Aim at a Star - A 12 Rules for Life Lecture

[0] Welcome to Season 2, episode 26 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator, eldest child, and basically the backbone of this family.

[2] Nah, that's actually mom, who, speaking of which, is still doing better and better.

[3] I'm fasting again.

[4] I swear I don't have an eating disorder.

[5] I can't get enough of this fasting.

[6] clarity of mind, sharpened jawline, yes please.

[7] Increased energy, cancer prevention, seriously, seriously, seriously recommend.

[8] But use salt and water when you're fasting.

[9] Don't just drink regular water or you will feel terrible.

[10] Salt your water.

[11] And if you're on a ketogenic diet, that'll make it easier.

[12] If you're not on a ketogenic diet, you should be.

[13] It's not a fad.

[14] I was talking to mom today.

[15] Hey, mom, isn't it cool that I found out my body fat percentage was a little bit high, and I did a week -long fast, and I lost 10 pounds.

[16] You know, I was like looking, kind of looking for a pat on the back, I guess, for having self -control, because doing a week -long fast is kind of intense.

[17] And she was like, yeah, that's what happens when you fast for a week.

[18] Happened to Jordan, too.

[19] I gave up looking for a pat on the back anyway.

[20] She's very difficult to impress.

[21] if you are a boss and you only eat meat fasting is even easier i'm literally transforming into a lion if you're interested at all i'm doing instagram and facebook and youtube lives throughout this fast 8 30 p m et usually uh i'm also writing a how to guide for the diet for people who want to get fitter or feel better or people with autoimmune disorders or mood disorders and exactly what it is we do what to expect when you get on it they'll be up for subscribers on think spot or available on my website, but I'll keep everyone posted.

[22] If you haven't heard of ThinkSpot, it's the social media platform dad's involved with that won't be unnecessarily censored.

[23] There's a ton of functionalities I haven't seen anywhere else like podcast annotation.

[24] Head over to thinkspot .com and sign up to see what it's all about.

[25] It's being unveiled finally, September 30th and the first people who signed up will be allowed in.

[26] Fancy, huh?

[27] An intellectual platform that won't be censored.

[28] Take that Google and face it.

[29] book.

[30] This is a podcast from Rochester, New York, recorded on September 5th, 2018, titled Aim at a Star, a 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[31] Well, that's very nice of you.

[32] So, I haven't done a talk for two weeks.

[33] It seems like a long time, although it's strange.

[34] We've been on the road for so long now.

[35] It's basically since January that this seems like normal life, weirdly enough.

[36] So it's nice to be back, and it's good to be here.

[37] I thought I might update you a little bit about what I'm up to, apart from doing this tour.

[38] So my wife and I, Tammy, she's somewhere in the audience, and Scots, somewhere in the audience.

[39] She's been traveling along, helping me out and make sure I don't do anything too dreadfully stupid along the way, which is one of the reasons that you should marry someone sensible, or at least more sensible than you.

[40] If you can find someone more sensible than you who would marry you, it's not that easy, necessarily.

[41] Necessarily.

[42] Yeah.

[43] That's what I think it was Nietzsche who said that, that being loved by someone should immediately disenchant you with them.

[44] So, right, Woody Ellen had a variation of that.

[45] He said, I'd never belong to a club that would have me as a member.

[46] So it's the same kind of idea.

[47] Anyways, we've been traveling around, and I think we've gone to 65 cities so far, so that's been really something.

[48] But August was a bit of a break.

[49] I only really had two talks in August, both in central Canada, in Saskatchewan, and so I've had a chance to step back a little bit and think.

[50] Some of you, I have a Patreon account, and the reason I'm telling you that is because I'm devoting the money from that patron account or some of the money from that patron account to a project that you might be interested in.

[51] So I've hired some people to work on an online university.

[52] We've sort of expanded the scope of it, though.

[53] We want it to be kind of a university.

[54] universal education system.

[55] So I've hired three really smart people, young people, and they're working really hard on that.

[56] And I would say we're ahead of schedule.

[57] So that's pretty cool, because projects are never ahead of schedule.

[58] So that's fun.

[59] Part of what we're trying to do is we've used Wikipedia, we've mapped Wikipedia to kind of get a sense of the general knowledge structure, you know, because Wikipedia covers almost everything.

[60] And it's not exactly easy to tell what the structure of knowledge is, but the work has already been done with Wikipedia, essentially.

[61] And there are maps of Wikipedia that sort of lay out the structure of knowledge as such.

[62] And we're trying to figure out how we can build accreditation processes, accreditation and questioning processes to go along with the knowledge structure that's associated with Wikipedia and also to build multimedia on top of that.

[63] So imagine that if you're interested in a topic like solar radiation or something like that, maybe you can think of a more interesting topic than that, but for some reason that popped into my head that you'd be able to go to the site and you could find a 30 -second video on solar radiation and like a five -minute video and a 15 -minute video and a half -an -hour video, depending on the level of resolution that you wanted to, the level of resolution for the knowledge that you wanted to develop, and that each of the educational materials would be set up in a competitive manner so that people could submit 30 -second videos and five -minute videos and 15 -minute videos, and then they'd compete for popularity so that the good ones rise to the top.

[64] We want to set up a platform where we can devote most of the money that the platform generates to the people who are doing the content creation, because then hopefully we could foster a whole infrastructure of content creators, and then we want to associate that with a questioning process so that once you develop your knowledge, and this might apply to anything that you do on the web, this would be a nice thing to do, so that you could watch whatever you're watching that would teach you something and you could pick whatever time frame you have to learn something, you know, so maybe you want to take a 30 second break and you could learn something in 30 seconds and then you'd get three or four questions that would test your knowledge of that.

[65] And then all the questions you got right would be stored so that you'd have a bank of what you already knew and all the questions you got wrong would be stored so they could be represented to you.

[66] And we're going to associate all the questions that you get wrong with a source, either video or text or whatever it might be.

[67] that would tell you how to answer the question that you got wrong.

[68] And so one of the things we've thought about is, you know, most of the time in education, if you take a test, it's mostly punitive, Faye.

[69] Like, maybe you do real well on the test, and that's good, but maybe you don't do so well.

[70] And then every time you get something wrong, it's like you get whacked on the head with a stick.

[71] And there's some utility in being whacked on the head with a stick, but it's not the best necessarily the best educational technology, let's say.

[72] But imagine that you could take a multiple -choice test, and every time you got something wrong, all that happened was that you were instantly provided with the information that would enable you to determine why it was that you got wrong.

[73] So you would never have to get it wrong again because that's really the point, right?

[74] And so those are the ideas that we've been working on for about the last three months, I guess.

[75] That's not all of them.

[76] We're trying to figure out how to teach people to write online.

[77] That's hard.

[78] Teaching people to write is really hard because it's so difficult to grade essays, especially if they're bad.

[79] So, well, it's really true.

[80] It's way easier.

[81] Student will write an essay and hand it into me, and I think, Jesus, you know, it'd be a lot easier just to burn this and write another essay.

[82] It'd be easier than grading it, you know, because you think here's how you can make a mistake.

[83] These are the mistakes you can make if you're a bad writer.

[84] Okay.

[85] Use the wrong word, and so often what people will do is use a word that they don't understand.

[86] So it's a large word, and they don't know how to use it colloquially.

[87] But it sounds like a word that someone intelligent would use, so they'll use that word, but badly.

[88] And that works if the person that you're writing to doesn't know the word any better than you do, or maybe even worse.

[89] But if they know it better than you do, it's actually not a very good trick.

[90] So you can use the wrong word.

[91] Then you can put it in a badly constructed phrase, and then you can jumble up the phrases so that you don't make a good sentence.

[92] And so then you can put the sentences in random order so that your paragraphs are just broken haphazardly.

[93] then you can sequence the paragraphs badly so that your argument doesn't make any sense it helps if you throw in contradictions as well so you say one thing one page and then you say something completely different the other page that's what postmodernists actually teach their students to do partly by accident partly on purpose and then to top it all off you can make your whole essay not really come to any point and so those are the levels of error And if you have a spectacularly bad essay, then it fails at every single one of those levels of analysis.

[94] And then it's just a hell of a thing to grade because it's, well, what did I do wrong?

[95] It's like, no, you got the question backwards.

[96] So we're trying to figure out how we could teach people to write online.

[97] And, you know, we thought maybe we could set up competitive writing exercises so someone could write a paragraph and submit it, and then somebody else could try to write a better paragraph, and everyone could vote on that, and then someone could write a better paragraph, and then you could see how the paragraphs would develop.

[98] You could do that at the sentence level as well.

[99] We thought maybe we could also break books up into paragraphs and then present people with paragraphs that would be informative, but then have them summarized the paragraphs and have those rated by other people and have other people submit better paragraphs.

[100] And we'd like to introduce an element of competition into the writing process, you know, because that's another thing that I think can make acquiring information exciting.

[101] You know, you can track your progress, so you'd be able to track your progress in all these different knowledge domains, you'd be able to see how fast you're learning, and you'd be able to compete with other people to see how good you could become, say, at writing.

[102] We want to do the same thing with people's ability to speak, so they should be able to upload videos and have them rated in the same way.

[103] So anyways, we're hard at it, man, and so that's one of the projects that I'm working on.

[104] I'm working on another project with a friend of mine in L .A., and what he's trying to do is to see if he can pull the Democrats back to the center, somewhat to the center, and away from the radical leftists.

[105] And so we're actually having a fair bit of success with that, as far as I can tell.

[106] He's trained about 22 different Democratic candidates in elections across the country, so that's pretty cool.

[107] And his experience has been, which is quite interesting, is that he's talked to, I think, 85 candidates at different levels of government across the United States and the Democratic Party, and he hasn't found one person, who's genuinely interested in identity politics if they're talking one on one.

[108] And so that's really something cool, eh?

[109] Because, and it might be, because we don't know what tiny minority of people are really committed to the radical view of the Marxist postmodernists.

[110] Even in the universities, it's not an overwhelming majority.

[111] It's quite a very noisy and well -organized and reprehensible minority.

[112] But in general population, it's a much smaller percentage of the population.

[113] And so it might be, and I think this is actually the case, that people are much more moderate in their views than you might think, but they're afraid to express moderate views because they're worried that they'll be attacked by the people who are immoderate and silenced one at a time.

[114] And seeing this in Canada, too, you know, I've talked to the Conservative Party leaders, particularly in Canada.

[115] And our conservatives are sort of like your moderate Republicans, or maybe your centrist Democrats, like Canada's entire political spectrum is sort of, of shifted to the left and sort of mashed into the middle, although we do have democratic socialists in the form of the NDP.

[116] They never form federal governments, though.

[117] But the conservatives are quite afraid to be conservative and to espouse conservative viewpoints because they're afraid they're afraid they're being targeted as individuals and mobbed.

[118] And they have reason to be afraid of that, I would say, although if you're a conservative and you're afraid, it's like you're done, right?

[119] You've lost.

[120] It's not a good thing.

[121] So anyways, we're trying hard.

[122] to figure out a way to pull the Democratic Party, either to pull it back to the center, or to indicate that it's actually more centrist than you might think, given the way that it presents itself and the way it's being covered.

[123] And one of the things he's realized is that there's no real central messaging apparatus in the Democratic Party, and there wasn't a coherent central narrative.

