12 Rules: London, Ontario: The inevitability, utility and danger of hierarchies

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 17 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

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

[2] This week's episode titled Twelve Rules, London, Ontario, The Inevitability, Utility, and Danger of Hierarchies, is a throwback to one of Dad's 12 Rules for Life Lectures from London, Ontario, recorded on July 21, 2018 at Centennial Hall.

[3] Quick update on the family situation.

[4] It's still dire.

[5] Mum's surgical complication isn't better yet.

[6] Life just keeps on throwing curveballs one after the other.

[7] We're thinking of going to the States for care, so hopefully that'll be what happens.

[8] It's really difficult to make decisions when you're stressed to the gills.

[9] Weird evolutionary flaw, eh?

[10] When you need your brain the most in stressful situations, sometimes you're so stressed you can't think.

[11] That doesn't seem useful at all.

[12] The in poor of support has been unbelievable, so thank you again.

[13] It's almost like having a peripheral support system.

[14] It's really cool.

[15] When we return, 12 rules, London, Ontario, the inevitability, utility, and danger of hierarchies.

[16] Please welcome my father, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

[17] Thank you.

[18] Thank you very much.

[19] I was a little worried about London.

[20] I thought maybe we saturated the southern Ontario market because two days ago, there were only 60 % of the tickets had sold, but they told me just before I came on tonight that were sold out, so that's really nice.

[21] Yeah, and Dave made it despite the torrential downpour and the trip from L .A., so it looks like the omens are good, as far as I can tell.

[22] So I thought I would talk to you tonight.

[23] I always like to have, there's two things I like to do in these lectures.

[24] I like to have a problem in mind, you know, because like when you're writing an essay, for example, if you're writing something, you need to have a problem that you're trying to solve when you're writing, because otherwise why bother write, and why bother writing?

[25] And it should be a problem that you actually care about because otherwise what you're writing is just nonsense and you're going to bore yourself to death and you're going to write something trivial and whoever reads it isn't going to care, so that isn't really much of a way to spend your time.

[26] And when you're talking, it's the same thing, is you should have a problem, right?

[27] Because why else are you talking unless you're trying to solve a problem?

[28] And maybe you could be talking because you think you have the solution, but you probably don't.

[29] And, well, you know, not if it's a complicated problem, but you can try to formulate the problem more clearly, and you can try to generate a solution.

[30] And that's a good reason for a talk.

[31] And that's what I'd like to do with these lectures.

[32] this every night it come out, I want to have a problem in mind that the whole lecture centers around.

[33] And then I also use the lecture as an opportunity to further my thought.

[34] So I'm going to, of course, talk about, to some degree, at least to talk about the rules in 12 rules for life.

[35] But I don't want to just go over what I've already, what would you say, concluded.

[36] I want to push what I'm thinking past where it's already got to.

[37] And then I think that that's useful, not only practically, so that I can think more clearly, but I actually think it's what you want to do when you have a lecture, because partly what people want to hear when they hear someone talk is whatever conclusions they've come to, but more particularly, and I really noticed this with the talks that I've been doing with Sam Harris, people really like to see the act of thoughts coming to be.

[38] like they like to see the thinking itself and well because it's an adventure if you're actually thinking because you don't know where you're going to go you know I saw this this is what artists do by the way real artists not propagandist types well there's a difference a propagandist is someone who already knows where they're going when they start and then whatever they do is just to justify where they're going but a real artist doesn't know where he or she she is going to begin with.

[39] I saw this great film once.

[40] You can find it on YouTube.

[41] It's a black and white film of Picasso painting back in 1957.

[42] I think if you typed into YouTube black and white Picasso painting video, you'd probably find it.

[43] And they had Picasso painting on a window and were filming from the other side.

[44] So you could see what he was doing.

[45] So it was really interesting because you don't often get to see, or you don't ever get to see a great artist actually doing what it is that they do.

[46] Picasso, here's something cool about Picasso.

[47] There's many things cool about Picasso, but this just goes to, this is a good illustration of how vastly different people are in their abilities.

