] Because that's how your mind is set up.

[1081] It's like one day you walk down the street and you fall into a hole.

[1082] And so then the part of your brain that's responsible for protecting you, the systems that regulate negative emotion, think, okay, it's time for you to redraw your brain.

[1083] your damn map.

[1084] If you're going to walk down that street, you better figure out how to walk around that hole.

[1085] Or you'll never forget the hole.

[1086] Well, why?

[1087] Well, because you don't want to fall in the hole again.

[1088] And sometimes the hole is very, very deep, and there are terrible things in it, and maybe someone pushed you in.

[1089] It doesn't matter.

[1090] You have to figure out how to never have that happen again.

[1091] And now, if that memory still has its hooks in you, what that means is the part of you that is responsible for your protection and self -preservation is not satisfied with your conceptual account of the occurrence.

[1092] And you might think, well, that's horribly unfair.

[1093] It's not only did this terrible thing happen to me, but I have to like carry it for the rest of my life.

[1094] It's like, right.

[1095] It's not, of course.

[1096] It's not fair.

[1097] It's horrible.

[1098] It's part of the ongoing catastrophe of the trauma.

[1099] It doesn't matter.

[1100] It's irrelevant.

[1101] You don't have a choice.

[1102] Well, you do.

[1103] You can either figure it out, or you can suffer permanently with it.

[1104] Those are your options.

[1105] And so I have a program online called the self -authoring suite, and one of its modules is a past authoring, and it invites people to write a biography, a structured biography, and ask you questions about your past.

[1106] And if you spend, it's something to ask yourself.

[1107] Look, lots of people live in the past.

[1108] nostalgically, but also they can't get rid of the things that happen to them.

[1109] And that's not good.

[1110] It's hard on you physiologically.

[1111] It's hard on you psychologically.

[1112] It makes you old and it interferes with the future.

[1113] And if you're in that situation where you're paralyzed by reminiscences and that produces anxiety and uncertainty, then it would be very useful to straighten that out.

[1114] And one of the best ways to do that is by writing.

[1115] It's like, what happened exactly?

[1116] Write down everything that happened.

[1117] Okay, why did it happen?

[1118] What made you vulnerable at that time?

[1119] Because one of the things you'll find, especially if you were hurt when you were a kid, is, well, you're not a kid anymore.

[1120] But, you know, if you were hurt as a kid, I know a lot of people who were hurt very badly as children, and the part of them that is still possessed by that has never figured out that they've grown up.

[1121] They've never figured out that that would not happen now.

[1122] or is not convinced of it.

[1123] And so part of it is that you have to update your self -conception.

[1124] You know, so I had a client at one point who told me that she had been molested by her brother when she was a kid sexually molested.

[1125] And the way she told the story was I thought, oh, she was like four and he was like 17 or something like that.

[1126] That's how it appeared to me?

[1127] And then she told me the whole story, and I said, well, how old was your brother?

[1128] And she said, well, he was six.

[1129] And I thought, and I talked to her about this.

[1130] I said, okay, look, here's how you told me this.

[1131] story it sounded like you know you were very young and he was like a teenager at least but he wasn't he was a kid like think think about a six -year -old like when you're four a six -year -old is way older way 50 percent older like they might as well be adult and they're much bigger so you could see that how she might have viewed him as a very large and intimidating figure but she was in her 30s when she came to see me it's like no no you got to retool this it's like here's a different story.

[1132] You were two very badly supervised children.

[1133] And so that was very useful to her, because the part of her that had that memory was still four.

[1134] She never got past it.

[1135] And it's a different story.

[1136] It's so funny that your past can change that way.

[1137] My brother and I were terribly supervised.

[1138] It's a way different story than I was sexually.

[1139] molested by my much older brother when I was young.

[1140] Now, I'm not saying that the first story didn't have its validity, but so did the second story.

[1141] It makes a big difference, and it's also a way of freeing her, because she's not four anymore.

[1142] And so, well, so you have this, you have this existential obligation to come to terms with your past enough so that the negative emotion of old memories disappears.

[1143] Because if it's still there, it means that Another way of thinking about it is that some of your potential is stuck in the past because you've been confronted by a terrible challenge, a puzzle, that you need to solve.

[1144] And if you solved it, then you would be more than you are.

[1145] tougher, meaner, more competent, more awake, more clear -headed, less likely to be taken advantage of.

[1146] Sharper, wiser, older, more mature, all those things.