[124] And maybe because of that, the more radical types have, because you have to have a story, have filled the void where there was no story with their story.

[125] And so there's that.

[126] And then the other thing I've been thinking about with regards to that, I've talked to a lot of people in the media to find out if this might be true, is, you know, we've really got this sense that things are polarizing.

[127] And I think there's some truth of that in the West.

[128] But I think that part of the reason that things might be polarizing isn't necessarily because people have become more polarized in their political.

[129] attitudes, but because as the classic media is dying, which it definitely is, and very, very rapidly, first of all, they're getting rid of their fact checkers.

[130] That actually turns out to be a big problem if you're supposed to be, you know, reporting facts.

[131] And they're able to pay people less and less, and they're, they're subject to much more competition from online writers and online video sources.

[132] And so it seems to me that what they're likely doing as they spiral towards death more or less inevitably because of the technological transformations is that they're more and more tempted to use clickbait headlines and to exaggerate the degree of extremism on both ends of the political spectrum.

[133] And I think that's warping the entire political dialogue.

[134] So the other thing that we're trying to do is to get mainstream politicians who are issues oriented to talk with people in the intellectual dark web, to get them online where they can do long -form interviews, because that would be good, too.

[135] Because maybe you want to find out if your politicians can actually generate a coherent conversation for two hours, right?

[136] That might be a precondition for electing them.

[137] So, because one of the things I've been struck by over the last couple of years, is probably three or four years, is the hunger that exists in the general population for complex, long -form philosophical discussion.

[138] It's like, who would have ever guessed that?

[139] You know, I put up a series of biblical lectures a year ago, and they're 15 lectures long, and they're long lectures, and they're fairly dense, I would say, like most of my lectures.

[140] And yet people, like I think the first one, has two and a half million views, something like that, which is on the first sentence of Genesis.

[141] It's like, what the hell are you people doing?

[142] It's watching two -hour lecture on the first sentence of Genesis.

[143] It's like, if you presented that as a business plan to a media company, you'd be like laughed out of town, you know, So, but, but it's the case that people are paying attention, you know, and they're watching on YouTube, but they're listening on podcasts as well.

[144] And the podcasts have also opened up this long -form forum, right?

[145] Because you're exercising, you're doing the dishes, or you're driving your truck or whatever you're doing, you've got hours that you can spend listening.

[146] It turns out that people will listen and they'll listen to complex material.

[147] So the other thing that I think might have happened over the last 30 years is that we've all convinced ourselves that we're stupider than we really are.

[148] And the reason we've done that, that is because we've been communicating with each other through broadcast television.

[149] And broadcast television is really narrow in its bandwidth because it's so expensive, right?

[150] Like a minute of broadcast television 20 years ago, or even now, it's phenomenally expensive.

[151] And so if you had a message, you had to compress it into this ridiculous form, tiny little form.

[152] And you also had to assume that your audience was composed of clueless people who had no memory.

[153] Because you couldn't assume that your audience had seen anything else you'd ever done.

[154] It was like presenting to someone with Alzheimer's disease.

[155] So, you know, no attention span in Alzheimer's disease is sort of the ideal TV audience in some sense, or not the ideal audience, but the inevitable audience given the technology.

[156] When all of a sudden we have these long -form technologies that enable, while they take the bandwidth's limitation off, audio material and video material, and turns out, well, people are way smarter than we thought.

[157] And so that's really cool, and hopefully, I'm hoping that the political dialogue in the next decade, let's say, will be those who engage in the political dialogue will be forced to adopt the long -form media so that we can find out if they have a clue.

[158] So I talked to Joe Rogan a couple of times about this, about his three -hour interviews, you know, because a three -hour interview, it's like, that's a long interview, man. By the time you're done with that, it's like you don't have any thoughts left if you had any to begin with.

[159] They're all sucked out of your head.

[160] They're done.

[161] And I asked him how people coped with that.

[162] And he said, well, some of his guests sort of ran out of steam at 45 minutes.

[163] They're just out of ideas, you know.

[164] And then other people can go on and on for, you know, the whole three hours and hopefully in a relatively engaging manner.

[165] And so it seems to me that that would be a good test, again, for anybody who's seeking complex political office.

[166] It's like, can you handle yourself in a spontaneous interview for three hours?

[167] or do you have to be handled so that everything that you say is pre -crafted and pre -scripted?

[168] Because that's just not good.

[169] And so, let's see.

[170] So is that everything?

[171] I started writing my second book.

[172] I'm about halfway through it.

[173] So that's kind of cool.

[174] I'm very happy about that.

[175] I think this one has a white cover, the 12 rules, and I think the next one will have a black cover.

[176] And that'll be kind of a chaos and order thing, and they'll make a good boxed set, I hope.

[177] So, yeah, kind of a yin and yang thing, so that's kind of the idea.

[178] And I've had the opportunity in all of these lectures to develop my ideas further.

[179] I'm going to do that a little bit more tonight.

[180] So, and I'm off to speak at about 60 more cities, I guess, between now and May. So 20 in the U .S. in the next month, and then 20 in Europe, mostly Northern Europe and the U .K., and then Australia and New Zealand, and then in March and April back to Europe, and then that'll be the end of this.

[181] as far as I can tell.

[182] And then I'm going to edit my book for four months, and then I'm going to do a biblical series on Exodus, which I'm really looking forward to, because I really know that story, and it's a hell of a story.

[183] So that's the plan, that, and we might run the online education system through a tech incubator process in January and February and see if we can get that company really rolling.

[184] There's lots of people who are in.

[185] interested in it.

[186] And so that should be exciting as well.

[187] And that'll probably happen in San Francisco or L .A. So the last thing that I've been working on, I think, at the moment is I'm also thinking that it might be interesting to have something like a two -day event in L .A., I think in L .A., but I'm not sure exactly, that would bring together a lot of the people who are loosely associated with what Eric Weinstein called the intellectual dark web, to have a conversation about all the things that we need to have a conversation about.

[188] And I'd like to bring together musicians and comedians and thinkers.

[189] I think that would be a nice combination.

[190] And I had a debate with four debates with Sam Harris and two of those are up on my YouTube channel now and the other two will be there in mid -September.

[191] And we got pretty big audiences to those and so it looks like there's public interest in that kind of thing.

[192] And so that would be fun to set up.

[193] So I'm doing a preliminary investigation.

[194] It might be interesting to see if I can find intelligent issues -oriented politicians, political people, who are also capable of delivering a gripping speech and an informative speech to include them in the mix.

[195] So we'd like to make that a major cultural event.

[196] And so, and my son is getting married in the end of September.

[197] So that's fun.

[198] Yeah.

[199] Okay.

[200] So, all right, so I usually use, I always use these, this opportunity.

[201] to lecture to develop my ideas further.

[202] And so I'm going to try to do that again tonight.

[203] I want to concentrate on two rules.

[204] I'm going to concentrate on rule 10, which is be precise in your speech, and rule one, which is stand up straight with your shoulders back, and I'm going to try to weave them together a little bit.

[205] And I'm going to use a theme, because I usually sit, before I come out and do a lecture, I sit in the green room, in backstage, and think, okay, there's some problem I'm addressing.

[206] I'm always working on some set of problems.

[207] I'm always thinking about some set of problems.

[208] So they're active in my mind.

[209] It's like, what's the problem that I'm trying to address tonight?

[210] What should I hit?

[211] It's like an essay topic, because if you're writing an essay, this is a good thing to know if you have to write something, is you should have a problem because, like, what are you doing writing if you don't have a problem to solve?

[212] It's the same if you're engaged in anything creative.

[213] If you're not trying to solve a problem, you're not engaged in anything creative.

[214] It's more like imitation of creativity or something.

[215] something like that.

[216] So I thought what I would talk about today is something like aim and the idea of aim.

[217] And so I'm going to bounce around that idea and associate it with the idea of precision and speech and also the idea of hierarchy, which is what's developed in Rule 1 because I've been thinking a lot about hierarchies.

[218] And I think that's partly because of all the chapters in my book, the one that's attracted the most criticism, strangely enough, as far as I'm concerned, chapter one, which is the chapter that features lobsters.

[219] Now, I think the reason for that is, is that the people who are particularly critical of what I'm doing can't read more than one chapter of a book, or at least my book.

[220] So they get stuck there, and they misinterpret it.

[221] But, you know, maybe that's mean, and I hope it is.

[222] And, and, and, but it's, but it's really, it's been useful, you know, because it's made me think more about it and, and to make the argument's more clear.

[223] So, because I've been trying to figure out exactly what a hierarchy is.

[224] And, you know, people said, well, I think it was Kathy Newman who said, so you want to organize human society along the lines of lobsters.

[225] It's like, can you already think of a stupider question than that?

[226] You know, I mean, what, I don't even know what to, what to think about a question like that.

[227] It's like, yeah, that's exactly what I thought.

[228] If we can't manage lobsters, maybe we can hit, like, the level of spiders or something like that.

[229] So what I was trying to do was to point out, this is something very, very important.

[230] I was trying to point out that most creatures who have to interact socially, regardless of their level of biological complexity, so across the entire biological landscape, organize themselves into hierarchies.

[231] Okay, so now you might say, well, that doesn't mean that people should organize themselves into hierarchies, and that's actually true, because just because something is doesn't mean it should be.

[232] Fair enough.

[233] that's not the point though the broader point is if social animals all the way up from glorified insects to human beings organize themselves into hierarchies or at least that's a very common form of organization you can't blame the existence of hierarchies on Western culture or capitalism and that's a big deal right that's our so you can still take the leftist stance and you can say well yeah you can blame hierarchies on Western culture or capitalism, but you can still be concerned with their negative consequences.

[234] Like, yeah, yeah, fair enough.

[235] Absolutely.

[236] But if you're really concerned with their negative consequences, you might want to get the causal pathway to their development correct, right, and not misattribute the cause.

[237] Because generally, not always, but if you're trying to solve a problem and you misattribute the cause of the problem, then your solution isn't going to work.

[238] Sometimes you get lucky and you solve the problem in some manner that has no relationship whatsoever to the cause of the problem.

[239] You know, that's like taking aspirin for a headache, say, but most of the time you better get your causal analysis right.

[240] And it seems to me that if you're on the side of the dispossessed, which is what the radical left has claimed to be, that you should be really concerned with the nature of hierarchies in a way that's much deeper than some shallow criticism of Western society and capitalism, you might have to go way below that and say, look, the hierarchical structure is built, in some sense, built into the structure of social reality itself.

[241] It has negative consequences, which involve, you know, the, what would you call the, the clustering of resources at the top and the relative deprivation of people at the bottom.

[242] It's an inevitable consequence of the construction of a hierarchy, and we have to deal with that.

[243] But that makes it a deeper problem than one that's merely associated with capitalism.

[244] And so if you care about the dispossessed, then you'd think you'd go deeper down into the process.

[245] problem and trying to figure out exactly what's going on.

[246] So, so we'll talk about that a little bit, a little bit as well.

[247] Okay, so back to the idea of aim.

[248] So I'm going to wander around a little bit because I'm trying to put ideas together, a whole bunch of ideas.

[249] So here's the first one.

[250] So, I was thinking about, I'll tell you a story.