[48] So there's a site also online called the online Picasso project, logically enough, and somebody, the person who generated that site, was trying to document all of Picasso's works, which is way harder than you think.

[49] You think, so just get, In your imagination for a minute, just estimate how many paintings and pieces of art Picasso produced.

[50] So imagine he produced had a productive life of about 70 years, something like that.

[51] So, you know, you figure 70 years.

[52] Let's see, knocking out a painting a week or maybe a month.

[53] So that's 12.

[54] It's something like 900 paintings in his lifetime.

[55] It's a lot of paintings, eh?

[56] Because I suspect that most of you have produced zero paintings.

[57] So 900 paintings or artworks is a lot.

[58] But that isn't even close.

[59] You're not even in the ballpark.

[60] He produced 65 ,000 pieces of art. Right.

[61] It's absolutely amazing.

[62] And Johann Sebastian Bach, he wrote so much music that if you hired someone just, and he wrote it by hand, of course, because he wrote hundreds of years ago.

[63] If you hired a modern copyist just to copy what J .S. Bach wrote, it would take him 40 years of, 20 years of eight -hour days just to copy what.

[64] what J .S. Bach composed.

[65] So, anyways, so that's absolutely beyond comprehension, right?

[66] I mean, people can be so good at things, you just can't possibly imagine it.

[67] And anyways, an artist, when an artist is working, an artist is trying to puzzle something out.

[68] And artists, like visual artists do this.

[69] You know, you think the purpose of a visual artist is to produce something beautiful.

[70] And that's not the purpose of a visual artist.

[71] The purpose of a visual artist is to solve a complex problem of perception.

[72] And although you may not know it, the way you look at the world is deeply shaped by the way great artists have learned to look at the world because they produce their artworks and they present the world in a certain way.

[73] And then that affects everything.

[74] It affects the way movies portray the world and it affects the way television portrays the world and advertisers.

[75] And so you come to see the world through the eyes of great artists.

[76] And what they're doing is solving complex perceptual problems.

[77] And so that you can see differently.

[78] And they don't know exactly how they're doing it.

[79] So when they film Picasso painting on this glass, it's so fun to watch him because he'd paint and then he'd erase and then he'd paint and then he'd erase and then he'd paint some more and he'd cover that over and then he'd wipe the whole thing clean and then he'd start again.

[80] It was just constant playing with the forms.

[81] And at some point he was done and then he'd be on to the next one but it was the same thing.

[82] Constant playing with perceptual forms.

[83] And the art is actually just a record of, his exploration.

[84] Then I went and visited an artist yesterday, Tadius Brnoe, who lives in in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in in little town, Ancaster, that's it.

[85] And I did a video for him at the opening of his gallery presentation about two years ago.

[86] He makes these interesting paintings that they look, they almost look like a rusty metal when you're up close or some, or an old, an old wall, something like that.

[87] But if you get back 10 feet, then you can see a ghostly face that sort of emerges from the abstraction.

[88] And they're really beautiful faces.

[89] They kind of look like the face that Michelangelo might have produced.

[90] He's very influenced by that high Renaissance art. And it's this ghostly emerging of form from a chaotic background.

[91] And I was looking at what he was doing yesterday, and he's introduced collages and the same thing, faces coming out of the background.

[92] But He's overlaid them now with collages cut from magazines that look like maps, and so he's playing with this idea of form emerging from the void.

[93] But he's playing.

[94] I saw him do the same thing.

[95] He sands down the collage, and he puts new things on it, and he's constantly playing.

[96] And so a piece of art is a record of that creative play.

[97] And that's what I hope to do in lectures, to play with the ideas, and see where the hell they might go.

[98] And, you know, I was just, I just did four talks with Sam Harris, two in Vancouver on June 24th and 26th.

[99] And then we went to Dublin and to London just a week ago.

[100] And that was really something.

[101] We met Douglas Murray there.

[102] And so he was part of the, was Brett Weinstein was with us in Vancouver.

[103] And he was that professor who got chased out of Evergreen College, the biologist, about a year ago.

[104] And so, and then Douglas Murray joined us in Dublin and London.