[1147] If you could only cope with that, if you could only parse your way through it, And, you know, you might need help to do that because, well, sometimes if something particularly dreadful happened to you, you might not be able to conjure up a philosophical or practical rationale for it.

[1148] It might be too deep.

[1149] You know, because if you're an unfortunate person and someone truly malevolent got their mitts on you, that's a hell of a thing to try to make sense of, because the only way you can make sense out of that is to come up with a comprehensive philosophy of evil.

[1150] and a philosophy of evil that's sufficiently comprehensive to account for such things borders on the theological.

[1151] It's very, very deep, and it's necessary.

[1152] You can't get out of those situations without doing that.

[1153] And so you might need help as well.

[1154] All right.

[1155] One more.

[1156] We'll shift gears a little bit.

[1157] You get this one off, and how do you like all this travel and meeting all these new people?

[1158] Well, when I left, I was supposed to be in Toronto.

[1159] for a week last week, and I wasn't because some things came up, and I had to travel to New York, for example, for a couple of days.

[1160] But I was looking forward to being home for a week because my son just got married, and him and his wife were there, and they live up the street from us, and so I was looking forward to spending some time with them, and my daughter is in Toronto, and she has this 14 -year -old daughter, who's my granddaughter, obviously.

[1161] 14 -month.

[1162] 14 -month, sorry, 14 -month.

[1163] 14 month.

[1164] Yeah, 14 month.

[1165] 14 month.

[1166] There's that arithmetic again.

[1167] And I was really looking forward to spending some time with them.

[1168] And so, and I didn't spend much time with them.

[1169] So I was feeling quite lonesome when we had to leave again.

[1170] And somewhat upset about that.

[1171] And as was my wife.

[1172] But having said that, I mean, we're on this ridiculous.

[1173] adventure, you know, so we're in Europe, we're in Dublin, that's cool, this is a cool place, Dublin, and look at all you people, here you are, it's amazing.

[1174] And then we're in 15, or 16, 20 cities, I think, in the next month in Europe.

[1175] Well, what an amazing opportunity and to have these sorts of discussions with so many people.

[1176] So, if you have to, you have to be a fool to not think that That's a miraculous opportunity, a genuinely miraculous opportunity.

[1177] And so I miss my family, but my wife travels with me. She's in the audience.

[1178] I think she's in one of these boxes.

[1179] And so that's really good, and she's very, very helpful.

[1180] And so that keeps some of the isolation at bay and helps keep me on track.

[1181] But, you know, I wouldn't be doing this if I thought there was something better.

[1182] that I could be doing, you know, because I have a fair number of opportunities, let's say, and this is a ridiculously good opportunity, and these are unbelievably positive events.

[1183] You know, I get to think about things that I think are the most important things that I've ever thought about, and I get to talk to people about them, and everyone seems pleased that we're having the conversation, and that the conversation seemed to be helpful to people, at least that's what people tell me on a relatively regular basis, and we get to see all these amazing theaters, and like, this is a good deal.

[1184] This is a really good deal.

[1185] So I've got zero, I've got no complaints about this at all.

[1186] It's, I don't feel put upon.

[1187] I don't feel that it's a burden, quite the contrary.

[1188] I do my best to notice when things aren't horrible, and to be grateful for that.

[1189] And there's endless numbers of things to be grateful about in all of this.

[1190] And so that's it.

[1191] Great.

[1192] This is wonderful.

[1193] My book is selling ridiculously well.

[1194] Which is a real shock.

[1195] I really think these events are there's nothing about them that isn't great as far as I'm concerned.

[1196] The fact that everybody comes, that we're talking about things that are important and difficult, that the vast majority of people who come like you all have, I believe that you're here because you're trying to figure out how to put your life in order, how to develop a vision that's ennobling and how to make things better.

[1197] It's like that's what we should all be doing.

[1198] We should be trying to figure out how to remediate suffering, how to constrain malevolence, how to make things better.

[1199] We can do that.

[1200] And there isn't anything that's better to do than that period.

[1201] And so hopefully this is some small step in that direction.

[1202] And so, yeah, I'm thrilled about it constantly.

[1203] That's why I'm doing it.

[1204] 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.

[1205] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1206] See jordanb .peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1207] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1208] Thanks for tuning in.

[1209] Thanks for the continuous support.

[1210] Have a wonderful week.

[1211] Next week's podcast delves into the so -called crisis of masculinity.

[1212] Talk to you next week.

[1213] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at Jordan