[251] So my father happens to own about 300 single -shot rifles.

[252] So he lives in northern Alberta, and it's a hunting culture, at least, his part of the subculture is a hunting culture.

[253] And he's a gunsmith, and he knows everything you could possibly know about single -shot rifles.

[254] And that's always interested me, not the rifles themselves, because it wasn't a passion that I shared.

[255] But the fact that he was so interested in them was really interesting to me. I guess that's because I'm more psychologically mine.

[256] It's like, what is it about this guy and his guns?

[257] Like, why is he so interested in them?

[258] And I thought about that for a very long time, because I've tried to understand my...

[259] father.

[260] It's quite a respectable person as far as I'm concerned.

[261] He's a tough guy and he's smart and he was very good to me when I was a kid and he taught me a lot of things.

[262] So I have a lot of respect for him even though he's a lot different than me. And so I thought about this and I had an insight a couple of years ago.

[263] I thought he told me that the reason he had single shot rifles is because when he hunted, it was two things.

[264] He wanted to give the animal a chance.

[265] That was the first thing.

[266] And he wanted to make sure that he aimed properly.

[267] Okay, so that was interesting, and he was also a target shooter.

[268] He's still alive, but he's getting a little too old to be a good shot now.

[269] It's a little too shaky, and his eyesight isn't as good as it could be, although I still think it's better than mine.

[270] He happens to be colorblind, and colorblind people have better eyesight for hunting, by the way.

[271] I don't know if you know that, but they do.

[272] They can see animals in the bush better than people with normal color vision.

[273] So, anyways, I thought about it for a long time, and I thought, I see what he's trying to do.

[274] He's trying to hit the target.

[275] It's symbolic.

[276] It's symbolic, because what you want to do in life is you want to hit the target.

[277] And use a single -shot rifle.

[278] You only get one shot, so you have to be very, very careful.

[279] You have to be very, very precise in your aim.

[280] You have to be very skilled.

[281] And so he's acting out in a technological way, this central idea, which is pick a damn target, aim at the center, make yourself skilled, and hit it.

[282] So I thought, oh, that's...

[283] that's pretty good realization.

[284] I wonder if that's the case.

[285] So then I went and talked to him.

[286] I said, I think I figured out why you like single -shot rifle so much.

[287] And so I explained that to him.

[288] And he said, yeah, I think that's right.

[289] I thought that's good.

[290] That's good.

[291] So I was happy about that.

[292] So, well, and I've become very interested in the idea of aim.

[293] So you think about the metaphors we use.

[294] You know, people will say, what's the point?

[295] You know, or what's your aim?

[296] and then you think so that's interesting because we know that there's an association between having a point and making a point and having an aim and we know there's an association between that and the idea of meaning itself because when you say what's the point one of the things that you're also saying is well what does that mean life has no point it's the same thing is saying that life is meaningless and for something to have a point then all of a sudden it has meaning so to have a point is to have meaning so that's very interesting interesting.

[297] And that's associated with this idea of being precise in your speech.

[298] And you know, and neurologically, this is really true.

[299] It's really fundamentally true.

[300] And we know this because we know a fair bit about how your brain is actually organized in relationship to the linkage between perception and motivation and emotion.

[301] So motivation, these are rough categories, but motivation is basically, motivation is the consequence of the action of instinctive systems that set your aim.

[302] So, for example, if you're hungry, well, then you aim at food, and if you're thirsty, well, then you aim at water.

[303] And the way that seems to work is like if you get hungry, maybe you're working on something that has nothing to do with food and you start to get hungry, what happens is the hypothalamus, which is the fundamental brain area, that's responsible for primordial motivation.

[304] There's a couple of them, but it's a major, it's a major brain center, very, very small, very deep in your brain, very, very ancient.

[305] it will start gripping the parts of your brain that produce fantasies.

[306] And so what happens is you get directly hungry.

[307] There's some physiological activation, but your brain starts to produce fantasies of food.

[308] It's like little movies of what you might do.

[309] You know, it would be a good thing to go into the kitchen and have a peanut butter sandwich.

[310] That idea will kind of pop up into your mind.

[311] And it's a simulation of the action that you might undertake if you were going to quell that motivated state.

[312] Right?

[313] And it's interesting because it's not a direct, It's not directly deterministic.

[314] It's not like you're sitting in front of your computer, doing whatever you're doing on your computer, and all of a sudden you're a zombie, a determinist zombie that's gripped by your hypothalamus, and you go to the kitchen and, like an automaton, generate a peanut butter sandwich.

[315] It isn't like that at all.

[316] What happens is that the hypothalamus suggests a new goal, and the goal is associated with a set of images, and the images are rough plans about how you might have undertake that goal.

[317] And maybe a variety of those plans might emerge.

[318] You see the same thing when you go to a restaurant, you know, and you think, well, what do I want to eat?

[319] Which is a form of hunting in some sense, although a pretty privileged form of hunting.

[320] It's like, well, maybe I feel like this, or maybe I feel like this, or maybe I feel like this.

[321] Little vignettes will run through your head, and there are a reflection of the hypothalamic systems which are way down in the base of your brain interacting with the visual cortex and allowing you to envision a set of possible futures, which you can then more or less choose to enact.

[322] Now, obviously, as you become more and more food deprived, the grip of your behavior and your imagery by the systems that mediate hunger becomes more and more intense, right?

[323] So maybe if you're deprived of food for a week, pretty much all you'll do is dream at night.

[324] All you'll do is dream about food.

[325] And it's really going to occupy your imagination during the day.

[326] And as you get closer and closer to starvation, then your attention is going to be focused more and more to a single point, and you get in some sense more deterministic.

[327] But you're never finally deterministic.

[328] There's some very interesting observations about that and behavioral morality in accounts of people starving in books like Solzhenits and School like Archipelago, which talked about how people could still conduct themselves under conditions of extreme privation, how much difference there was in human moral choice, even under conditions of absolute privation.

[329] So that's very interesting to know about.

[330] So anyways, what the hypothalamic systems do, and there's some other ones, there's one called the periacaductal gray that seems to mediate pain responses, which is another form of motivation.

[331] It's usually get away is the motivation with regards to pain, or stay still so you don't injure yourself more.

[332] And fear is more of an emotion, though.

[333] You can't exactly distinguish between emotions and motivations because they're not real categories, they overlap, and there isn't a separate brain system for emotion and one for motivation, right?

[334] They're just sort of rough category terms, and they don't bear a one -to -one relationship with the underlying biology, but they're still useful enough to discuss.

[335] So imagine that your hypothalamus sets your fundamental aim, whatever that happens to be, the basic aims.

[336] And then that focuses your perception.

[337] So, for example, if you're hungry, and you walk out of your office and you go into your kitchen, then what's going to happen is the world's going to set itself up around your aim, which is really, this is a fascinating thing to know, because it also sheds light on the relationship between ethics and perception in a fundamental way.

[338] It's really, I think it's a miraculous thing to know in some sense.

[339] So, anyways, if you're hungry and you go into the kitchen, then what you tend to see are all those things that are relevant to you acquiring food.

[340] and you don't see anything else and I mean that literally you think yeah yeah you see the other things it's like no you don't you think you see them but if you're tested you don't see them at all because you're way blinder than you think and when you look at the world you see way less of it than you imagine that you see and what you tend to see are things that are useful while you're pursuing your goal and things that might get in the way and you don't even necessarily see things that might get in the way until they get in the way and so the world the world constructs itself in terms of how you interact with it in relationship to your goals.

[341] And that's how, you think about that for many, that means, oh, well, that's so interesting.

[342] If the world reveals itself to you as an unbearable place, there's some possibility that the reason for that is that your goal structure is warped, right?

[343] Because it's definitely the case that the world manifests itself, even as objects, as tools and impediments, but also as things that have emotional tagging in relationship to what your goals are.

[344] Now, if you're thinking about just a simple goal, so to speak, like hunger or thirst, well, that's not so amazing a conclusion, you know, but when you're thinking about higher order goals, which is, and higher order goals are integrally associated with ethics, because ethics is, well, your ethical behavior is a consequence of what it is that you choose to pursue in your life, well, there's an implication for that, which is that if the world isn't unfolding in front of you in a manner that you find acceptable, it's certainly possible that what you're aiming at is wrong.

[345] And that's a great thing to realize, because, well, if things aren't going for you the way that you want them to, then you kind of have two options.

[346] One is, man, the world's a horrible place, and that can turn you against the world.

[347] And I wouldn't recommend that, partly because you make the world a worse place then, but partly because if it's you against the world, buddy, you're outman.

[348] Right?

[349] If it's you against reality, it's going to be one sad battle and, you know, you might be able to put up a pretty decent scrap, but in the final analysis, you're going to get absolutely flattened.

[350] And so if reality itself is cursed and you're destined to be miserable, well, then too bad for you.

[351] But if there's some possibility that the way you're looking at things is making you suffer unduly, what that might mean is that you could reevaluate your ethical structure and that would transform the way the world manifests itself to you.

[352] kind of knew that, right?

[353] Nietzsche was the philosopher who announced the death of God and he thought that what would have to happen to human beings is that we would have to generate our own values, a new set of values, and that that would enable us to transcend this catastrophic, the catastrophic dissolution of our previous belief system.

[354] Now, I don't think that Nietzsche's solution is actually practically possible or implementable for reasons I may get into later.

[355] I think the fundamental error is that we actually can't create our own values because we're not our own slaves.

[356] We can't actually tell ourselves what to do.

[357] We might be able to cooperate with ourselves to move in a certain direction, but I don't think you can tyrannize yourself without rebelling any more than you can tyrannize someone else, and you have to work with your a prior value systems rather than impose something top down.

[358] And this is really, I think, the psychoanalytic contribution to the Nietzschean cure for nihilism.

[359] So Nietzsche thought, well, we should generate our own values.

[360] And Carl Jung came along and said, yeah, but wait a second, we can't.

[361] Because we actually have a biological nature that's expressed in these archetypal structures, in these great stories we have.

[362] And in order for us to develop valuation systems that are functional, both psychologically and practically, we have to take our own nature into account.

[363] And I also think that's a good antidote to utopian thinking because one of the problems with utopians, especially the rationalist types, is that they tend to think that human beings can be remade in whatever image the rationalist utopians happen to have of the desirable and optimal human being.

[364] And that just doesn't work.

[365] It's like because we have a nature, despite what the social constructionists say.

[366] And so we at least, even though the nature doesn't determine our behavior, But it sets parameters for who and what we are, and we have to cooperate with that.

[367] Just like if you're trying to work with someone else, child, wife, husband, co -workers, doesn't matter.

[368] You have to cooperate with them in order to build a structure of perception and behavior that you can jointly inhabit.

[369] And I think there's no difference between that and doing that with yourself.

[370] One of the things Jung did, and the psychoanalyst as well, when he was trying to restructure people's value systems, he would consult their dreams because this is a very interesting issue and something I'm writing about a lot in my second book.

[371] I'm writing a chapter called Make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.

[372] It's sort of an extension of clean your room or put your house in perfect order because what artists do in some sense, so they're obsessed or they should be obsessed with beauty.

[373] And beauty is a vision of the way that things could be.

[374] And it's an act of artistic imagination, and it's associated with dreaming.