[105] and he's a columnist for the spectator and an author and a very intelligent guy.

[106] And it was really interesting.

[107] Sam and I were talking about the relationship between facts and values, which is a fairly abstract philosophical set of concepts, or maybe the relationship between religion and science, which is another way of viewing the same thing.

[108] We're trying to figure out how it is that people can take the complex world of objective facts that manifests itself in front of us and derive out principles for action and for perception.

[109] How do we get from what is to what should be?

[110] It's a crucial, crucial question.

[111] It's actually the question that your entire brain has evolved to answer.

[112] It's a really hard question.

[113] Because it's the question of how should you conduct yourself in the world.

[114] And there isn't a harder question than that.

[115] And so it was so interesting to do these talks for a whole bunch of reasons.

[116] First of all, Sam is a very articulate exponent of the materialist atheist perspective, which is a very powerful perspective.

[117] And so it was good to talk to him just to face that because one of the negative consequences, I think, of materialist atheism is that it tilts people towards nihilism.

[118] You might say, well, that's an inevitable consequence of a particular kind of harsh truth, and that might be the case.

[119] But I think that the fact that that viewpoint tilts people towards nihilism is actually an indication that there's something wrong with the viewpoint.

[120] And we talked about that for 10 hours, basically, right?

[121] two and a half hours both times in Vancouver and then again in Dublin and in London.

[122] And there were 3 ,000 people at each of the Vancouver shows.

[123] And so that was pretty unbelievable to begin with, that people think about that, eh?

[124] People are a lot smarter than we think.

[125] You know, and I've really been thinking about this a lot because it's unbelievable that so many people would come out for a discussion like that because it was as high a level discussion as Sam and I could manage.

[126] And so you could imagine that there could be.

[127] a higher level discussion, but still, it was about the same level as a pretty decently conducted PhD defense at a credible university.

[128] So, and yet the audience was just lasered right in, you know, and we talked for an hour, and then we were going to shift to Q &A, but we didn't because we asked the audience if we should just continue the discussion, and everyone roared, you know, we asked them to vote by clapping, and it was overwhelmingly the majority of the audience wanted the discussions to continue.

[129] So 3 ,000 people sat there for two and a half hours at each of the venues as we walked through this abstract, complex, philosophical discussion.

[130] And so, and, I mean, I think people were there to see whether Sam's viewpoint would prevail or whether my viewpoint would prevail.

[131] Sort of, that's why they came.

[132] But that isn't really what held people there.

[133] What held people was their willingness to participate in an active discussion, to see where it was going to go.

[134] Because it wasn't like Samurai knew where this was going to go.

[135] You know, I'd never met him before.

[136] We did two podcasts together, but I'd never met him in person.

[137] We had no bloody idea if we were going to be able to talk sensibly with each other for, well, for 10 hours in total.

[138] You know, so it was unscripted.

[139] And we met beforehand.

[140] We had dinner, and we talked about what we were hoping to accomplish.

[141] And, you know, we kind of outlined the topics we might cover, but it was completely off the cuff.

[142] you know and and so a risk and that's another thing that you want to see when you go see someone speak you want to bloody well see them take a risk you know because there's no tension there's no dynamism in the discussion in a lecture unless you know the person might fail and so if you just read your notes you just stick to the script well you're not going to fail completely you're not going to fall on your face but you're certainly not going to succeed because you don't produce any tension.

[143] And so what people were participating in essentially was the process by which the ideas were coming to be.

[144] And that's a really exciting thing to participate in.

[145] And then I've been reflecting on this a lot as well because I've done 55 or 56 cities.

[146] My wife and I have been traveling around a lot in the last four months.

[147] And I've been speaking to audiences of this size or up to twice this size, I guess.

[148] This is a smaller venue.

[149] And people, come out and and and people are also watching these long -form interviews on YouTube you guys know about them the sorts of things that Joe Rogan is doing three hours long or Rubin with with a slightly shorter format people are right into those discussions you know and and all sorts of people you know there's lots of working -class guys that come up to me after my talks and say look I've been listening to the podcast on when I'm doing long haul trucking or I'm running my forklift or whatever it happens to be.