[375] And so partly what you do when you put the world together, whether you know it or not, is you encounter the things that you don't understand first through your dreams.

[376] That's the creative part of you that generates images of what could be.

[377] And Jung's attempt to analyze dreams was an attempt to take that dream -like foray into the unknown and to make it explicit so that people could incorporate the most exploratory parts of their creative imagination into their lives.

[378] And so he was consulting with the imagistic expression of their biology to update their systems of ethics.

[379] That's the right way of thinking about it.

[380] And Jung is often criticized for being unscientific, but I knew some of the greatest neuroscientists of the time.

[381] One of them in particular, Yak Panksep, who died just a year, two years ago, something like that.

[382] He wrote a book that's on my book list, which is on my website called Affective Neuroscience.

[383] It's a great book, man. It's wonderful.

[384] One of the real classics of, well, it's a classic of 21st century, psychobiology, I guess.

[385] And Panksep discovered the play circuit in mammals.

[386] That's a big deal, right?

[387] Discovering a whole neurological circuit, that's like discovering a continent.

[388] That's Nobel Prize -worthy stuff.

[389] And he discovered the play circuit and discovered that it was a separate circuit.

[390] and that it operated across mammalian species and that its operation was associated with the emergence of morality.

[391] Those are big discoveries.

[392] Anyways, Panksep was one of the people who was very interested in Jungian archetypal ideas.

[393] And my experience has been that the biological types, the psychologists who are very biologically oriented, are very much appreciative of Jung's ideas if they study emotion and motivation.

[394] So that's the instinctive level of cognition.

[395] Whereas the people, like Sam Harris, for example, who study cortical function, which people tend to think of as the advanced part of the brain, which is wrong, by the way.

[396] It's not the advanced part of the brain.

[397] It's the part of the brain that your brain lets you use because if you do something stupid with it, you won't die instantly.

[398] So the complex parts of your brain, they make you breathe, right, or they keep your heart going, or they regulate your digestion.

[399] You want to do that voluntarily?

[400] It's like, well, turn that over to your cortex.

[401] You can plan your digestion.

[402] Now, that's not going to work out.

[403] very well for you.

[404] You don't even know how you walk, much less how you digest.

[405] So the emotional neuroscientists were very much interested in the idea of archetype because they know that our cognitive structures are nested inside our biological predispositions and that there's some relationship between those biological predispositions and the way that we perceive and think about the world.

[406] So that's partly what I'm trying to lay out.

[407] So if you go into the kitchen for example, and you're hungry, what you see are things relevant to the food -making operation.

[408] And that's actually how your perceptions work.

[409] So you think, well, you see the world the way it is, and then you think about it, and you evaluate it, and then you decide to act on.

[410] It's like, that is not how it works.

[411] It does not work that way.

[412] So, for example, if you look at a table and there's a glass on it, like a drinking glass, your eyes activate your motor cortex directly.

[413] so part of the act of seeing a glass is mentally preparing to do this and so this say the glass is that size is the imitation of the glass with your hand and the imitation of your glass with your hand is the preparation for moving the glass to your mouth and that's what the glass is the glass isn't an an object the glass is an implement for a desired end and that's what you see you see that directly you don't see the fact of the glass and infer its function.

[414] You see its function.

[415] The person who established this wrote a book called The Ecological Guide to Visual Perception.

[416] Another brilliant book.

[417] It's also on my reading list.

[418] One of the things he pointed out was that when you come close to like a cliff -like disjunction like that, you don't see a cliff.

[419] You see a falling off place.

[420] And you're right.

[421] Right, and babies see this, right?

[422] Because if you put two tables together and you have a space between them and you put a piece of glass across the space, like a baby that can just start to crawl, won't crawl across the space because they see a falling off place.

[423] And when they see a falling off place, that makes their body move away.

[424] And it's because your visual system is very complicated.

[425] It doesn't just report to your vision.

[426] So it isn't like there's an object, you see it, and you think about it.

[427] It's like, what's happening is there's a pattern out there, and that pattern makes a pattern on your retina, and then that retinal pattern propagates through the optic nerve, and then that fragments up into all sorts of different outputs.

[428] So, for example, your eyes map right onto your spine.

[429] And so one of the consequences of that is, I actually saw this happen one time in my life.

[430] I was walking along some falling off places by the Pacific Ocean, near L .A., and I was with this brother of a friend of mine.

[431] He was about 6 '5, and he had this little daughter who was about four or five years old, and we were walking down the pathway, and there was a rattlesnake by the pathway.

[432] And she saw it and jumped right on top of her father's shoulders, just like a cat.

[433] It was like, ping, on her father's shoulders.

[434] I thought, well, that was quite amazing.

[435] Then I read another book by a guy named Joseph Ladoo, someone else I would recommend, and he mapped out snake perception.

[436] And so if you have to see a snake and then think snake and then move, it's like, the snake's bitten you, you're dead.

[437] So that's not a good strategy.

[438] So, but you have spinal reflexes to snake -like entities.

[439] And they're fast, so they can operate in less than a tenth of a second, which gives you a fighting chance with regards to a snake's strike.

[440] And so what happens is your visual system, a specific part of it that's associated with fear, picks up the snake pattern and it maps right onto your spinal cord and that makes you jump.

[441] And then maybe you see it.

[442] So you think, no, you see the thing.

[443] First, it's like, no, you don't.

[444] You map the pattern onto your spine and your spine produces a pattern which is you jumping and then you're not dead.

[445] And all of that's conserved.

[446] And so your eyes actually communicate with your nervous system at multiple levels.

[447] The top level is conscious vision.

[448] So there's other phenomena that go along with this like blind sight is a real cool one.

[449] So there are people who There's different ways to be blind, right?

[450] You could have your optical nerve severed, you could have your retina's damaged, or you can have a stroke, and the stroke will take out the visual cortex.

[451] And so if you have a stroke, and it's taken out your visual cortex, which is pretty high up in the visual processing hierarchy, then you say you can't see.

[452] So if you talk to someone who's blind because of a stroke to the visual cortex, and you say, well, can you see my hand?

[453] They'll say, no. and then you say, well, guess which hand is up?

[454] And they move your hand?

[455] They can guess with nine out of ten accuracy, even though they can't see it.

[456] And so not only that, if you take those people and you show them faces of people who are afraid, they'll show galvanic skin response if you test them psychophysiologically.

[457] So even though they cannot report seeing the face, the circuits that detect fear on the facial displays of other primates are still intact, and they'll show a psychophysiological response that's associated with fear.

[458] So perception is very complicated, and it maps onto you so that you can react very, very rapidly, reflexively.

[459] Well, you see that when you put your hand on a hot stove, right?

[460] Jerk away, that's just a spinal reflex.

[461] So the reflex is here to here and back.

[462] It's very fast.

[463] And then the pain comes.

[464] You think, well, I...

[465] pulled my hand away from the fire because it hurt.

[466] It's like, no, you didn't.

[467] You hurt so that you don't put your damn hand on the fire again.

[468] But waiting for the pain means you're so burnt, you'll never recover.

[469] So you need to conserve those very, very basic responses that are still mediated by sensory perception.

[470] Okay, so back to the aim idea.

[471] Now, let's think about the idea of hunting for a minute.

[472] So there's a guy named Richard Rangham, a primatologist I really like.

[473] He wrote a book about fire, which is another book I'd recommend.

[474] I can't remember the name Raising Fire, is that it?

[475] Catching Fire, that's the name of the book.

[476] And Rangham's a good primatologist.

[477] He also wrote a book called Demonic Males, which is a study of male aggression across primate species, which I'd also highly recommend.

[478] It's a nice biological analysis of the proclivity of male apes, of which were a subset, to be aggressive, which is why 10 times as many prisoners are men than women.

[479] It's not a social construct, and it's not prejudice of the legal system against men.

[480] Though, you know, in our climate, that would be a logical conclusion.

[481] So, well, right, it's like, let's raise the proportion of female prisoners to 50%.

[482] So we have an equity...

[483] Really?

[484] Look, I talked to scientists back in the 1990s.

[485] I was at a NATO conference in northern Italy, and there were three women on this panel on childhood aggression, And here was their damn conclusion.

[486] This was back in the 1990s.

[487] So there's a psychiatric category called childhood conduct disorder, and it's the precursor to adult antisocial behavior.

[488] It's really the same thing.

[489] It's just how it manifests itself in childhood.

[490] And there's way more boys that get diagnosed with childhood conduct disorder than girls.

[491] And so their idea was to eliminate those diagnostic markers that discriminated between the boys and the girls, because they thought it was unfair that more boys were being...

[492] Or unfair to women, that more boys were being categorized as aggression as aggressive than girls.

[493] And my mouth was...

[494] This was like I was like 25 when this...

[495] I thought, what the hell is wrong with you?

[496] The only reason that we care about aggression, fundamentally, is because it manifests itself in adulthood in extreme physical violence.

[497] That's the problem.

[498] The extreme physical violence.

[499] What you're proposing is to gerrymander the diagnostic criteria by removing the marker that actually signals the existence of the problem, and then that'll undermine the science so that we never actually study violence.

[500] But that's okay, because then half the boys and an equal number of boys and girls would be classified as violent.

[501] It was absolutely, I thought that was absolutely insane, and now that's like the norm, that's normative thinking among a huge section of the, what would you say, the social constructionist community.

[502] Anyways, Richard Rangham wrote this book on, fire, catching fire.

[503] And he proposed that we've been using fire for two million years, which is longer than most primatologists and anthropologists believe that we've been using fire.

[504] He did an analysis of our digestive structure.

[505] So you've seen chimps.

[506] You know how a chimp looks, hey?

[507] Chimps about this high.

[508] Very, very powerful.

[509] About four times as strong as a really strong man. But shape kind of like this, like they're really wide.

[510] And the reason they're wide is because they're mostly intestinal tract.

[511] And the reason they're mostly intestinal tract is because most of what they eat are leaves.

[512] And you might think, well, be good to just eat leaves, but here's the problem is chimps spend about eight hours a day chewing because leaves aren't actually edible.

[513] And so if you're going to eat leaves, like if you're a panda, those crazy animals only eat bamboo shoots.

[514] It's no bloody wonder they're almost extinct.

[515] It's like, bad choice there, guys.

[516] So every seven years, the bamboo shoot crop fails, on average, and so that's really hard on the pandas.

[517] Anyways, chimps have a huge digestive tract because they eat the stuff that's basically inedible and they have to spend all their time chewing.

[518] Whereas human beings, hypothetically, we figured out how to hunt, and we hunted collectively, and then we figured out how to cook.

[519] And so Rangham's thesis is we traded, gut for brain, which, you know, is arguably a good trade.

[520] And because cooked food is much more nutritionally dense, especially if it's high in protein and fat.

[521] And that's what you get if you hunt.

[522] And so the hunter, think about a hunter, a hunter has an aim, right?

[523] And the aim is an animal, obviously, to bring down an animal.

[524] And then you think about, well, what's the implication of that for what we're like?

[525] Well, human beings are very interesting creatures, right?

[526] Because, well, we stand up on two feet so we can see a long distance and we can really see.

[527] We've got great vision, and we can really run, you know, like an adult human being can run almost any animal to death over the course of a week if he's in good shape.

[528] And so lots of hunters, the Bushmen in the Calahary Desert, for example, they just run down their prey.

[529] They just keep running after them until they basically die.

[530] Now, they have poisoned darts, and those things also work, but a lot of it's just, they just run the animals to exhaustion.

[531] And a man in good shape can run a horse to death in something like a week.

[532] So we're really good at running, and so we can run things down.

[533] And we're really good at taking aim.

[534] Then you think, well, how good are we at taking aim?

[535] How deeply is that built into us?

[536] Well, look, think about what we do.

[537] First of all, we can throw.

[538] Right now, a chimp can throw a punch, and so can a kangaroo.

[539] So there's some other animals that can punch, but we can really throw a punch.

[540] But we're the only creatures that we know of that can throw a projectile.

[541] And to throw a projectile, you have to specify a target.

[542] And then you have to throw at the projectile, right?

[543] And then you have to hit it.

[544] And so, and if your success in hunting is dependent on that, it doesn't matter if you're throwing a rock or wielding a stick, or maybe using a bow, or using a javelin, or something like that.

[545] It's all target specification and aim so that you hit the target.

[546] Right?

[547] So that makes you a hunter.

[548] But then you hunt collectively.

[549] So that makes it more interesting.

[550] Think, well, what's a collective hunter like?

[551] So then you think, well, what's the point of hunting?

[552] and the point of hunting is to bring down an animal okay the point of bringing down the animal is to eat and the point of eating is to survive but the point of eating to survive isn't to survive so that you can just have that animal the point of eating to survive is so that you don't starve so then the question might be well what makes a good hunter and the answer might be well someone who can take aim and fair enough, and who can throw.

[553] So there's a prowess and accuracy that's associated with that.

[554] But let's say you start to hunt collectively, and even monkeys do that, or chimpanzees do that, by the way.

[555] So the precursors are laid down far down in our primatology, in our primate lineage.

[556] So imagine that to be a good hunter, you have to be able to aim and see and throw.

[557] And so you take aim, and you have a point, all of that, and you can point things out to other people.

[558] But then imagine that you also have to be able to organize the hunt.

[559] Because if you can organize the hunt, even if you can't aim yourself, if you can organize a hunt, well, then you're really valuable because that's like a meta aim, right?

[560] If you have 20 people who can hunt and you can organize them, it's like that's an aim.

[561] It's a meta aim.

[562] It's like you've taken the idea of aim and you've transmuted it into a sociological abstraction.

[563] You transmuted it into something like a form of ethical behavior.

[564] How can we organize ourselves tribally so that we can hunt effectively together and then not just this hunt, right?

[565] Because yeah, we're going to hunt tomorrow but then we're going to hunt next week and we're going to hunt next year and we're going to hunt a year from now and our children are going to hunt with us and so it isn't just one hunt, it's many, many hunts.

[566] And so then we have to organize our tribe so that when we hunt we split the food up so that the group stays coherent enough so that we can continue the hunt across time.

[567] Well then you can just, you don't have to use your imagination, very hard to understand how an ethic can emerge from that.

[568] It's a kind of game.

[569] You know, one thing I've lectured about fairly extensively is the idea of the emergence of morality from the structure of games.

[570] It's like you should play a game to win.

[571] Now, most games have a point and an aim, which is another indication, I think, of our fundamental hunting background, right?

[572] Because you think about all the things we do for entertainment, they're very hunting -like.

[573] you know so basically what what a basketball team is doing with the basketball is hunting down the hoop with the ball and so when everyone's into that they organize themselves into little hunting teams and they compete and it's so exciting that everybody will sit in the audience and watch that and then we're really excited when we see someone do something that's particularly athletically spectacular but we're also impressed when we see someone do something athletically spectacular in a way that's of maximal benefit to the rest of the team or that maybe even transforms the whole game, right?

[574] Because that's even better than you see a great athlete who's a great sportsman.

[575] And then you think that's a great person.

[576] It's like, and that's a good idea.

[577] It's like that's the person who's got an aim, but who's transmuted the aim as well so that they modify the entire structure of the cooperative game so that it becomes a better game.

[578] And that's a better aim.

[579] And that makes you a better hunter.

[580] Think, well, why does it make you a better hunter?

[581] It's like, well, do you want food today?

[582] Or do you want food for the rest of your life?

[583] And so here's a rule.

[584] If you're going to be a good hunter, share what you can.

[585] kill.

[586] Now that's something.

[587] And then you think, well, what are you hunting then?

[588] You're hunting reputation.

[589] All of a sudden, instead of hunting animals, you're hunting reputation.

[590] It's like, oh, you can trust him, man. You go for a hunt with him.

[591] You get a little more than your fair share.

[592] So then everybody lines up to hunt with that guy.

[593] And then, well, he's set, perhaps, for the rest of his life.

[594] And maybe even if he's old, or maybe he's having an off day, all those people with whom he's hunted with properly think, you know, we owe him something.

[595] And they're very concerned about maintaining their reputation as well.

[596] So you can see how, I see, I've become very interested in the emergence of ethics from the biological substrate.

[597] And one of the things that happened, when I was discussing the relationship between facts and values with Sam Harris, Harris has got an interesting problem to solve.

[598] See, Harris wants to ground ethics in something that isn't just arbitrary opinion.

[599] And so that's why he makes a strong case that you can derive values from facts.

[600] That's his motivation.

[601] And he has other motivations, like he would rather that people didn't suffer any more than necessary.

[602] And if you act ethically, maybe that's associated with the amelioration of suffering.

[603] And if you can ground that in something solid, then we can come to agreement about how we should all act to ameliorate suffering.

[604] Good, you know, that all seems reasonable.

[605] But the grounding of value, in fact, is very, very difficult.

[606] You don't get from the array of facts to the world of values without very complex intermediary stages.

[607] And so what I've been trying to puzzle out is what those intermediary stages are.

[608] So that's the hunting story.

[609] It's like you think about how the idea of an aim is transmuted.

[610] And so let me give you a further transmutation of that.

[611] So you remember the story of Pinocchio.

[612] And so Geppetto has an aim, right?

[613] And it's turned into a cosmological aim, interestingly enough, because what What you see at the beginning of the movie is Jepetto produces a child, essentially, who's a marionette, not autonomous, pulled, motivated and moved by forces that are beyond his control, voiceless, wooden -headed, and naive, right?

[614] But full of possibility.

[615] Well, what that, and born, one of the things that's interesting about the Pinocchio movie, if you remember how it opens, most of you, how many of you haven't seen that?

[616] Okay, so virtually everybody's seen that.

[617] So, you know what I'm talking about?

[618] When the book opens, when the movie opens, there's a book, and the cricket is showing you the book.

[619] J .C. is the cricket, right?

[620] And so that's Southern U .S. slang for Jesus Christ, by the way.

[621] So in Pinocchio, Jesus Christ is a cricket, which is very peculiar.

[622] And to say the least, even though you'll swallow it, so to speak, without even noticing.

[623] He shows you a book, so you're being taught by a cricket named Jiminy Cricket, who's an analog of Jesus Christ to look at a leather -bound book.

[624] And in the picture, there's a nativity scene with a star, and that's when Pinocchio's born.

[625] So that ties, that means that there's an association between Pinocchio and the divine hero.

[626] And the divine hero is always threatened at birth like Moses was.

[627] And Pinocchio is, of course, a wooden -headed, naive puppet who's a marionette, right?

[628] He's nothing at birth, but he could be something.

[629] And so then Geppetto puts a mouth on him, so to give him a voice, and then goes to bed and has a wish, dream, and that's when the movie becomes even more deeply symbolic.

[630] But what Geppetto does is wish on a star.

[631] Now, stars are very interesting from a metaphorical perspective because a star is something that glimmers in the night, right?

[632] It's a source of light in the darkness.

[633] And if you go outside and you look up in the stars, then you're confronting infinity in some sense.

[634] And it's actually been a real catastrophe for people, I think, to be enveloped in light pollution, one of the primordial experiences of mankind is to go out at night and to look up into the vastness of space and to confront infinity, right?

[635] I mean, you could do that every night.

[636] And now it's like two stars in a kind of an orange sky.

[637] So the star is also associated with infinity.

[638] And then it's associated with the idea of lifting your eyes above the horizon.

[639] You know, so if you have a proximal goal, then you're not very noble -minded.

[640] But if you have a distal goal that forces you to lift your eyes above the horizon, then you have a noble goal.

[641] It's like a meta goal.

[642] And a meta goal is a goal that enables you to achieve all sorts of sub -goals at the same time.

[643] Right?

[644] So if you have a good goal for your life, it means that pursuing that goal will help you in a bunch of ways simultaneously.

[645] And that's what you want.

[646] If you're going to aim at something, you might as well aim at something that works in a large way across a large scale of time.

[647] And so what you might say is that the thing that you should aim at most is the way that you should act that would solve the most problems at the same time over the longest period of time for the largest number of people.

[648] It's something like that.

[649] And I do think that our ethical systems, and I think this is coded in our religious stories, essentially, our ethical systems are attempts using our dreamlike intuition to build up structures of ethics that have exactly, and to provide us with aims that have exactly that purpose, even though we don't necessarily understand what we're doing because it's so complicated.

[650] But anyways, Geppetto has an aim, and what he does is aim at a star.

[651] Now, you think, too, the other thing about stars is that human beings have always used stars to orient themselves in the world, to actually find direction, right?

[652] Because, well, once people figured out the north star, they mapped the constellations, they figured out the north star, which was a stable point at night, they could orient themselves in space.

[653] And once they figured out how the stars changed across the seasons, then they could orient themselves in time.

[654] So it's actually the case that if you consult the stars, you can orient yourself in time and space.

[655] And so that's another reason why you might look to the heavens.

[656] And so that's why Jepeda wishes upon a star.

[657] And what he does when he wishes upon a star is that he hopes that the thing that he's created can become genuine, can become autonomous and real.

[658] And that's the highest of aims.

[659] And that's exactly right.

[660] And so then this transformation story that's associated with Pinocchio is a story of that coming to be.

[661] Right.

[662] Pinocchio has to fight against deceit because that's a major temptation.

[663] That's why his nose grows.

[664] He has to fight against being a neurotic victim because the cat and the fox convince him to shirk his duties because he's sick and he needs a holiday on Pleasure Island.

[665] It's like his university advertisement essentially.

[666] Are you sick and victimized?

[667] Come to Pleasure Island.

[668] Our university will allow you to extend your adolescence for four years with no responsibility and all you have to do is sacrifice your entire financial future to our administrators.

[669] What a deal.

[670] So Pinocchio has to go through these sequence of temptations, right?

[671] And he turns into a braying jackass as a consequence of his pleasure -seeking victimization.

[672] It's like, Jesus, you just can't make this stuff up.

[673] It's absolutely amazing that that was coded in a movie like 70 years ago.

[674] So, and then strangely enough, in the climax scene, he has to go to the bottom of the world to rescue his father from a whale, right?

[675] And that's the thing that transforms him finally into an autonomous individual.

[676] It's a very strange thing, too.

[677] And I did figure out more about what that meant in the last few weeks, so I thought, so here's a cool, this is so cool.

[678] This really took me like 30 years to figure out.

[679] But why in the world would your father be resting in a beast at the bottom of the abyss?

[680] What could that possibly mean?

[681] And this is a bit of a side trip, but that's okay.

[682] We'll take it anyways.

[683] We know that you grow in strength in proportion to your willingness to voluntarily confront confront sequential challenges.

[684] Okay, everybody follows that, right?

[685] And that's what you do with the kid.

[686] If you want to make the kid grow, it's like, well, here's a little challenge.

[687] You can't do it yet, or if you do do it, it's going to stretch you out, right?

[688] It's a bit beyond your capacity.

[689] It's in the zone of proximal development.

[690] That's a, what would you say, a way of being that was characterized by a Russian psychologist named Vygotsky.

[691] What he observed was that adults tended to speak to their infant children at a level of linguistics.

[692] complexity that was slightly above their level of comprehension.

[693] And they did that automatically.

[694] So when you're training your child to talk, which you do unconsciously, you talk to them using vocabulary that's a little more complex they can actually understand.

[695] And that pulls them along.

[696] That's the zone.

[697] So that's where the idea of the zone comes in.

[698] You're in the zone.

[699] It's the zone of proximal development.

[700] You're optimally challenging yourself, and that's where the meaning is.

[701] Okay, so we know that if you optimally challenge yourself, you develop.

[702] And then the question is, well, what do you develop into?

[703] And the answer to that is something like, well, you develop into what you could be.

[704] And the question is, well, what could you be?

[705] And the answer to that is something like, well, you could be the full revelation of your potential.

[706] And some of that's ancestral potential because you're actually, in some sense, you're three and a half billion years old.

[707] Right?

[708] Because life is continuous.

[709] And so there's potential locked inside of you in all sorts of different ways.

[710] And the way that you call that potential forward, is by challenging yourself and say, well, how much should you challenge yourself?

[711] And the answer that might be, well, it depends on what you want to call forward.

[712] The more you want to call forward out of yourself, the more you should challenge yourself.

[713] Okay, so what's the ultimate challenge?

[714] What's to look into the abyss?

[715] And so what's the abyss?

[716] Well, maybe that's mortality.

[717] That would be part of it.

[718] Maybe that's malevolence as well.

[719] Let's say suffering and evil.

[720] That'll do the trick.

[721] abyss.

[722] And what's in the abyss is the predator that lurks.

[723] So what happens if you gaze forth rightly on the predator in the abyss that lurks?

[724] And this is the theme of Pinocchio.

[725] You discover your ancestral father.

[726] Why?

[727] Because if you voluntarily take on the heaviest load that you can possibly bear, then you'll call forth from within you that which you could be.

[728] And that's equivalent to the ancestral father.

[729] And that's the story of Pinocchio.

[730] It's like just, I was so happy to figure that out.

[731] I couldn't figure that.

[732] I thought, what the hell's going on here?

[733] Why is the father trapped in the belly of the whale?

[734] It's a fire -breathing dragon in Pinocchio.

[735] Why does that make sense?

[736] Because it does make sense to us.

[737] Well, that's why.

[738] It's like, and it's a very optimistic idea, right?

[739] Because if you go down to the depths, the far as you can go down, to the depths of suffering and evil, you can find out who you are.

[740] And what you find out is that you're the thing that can transcend suffering and malevolence.

[741] And so that's so interesting.

[742] too, because it's an inversion of pessimism, you know, because you might say, well, if you're thinking that life has no point, no aim, has no meaning, the reason you think that is because of suffering and evil, essentially, because if those didn't exist, you wouldn't be questioning.

[743] It's like, well, what the hell is going on here?

[744] It's like, well, life is ripe with suffering, and it's made worse by malevolence, and that makes things seem pointless.

[745] I know there's other reasons why they might seem pointless, but those are major reasons.

[746] It's like, well, what should you do about that?

[747] Run from it.

[748] No, it gets bigger and you get smaller.

[749] turn and face it voluntarily.

[750] What happens, you discover your ancestral father in the belly of the beast, and that means that you start to become who you could be, and then the question is, who could you be?

[751] And the answer is, you could be the thing that transcends suffering and malevolence.

[752] And so it's so interesting, that's the same.

[753] And I think that's the same in some sense as wishing on the star, because that's the light that beckons in the darkness, right?

[754] That's the ultimate light that beckons in the darkness.

[755] And so if you don't pull away from the darkness, if you can confront it, It's your worst fear.

[756] Carl Jung said, in Sturquilinus Invinator, he derived that from the alchemical literature.

[757] What you want most will be found where you least want to look.

[758] That's the hero story in and of itself.

[759] Why?

[760] Because what you can be will not reveal itself unless you challenge yourself maximally.

[761] And then the question is, well, what is it that can reveal itself within you?

[762] And the answer to that is terrible as suffering and malevolence is.

[763] And I would say it's ultimately terrible in some sense.

[764] There's something in you that's more powerful.

[765] than that.

[766] And so out of that terrible pessimism, and that's the pessimism that can be generated by by forthright contemplation of the terror of hunger and privation and the absolutely cataclysmic consequences of human malevolence, the more you understand that, the more you understand that that's something that you can not only face, but also transcend.

[767] And by transcend, I mean two things.

[768] I mean, fix.

[769] I mean deal with.

[770] I mean lesson, right?

[771] Because you can reduce suffering and you can constrain malevolence and you can start with yourself and so you can do it practically but also it works psychologically because there isn't anything more meaningful than that and so that's the proper aim that's the proper aim and so that's what you hunt for if you're a real hunter is that proper aim right that's what you're taking aim at and that's a bit of a description of how that great ethic of aim and meta aim emerged from those that underlying biological platform how it's how it's written into us in some sense.

[772] So, thank you.

[773] Good thing we've got John along, that whole on thing, man. That's a killer.

[774] I'm an old pro, my friend, an old pro.

[775] All right, well, before we dive in to any of these, since we did about 45 shows together or so, and we took about a month and a half off here, and it's good to be back, right?

[776] Like, you seemed like very sharp Jordan Peterson tonight.

[777] What does Jordan Peterson do when he's not working?

[778] eat steak I spend lots of time with my family really that's mostly what I'm doing right what that's really mostly what I've done ever since I've had kids and got married I would say is you know although I spend a bunch of time with my parents I spend a bunch of time with Tammy's family her sister is going to be traveling with us for the next while I spend a lot of time with my kids I have a new granddaughter she's 13 months old so it's good to spend time with her And I spend a lot of time, I've spent quite a bit of time writing.

[779] I think I've written 10 ,000 words or something like that in the last month.

[780] And some of that, I've been laying out some of what I've been thinking about tonight.

[781] That's all being woven in one way or another into the next book.

[782] I didn't get a real chance to talk about hierarchies tonight, which is too bad.

[783] I mean, hierarchy is the way that those meta -a -a -aimms are instantiated in a social context, right?

[784] They're not hierarchies of power.

[785] They're hierarchies of competence.

[786] That's a very important thing to know, too.

[787] And so that's something I really want to work out more and more, because a lot of the critique of our society, especially from the radical left, is that Western society is a corrupt tyrannical patriarchy, something like that, based on power.

[788] It's like, well, it's not corrupt compared to most cultures and to all cultures throughout history.

[789] It's actually pretty damn honest.

[790] It's actually not based on power, except when it becomes corrupt.

[791] It's based on competence.

[792] Competence is the ability to do a job that needs to be done well, jobs that need to be done ameliorate suffering and constrain malevolence.

[793] And so everyone agrees that they need to be done.

[794] So the idea that hierarchies in and of themselves are, what would you call them, need to be torn down and replaced by completely flat structures is, it's an insane idea.

[795] It's based on an absolute misapprehension of the way the world works.

[796] Of course, for the post -modernist, there's no actual world, so it doesn't matter.

[797] But, so those are the sorts of, so what I've done in my time off has spent a lot of time with my family.

[798] I've done quite a lot of swimming and a bit of canoeing and some reading and a fair bit of writing and a lot of thinking and clarification, trying to weave all these things together, you know, because I'm trying to get everything to come together in this sort of musical way.

[799] and I'm hoping in my next book so the plan is I want to make the next book I write better than this book I just wrote because I don't want to publish it otherwise it's got to be better and it should extend the thinking that I've done and make it more elegant and more beautiful and more coherent and more useful, all of that and so I'm thinking all the time about how that might be done and some of that I went through tonight and that went pretty well I think so Jordan Peterson Swimming sounds like a great YouTube channel What do you think?

[800] When did Jordan Peterson become a middle -aged male fashion icon?

[801] I'm just reading them.

[802] I could tell that story.

[803] Well, you know, when I decided to do this tour, so what happened last year is that I did these biblical lectures and we decided to rent a theater to see what would happen, and what happened was everybody came to the theater, and there was about 500 seats, and it sold out all 15, and I thought, oh, that's pretty interesting.

[804] Who would have guessed that?

[805] And then I went to London, and my publishers, Penguin, in London, rented a theater of, I think, 500, 600, something like that, and sold out in like two minutes.

[806] So they rented another one of 1 ,500, and it sold out virtually instantly.

[807] And then I was invited to Amsterdam, and it sold out, And I thought, oh, that's weird.

[808] It looked like I could rent a theater wherever I wanted to, and it would sell out.

[809] And I thought, well, that's interesting.

[810] Better do something about that.

[811] And at the same time, CAA, Creative Artist Agency, so there's this agency in L .A. called Creative Artists Agency, and they represent most of the people that you'd be familiar with in the entertainment world.

[812] and fortunately they contacted me at about the same time because I think I rented a theater in L .A. by myself and that didn't go that very well.

[813] Yeah, that was the Orpheum.

[814] Well, it didn't go so well with the people I was renting because I phoned them up.

[815] I said, well, I'm a professor from Toronto and I'd like to rent your theater.

[816] They thought, like, we've got a crooked narcissist on the line here, you know?

[817] So they were very skeptical about that.

[818] And, of course, I didn't have the connections to do the rentals property and all properly and all that.

[819] but they did rent it to me, and it did sell out, so that worked fine.

[820] But CAA showed up, and also Live Nation, who's been organizing this tour.

[821] And so we talked and started selling venues or renting venues, and the tickets were going quickly.

[822] And so then I thought, oh, that's interesting.

[823] I'm going to be able to go around the world and talk to people.

[824] And I thought, well, I better do that right.

[825] And I thought, well, I should probably dress process.

[826] And so then I was reading my 12 Rules for Life book for Penguin, reading it aloud.

[827] I actually knew what it said.

[828] I've written it and everything.

[829] Although you'd be amazed at why you forget, you know.

[830] Jordan reads me a chapter of the book every night before the show.

[831] It's very nice.

[832] It's how Dave goes to sleep.

[833] So anyways, I was reading it out loud for Audible.

[834] and the guy that was the sound engineer, or no, he was the voice coach, so he would listen, and then if I made a mistake, he would tell me, and I'd reread it.

[835] He was very well -dressed, and I thought, oh, look, he's very well -dressed.

[836] He probably knows something about clothes.

[837] It was quite marked, you know, so I talked to him a bunch about clothes, and he recommended this place in Toronto.

[838] And so I went there, and I let them provide me with two suits, which were way too expensive, and I just felt terrible.

[839] about.

[840] I thought, Jesus, you should, nobody in the right mind should ever buy a suit for that much money.

[841] That's just completely insane.

[842] But I thought, no way, man. It was a nice suit.

[843] My daughter liked it.

[844] Everybody approved of it.

[845] I thought, no, I'm trying to do this right.

[846] I'm going to do everything I possibly can to do this as right as I can.

[847] I thought, well, I'm going to be in front of 100 ,000 people.

[848] It's like, buy a good suit.

[849] So I did.

[850] I bought a couple of them, and I bought a couple more.

[851] And it was actually a good idea.

[852] I would have never guessed it, but I did write in my rules, you know, the original list of 40, dress like the person you want to become.

[853] And so that seems right.

[854] So that's the story, man. This is a new one for the occasion.

[855] So what do you think?

[856] Is it good?

[857] One of the things that's been fun is that a lot of people who come to these talks, the young guys, the younger guys, especially dress up.

[858] And so I've seen lots of people in suits.

[859] And that's pretty fun.

[860] It's like, look at that.

[861] People are dressing like adults.

[862] They've been dressing like 10 -year -olds that have been inflated with a bicycle pump since 1967.

[863] So you go to Washington, that's exactly what it looks like.

[864] You see the 10 -year -olds, they've got shorts on and ugly t -shirts, and then their dads.

[865] Exactly the same, except pumped up with a bicycle pump.

[866] Yeah, so, you know.

[867] I mean, Washington is a very hot swamp, so it's not surprising.

[868] But still, it's not, I think it's a mistake.

[869] I think it's a mistake for people to dress like children.

[870] You didn't think you weren't going to get a serious answer there, did you?

[871] The real question is, did you get your shoes in Rochester?

[872] Because I did.

[873] Those are nice, man. There you go.

[874] Can you talk about what it means to be ideologically possessed?

[875] Is there some kind of diagnostic that I can use to tell whether I'm possessed by an idea that is not my own?

[876] I don't know if there's a diagnostic you can use.

[877] Yeah, yeah, there is.

[878] There is.

[879] So there's, well, I was thinking about it two ways.

[880] One was, it's very difficult to listen to someone who's ideologically possessed because it gets droney very quickly.

[881] And the reason that it's not interesting is because, well, it's not interesting.

[882] You can hear it from everyone.

[883] Like, I'll give you an example.

[884] I went and saw John Cleese at, uh, in Toronto.

[885] And I really wanted to go see John Cleese.

[886] I think he's damn funny.

[887] I really liked Monty Python when I was a kid, and well, an adult too.

[888] And, you know, and they made some amazing movies.

[889] And it was interesting to listen to him, talk when he talked about the life of Brian and about the killer rabbit and all those sorts of things.

[890] And, and, you know, those were stories that only John Cleese could tell.

[891] And so they were fascinating because he brought all of his accrued wisdom and his wit, and he conjoined that with his personal experience, and he said things that no one else could say.

[892] And so he was fascinating.

[893] But then he talked about Trump for 10 minutes, and it was like, John Cleese talking about Trump is actually no more interesting than any of you talking about Trump.

[894] It's just not interesting.

[895] And it's because he moved out of the domain of the conjunction of his personal experience and his genius, let's say, and into the ideological domain and it could have been anyone it didn't have to be John Cleese saying those things it could have been anyone and you can tell that in many political discussions it's like I could just replace this ideologue with this other ideologue and they'd say the same thing I really learned to become aware of that from reading Solzhenitsyns in school like archipelago because he talked a lot about he had a moral conundrum when he was locked in the Gulag concentration camps and the conundrum was what do you do with the communists Because now and then, frequently, really radical communists would get thrown into the camps.

[896] Because, of course, under Stalin, well, under the communists in general, everybody got thrown into the camps.

[897] Communists, socialists, students, if you were human, it was camp for you, buddy.

[898] And so, and, you know, being thrown into a camp was no joke.

[899] And you think, well, you get imprisoned unjustly, the proper response should be compassion.

[900] But then these radical communists would get thrown in, and they would still be radical communists, and so socialists didn't know what to do with them.

[901] It's like, are you a perpetrator, or are you an innocent victim?

[902] You're some weird amalgam of both, so how do I treat you?

[903] And his answer was, like a perpetrator, until you wake up, and you stop spouting the nonsense, and you start coming to grips with the reality of your life, and you start making, you start, start being a personal, like individual, right?

[904] Someone that...

[905] Because one of the things I noticed as a clinician is I really loved being a clinical psychologist.

[906] It was as good as being engrossed in a great novel.

[907] And sometimes the...

[908] But sometimes the conversations would get dull and my attention would wander.

[909] And I think, oh, I'm doing this wrong.

[910] If my attention is wandering, then I'm doing it wrong.

[911] Because if I'm actually talking to this person and we're on the thin path of truth, then it would be absolutely engrossing.

[912] And that was the case.

[913] If you're speaking and you're boring yourself and you feel weak and stupid and ashamed and like you're sacrificing your good name and that people's attention is being distracted, it's like it might be that you're not there.

[914] And if you're not there, then something has control of your voice.

[915] Remember in Pinocchio, Pinocchio's turned into brain jackass just before he's enslaved.

[916] It's the risk of enslavement that's the next thing.

[917] Because when he becomes a full jackass, then he's packed off to the salt mines, I think, by the dark, fascist slave drivers that are in the background.

[918] It's very uncanny, that part of the movie, but it's exactly right.

[919] So one of the, something I've suggested to people online is, listen to what you're saying.

[920] And if it makes you weak, Stop saying it.

[921] And you can feel it.

[922] I learned this from Carl Rogers as well, because Rogers was very interested.

[923] He's a clinician, very interested in this idea of something like psychophysiological integrity.

[924] And so he believed that if you were having a conversation with someone that was therapeutic, and so it was treading this thin line of truth, then you were sort of lined up physically and mentally.

[925] All of you was pointing in the same direction, like a piece of music points in the same direction, and that you could feel, when there was disharmony, and that was a sign that you weren't being genuine.

[926] And I think that's true, and you can really learn to feel that.

[927] And it's an uncanny thing to learn, though, because, and I've had students report this to me too.

[928] When I first started to learn that, I noticed that I felt weak when I talked about 95 % of the time, because almost everything I said was false in some way.

[929] You know, maybe I was trying to appear smart, or I was trying to win an argument, or I was trying to demonstrate what I knew.

[930] I guess that's the same as trying to appear smart.

[931] There was some ulterior motive that was driving my speech instead of just the requirement to say what appeared to be true.

[932] And so I've practiced since I was about 25, 24, to only say things that I believe to be true.

[933] And then to see what happens.

[934] right and well and those are the sources that was partly from reading solace and partly from reading jung because jung believed that psychotherapy in its fundamental essence was a moral endeavor an ethical endeavor and partly from reading rogers who was a good practical guide to this sort of the psychophysiology of speech so how much of that do you feel when you're doing these talks when you're really in the groove because i can notice on certain nights when i think you're really like tonight and we haven't been doing this for a while I felt like you were really, really sharp, but there are moments where it, like, really tightens up.

[935] Yeah, moments when I see you exploring an idea.

[936] Well, there's other things, too.

[937] Like, you know, the depth that you can reach is also dependent to some degree on your state of mental and physical health, you know.

[938] And so I haven't been at my sharpest this whole tour.

[939] You know, parts of tonight were good.

[940] I was cooking tonight, you know.

[941] Things were snapping along pretty nicely.

[942] But I think, I think, Some of it's because, like, the last two years have been very challenging, let's say, and I've got very deep into the social media world, and some of that's not been very good for me. I've really pulled back from Twitter in the last month.

[943] Twitter is really toxic, man. It's rough.

[944] And so I think putting a bit of a barrier between myself and the constant barrage of unbelievably vitriolic comments is, surprise, surprise, is somewhat useful.

[945] Like, it's taken me a long time to figure out what to do because, you know, I have 800 ,000 Twitter followers, and so you think, well, you have some responsibility to communicate with all those people because that's a lot of people, and maybe there's some good that can come out of it.

[946] And, like, these new technologies are very, very complex spaces to negotiate, and how much you should be in them and how much you should be out of them is very difficult to determine.

[947] But I pulled myself back a reasonable amount in the last month and we haven't been traveling as much and so I think I got some rest and so I'm probably a little more alert and with it than I have been and maybe less stressed by and you know you said you were gone for a month but probably there's been a bunch of hit pieces written and they're actually starting to dwindle you know and more of the pieces like there was a piece written about me the other day in Politico and it was pretty positive it was they didn't muck about with it they mostly wrote what I said in the interview and the Atlantic they came out with a pretty positive piece.

[948] And I was on Dr. Oz yesterday, by the way.

[949] So we taped three podcasts yesterday.

[950] So we talked for about four hours.

[951] So I was pretty much done by the end of that.

[952] It was more of a marathon than Rogan.

[953] And I'm going back on the 12th to do a live show with him.

[954] And so that's an entry point into a much more mainstream audience, essentially.

[955] His demographic is basically women overfell.

[956] 50.

[957] And so I wouldn't say that's a group that has been assiduously following me, but it's nice group to be able to communicate with.

[958] And so hopefully the tide is turning, right?

[959] We'll see.

[960] We'll see.

[961] Well, here's a good segue from women over 50.

[962] You can change someone's life right now.

[963] As a 13 -year -old, what is the best piece of advice to give me to ensure that?

[964] that I maintain a stable, healthy life.

[965] You want to yell for a second so Jordan can kind of look at you?

[966] Clap twice, if it's you.

[967] There we go.

[968] All right, there you go.

[969] Well, I can basically localize you in the audience then.

[970] I don't think that you can ever be given a better piece of advice than to tell the truth.

[971] You know, and if you could start practicing that now, then you might get really good at it, and then you'll be really something.

[972] because there's nothing more impressive than someone who's articulate who can tell the truth and there's nothing more potent than that now what that means is you might have to take some knocks in the short term because people aren't necessarily that happy when you point out things that everybody knows to be true but that no one wants to talk about now but I would also caution you like it's not an easy thing you can't just blurt out what you think that's not the same thing as telling the truth right, because you have to orient yourself right in the world.

[973] You have to be aiming at something.

[974] You have to be aiming at something good.

[975] You want things to be better than they are.

[976] And then you use truth in the service of that.

[977] So it's like truth in the service of love.

[978] I think those are the fundamental elements of Christian ethics, by the way.

[979] There's some relationship between truth and love.

[980] And love is the desire for things to be better than they are.

[981] And that's not an easy desire, you know, because people get vengeful and vicious and malevolent and cruel, and they want harm, they want to produce harm to themselves and to others.

[982] And it's a universal human tendency.

[983] It's a very difficult thing to constrain.

[984] So you have to want things to be better, and then you have to use truth in the service of that.

[985] But those are, if you can manage that, if you can start when you're 13, man, that'd be something.

[986] You know, because there's a lot of call for adolescents to be false, to go along with the crowd and all of that.

[987] And you have to be socialized.

[988] You have to make friends.

[989] It's important to figure out how to fit in, but you don't want to sacrifice your soul to fit in.

[990] You want to retain it.

[991] And so watch what you say, watch what you write, be careful with your language, watch how you communicate, and tell the truth.

[992] That's the best thing you got going for you.

[993] If you think about it, if you tell the truth, then you have reality on your side.

[994] That's a good ally.

[995] So it beats the hell out of the alternative.

[996] What does it say about the state of the world that the world seems to need you right now?

[997] Yeah, that's terrifying.

[998] Well, look, I wouldn't say it's me. Like, you have to be very careful.

[999] This is something I learned from Carl Jung.

[1000] It's exactly relevant to this question.

[1001] He wrote a paper called Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious.

[1002] And it's a very strange paper, like many of the things that Carl Jung wrote.

[1003] And it's about the danger of ego inflation.

[1004] And so, I've been rose to notoriety or public, I'm a known public figure, let's say, and what I say has a certain amount of influence.

[1005] And I could attribute that to me. but you see that's not that's not the right way of thinking about it because well you don't if you're a musician you don't if you're a musician and you're playing a great piece you don't attribute the music to you precisely you know it's like you're part of something maybe you're you're part of how that is expressed so i'm i'm part of the process by which archetypal ideas are expressed, but I am not the ideas.

[1006] And to confuse yourself with the ideas is to court insanity.

[1007] Hitler confused himself with the ideas.

[1008] That's a bad idea.

[1009] It's like, you know, here's another way of thinking about it.

[1010] I wrote about this in 12 rules.

[1011] Every superhero has a, has a, what do you call that?

[1012] It's like Peter Parker and Spider -Man.

[1013] What is it?

[1014] It's, it.

[1015] Well, no, no, his, his, his his alter ego, right?

[1016] Well, you don't know who the alter ego is.

[1017] You don't know if it's Peter Parker or Spider -Man, right?

[1018] But there's no Spider -Man without Peter Parker.

[1019] There can't be, and there's no Superman without Clark Kent.

[1020] And there's actually a psychological truth there.

[1021] So that's the relationship between the ego and the self.

[1022] Okay, and the self is the superordinate.

[1023] It's that which you could be if you were everything you could be.

[1024] And there's something divine about it, in a real sense.

[1025] it's the sum total of human potential insofar as that can be manifested in an individual.

[1026] So it's like the genie.

[1027] That's another way of thinking about it because genie is associated with the root word for genius.

[1028] And that's, it's like the Brahman and the Atman in Hindu philosophy.

[1029] So there's the you that's just you and then there's the you that's part of the divinity of being human.

[1030] And you need both of those and you want to identify with the first one.

[1031] Not the divinity of human part.

[1032] You want to identify with you.

[1033] You're you.

[1034] These other things can make themselves manifest through you in some sense, but you do not take, you have to keep yourself separated.

[1035] Jung used the image of the earth and the sun.

[1036] The earth should not fall into the sun.

[1037] It rotates around the sun.

[1038] That's like the proper relationship between you and God in some sense.

[1039] It's like there's a relationship there.

[1040] but that doesn't make you God and you have to never forget that right it's you have to keep that that's humility you're faulty and flawed and you make mistakes and you keep your damn feet on the ground and if you don't you're going to get you're going to get flattened and this is another thing that keeps my feet on the ground is like the degree to which you will be flattened is proportionate to the danger of the game that you're playing right and so I've been very careful I'm careful with what I say.

[1041] I try to be very careful.

[1042] And I try not to put myself in situations where I'm unlikely to be careful.

[1043] So, and the reason for that is that I'm not interested in being flattened, and that's a high probability event.

[1044] And so, well, so I don't think that people need me. What everyone needs is to reunite with the father in the ability.

[1045] this, let's say.

[1046] That's what everybody needs.

[1047] And I'm trying to do that for myself, and I'm communicating that to everyone else, to the best of my ability.

[1048] But it's part of a universal pattern, and that pattern isn't me, not personally, you know.

[1049] It's trans -personal.

[1050] And so you stay away from that.

[1051] It's like you don't, you can cook something on a fire, but you don't dance in the fire, you know.

[1052] You burn that way, and that's not good.

[1053] So what do you think about the part of us that wants to be flattened, because as you were saying this, I was thinking about about two years ago when Milo was at the peak of his success, he said to me, after we finished an interview, he said, Dave, this won't last forever, I'm going to destroy myself.

[1054] Oh, yeah, well, that was inevitable.

[1055] And I knew he was telling me the truth.

[1056] Yeah, it was inevitable.

[1057] You could see that with Milo.

[1058] I felt really bad when that happened, actually, because I watched him, and I thought, there's just no way this person can exist.

[1059] He's too full of contradictions.

[1060] Like, no one can pull that off.

[1061] There's just too many, a gay, English Jew, flamboyant, trickster, darling of the Republicans.

[1062] It's like no one can pull that off.

[1063] Yeah, you got a little runway.

[1064] Yeah, and, you know, and he'd been, and there were things about him that weren't ironed out, and that's what brought him down, because he talked about what happened to him when he was a kid, right?

[1065] He got seduced by someone much older and in a position of authority, and he didn't want to play himself off his victim, and good for him.

[1066] But Jesus, he was 14.

[1067] Now, when Milo looked at that, I listened to what he said very, very carefully, and with the clinician's eye, he said, well, I was, I was a willing participant.

[1068] It's like, fair enough, I can see why you don't want to play the victim card, but you were 14, and now you're 30, and you're still, you haven't separated yourself from the 14 -year -old.

[1069] You don't see that 14 -year -old from the perspective of an adult.

[1070] It's like something, I'll tell you a story, a funny story, or a strange story.

[1071] It's not funny at all.

[1072] It's a strange story.

[1073] So I had this client years ago, and she came, I only saw her once, and she came in to see me, and she said, I was sexually abused by my brother when I was five.

[1074] And so she told me what happened.

[1075] And I'd kind of built this image of her brother in my imagination, well, she told the story, and I thought, 16, 17, something like that.

[1076] She didn't tell me how old she was.

[1077] She just said she was a kid.

[1078] I said, well, how old were you?

[1079] She said, well, I was four, I think she said.

[1080] I said, well, how old was your brother?

[1081] Well, he was six.

[1082] And I thought, oh, well, I know how to deal with this to some degree.

[1083] It's like, you weren't sexually molested by your brother.

[1084] You were two very badly supervised children.

[1085] Right?

[1086] because part of her was still four.

[1087] And a six -year -old is an adult for a four -year -old, but a six -year -old isn't an adult.

[1088] You know, and it was so, it was such an interesting interchange because she walked away better.

[1089] Now, I'm not saying she was, that it fixed what had happened to her because it didn't.

[1090] But the memory of being assaulted by someone in authority is much ameliorated when you're 30 and you realize that one of you was four and the other was six.

[1091] It's a whole different story, you know, but you can't have that story until you're 30.

[1092] And it's so weird, too, because the past changed on her.

[1093] It's like, well, how can the past change?

[1094] It's fixed.

[1095] It's like, well, it's not as fixed as you think.

[1096] It's like, what happens now can change the past so strangely.

[1097] Milo is like, and he talked about this, and then people went after him for justifying sex with children, something like that.

[1098] which I thought was, I thought that was really unfair because I thought I could see how confused he was ethically.

[1099] And then he also said, well, this sort of thing is relatively common practice in the homosexual community.

[1100] You know, the relationship between an older guy and a younger guy.

[1101] I'm so like, that was just the combination of those two things, you know, making, because it sounded like a justification for pedophilia and B, like an assault on the gay community.

[1102] Well, that just sunk him, and people were waiting to take him down.

[1103] But I thought it was terribly unfortunate in some sense because he's a remarkable person.

[1104] You know, for all his strange, for all his strangeness, he's a remarkable person.

[1105] And what happened to him when he was a kid heard him and bent him up.

[1106] And he doesn't know how or why.

[1107] And that certainly was part of what drove him to take himself down.

[1108] Well, and he said that himself.

[1109] I mean, he said that after he had those initial experiences that he just drugs and alcohol for the next six years or whatever I don't remember the exact parameters of the story so yeah all right one more unfortunately only time for one more get a good one here all right we'll help one other person out right now how would you deal with the dragon who happens to be my roommate who refuses to clean his room or do the dishes or take out the trash or mow the lawn physical violence is Good night, everybody.

[1110] You want a better one?

[1111] Oh, I don't know.

[1112] That's not a bad question.

[1113] But I don't think it's the right question.

[1114] The right question might be, what are the circumstances that require you to put up with that?

[1115] It's like, because the first thing I would do if we were sitting down talking is I would say, well, can you change them?

[1116] No. Can you move?

[1117] Well, that's the next thing to do, is like, let's walk through what it would take you to move.

[1118] Because sometimes the best solution is just to get away.

[1119] Because some people, another rule that I've been working on is don't rescue someone who doesn't, don't try to rescue someone who doesn't want to be rescued, and be very careful about rescuing someone who does.

[1120] Like, maybe you have a roommate who doesn't want to make things better.

[1121] And then there's nothing you can do about that, except example.

[1122] example, and one manifestation of that example might be, just leave.

[1123] You know, if you're being treated unfairly, then you have an ethical obligation to alter the situation so that you're no longer the recipient of injustice.

[1124] You have an ethical duty to yourself to do that.

[1125] Now, maybe there are things in your life that make it impossible for you to leave at the moment, but then I can't really offer you any generic advice.

[1126] because what we'd have to do is sit down and figure out, I'd have to do a much more detailed analysis of your living situation and your interactions with your roommate to find out the entire story and to start thinking about a strategy that might aid you in your negotiations.

[1127] Like, maybe you just can't negotiate.

[1128] I'm not saying that's true, by the way, because I don't know who you are.

[1129] Maybe you can negotiate like mad.

[1130] But there's no way I can tell from the question.

[1131] question where the locale of the problem is.

[1132] But the first thing I would explore is like, what the hell are you doing there?

[1133] You know, leave if you can, move somewhere else.

[1134] And that's that's the simplest, perhaps the simplest solution to the problem.

[1135] Perhaps not.

[1136] Well, on that note, I'm...

[1137] On that happy note?

[1138] On that happy note, the guy's looking for a new roommate right now.

[1139] Anyone looking to, anyone got an extra room?

[1140] Someone who's easy to push around.

[1141] ha ha he's getting funnier sorry i didn't i didn't need that but i couldn't resist uh well i'm thrilled that we're kicking this thing up again and we got now we have like another 50 stops and i think we have about 16 in europe and and this thing is truly truly worldwide it's it's awesome and i'm and i'm psyched to be part of it and on that note i'm going to get out of the way and guys make some noise for jordan peterson everybody thank you everyone it was a pleasure to be in Rochester, so thank you very much for coming.

[1142] Good night.

[1143] If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps with meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life and antidote to chaos.

[1144] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1145] See Jordan B. Peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1146] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1147] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment or review, or share this episode with a friend.

[1148] If you didn't enjoy it, keep it to yourself.

[1149] We're still at five stars, even though I'm the one doing the intros and the extras.

[1150] Next week's episode is another 12 Rules for Life lecture from Westbury, New York, recorded on September 6th, 2018.

[1151] Talk to you next week.

[1152] Thanks for listening.

[1153] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and at Instagram at jordan .b. Peterson.

[1154] Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books, can be found on my website, jordanb peterson .com.

[1155] My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[1156] That's self -authoring .com from the Westwood One podcast network.