[150] And it's all of a sudden, it seems, it seems to be the case that there's an immense public hunger for long form, high -level discourse.

[151] And a lot of that's been revealed by these new technologies.

[152] So here, I'll tell you one more story before I start talking about what I actually want to talk about tonight.

[153] When I was in London, three or four days ago, I went on this television show called Hard Talk.

[154] And I went to the BBC studios, and there was a round glass table in this little room, a little sound studio, with a couple of video monitors behind it, and it kind of looked polished, you know, like a television show often does.

[155] And the interviewer came out.

[156] And we chatted a bit.

[157] He was a decent guy, kind of guy that looks like he would belong on television, you know, because people who do that sort of thing are sort of disproportionately good -looking.

[158] It's like a prerequisite for it.

[159] Not always, but generally speaking.

[160] And the camera started to roll.

[161] I had 25 minutes, which is a long time for network TV.

[162] The camera started to roll, and he stood up, and he read the intro on the teleprompter.

[163] And we talked a little bit before that, and he seemed all right to me. We had a decent conversation, and he apologized for making me wait, even though he hadn't.

[164] and so he was being civil and all of that.

[165] And then he read the intro off the teleprompter, and then he sat down to interview me. And it was so weird.

[166] I felt for a minute like I'd been...

[167] It was like it was in a little time warp, and I'd been propelled back to something like 1970.

[168] I all of a sudden felt that this was done, this format.

[169] It was over.

[170] And the reason I felt that was because I was trying to have a conversation with him, because we'd sort of started a conversation before the...

[171] cameras got rolling and there was a human being there that I was talking to.

[172] The same thing happened when I talked to Kathy Newman to begin with in the Channel 4 interview that some of you may have seen.

[173] To begin with, I was talking to a human being, but when the cameras rolled, I was no longer talking to a human being.

[174] And it was less the case with the guy from hard talk.

[175] He wasn't as committed to whatever it was that she was committed to when she was interviewing me. But it was kind of off -putting because he had some questions and they were all listed on a list of questions you know and I guess that's okay but it isn't you know when you go talk to somebody you sit down and have a serious conversation it's not like you bring a list of questions you kind of assume that if you're having a discussion that the discussion will proceed organically without prescripting and that your response to the person you're talking to will be dependent on their response, right?

[176] And that makes it kind of a dance.

[177] You even see this, by the way, with mothers and infants, little bitty infants, you know, like newborns.

[178] If you take a mother who's interacting with her infant properly and you videotape her interacting with the infant and you speed up the videotape, you can see them dancing.

[179] Like there's a response from the infant and there's a response from the mother and they automatically engage in a dance.

[180] And there was no dancing in the hard talk studio.

[181] There was none.

[182] And it really, I had a little epiphany.

[183] I thought, oh, I see what's happening.

[184] I'm actually not talking to a person here.

[185] I'm talking to a puppet, like Pinocchio.

[186] I'm talking to someone whose strings are being pulled from behind the scenes.

[187] And this isn't an insult to the interviewer, by the way.

[188] I suppose it is to a tiny degree.

[189] Well, I'll tell you why it is and why it isn't.

[190] It isn't because then I thought, well, because I kept trying to, he'd asked me a tough question, because like it was hard talk, right?

[191] So I'm going to get a tough question.

[192] But all the questions are already pre -made.

[193] And so they're not that tough.

[194] Because a bunch of people, a committee, sat down and wrote them out.

[195] And so they're not really dependent on me being there.

[196] And they're certainly not dependent on him being there because he's just the mouthpiece of the committee.

[197] And then I thought, well, and I kept trying to get under that and talk to him.

[198] You know, because I was talking about serious things.

[199] and I hadn't crafted my responses.

[200] I hadn't decided what the outcome of the discussion was going to be.

[201] I wasn't using it to sell books or any of those things.

[202] If it sells books, that's just fine.

[203] And I've got no problem and a certain moral obligation to publicize my book because lots of people are depending on its success.

[204] But I didn't go into hard talk thinking, this is how I want this to go, and this is how I'm going to answer the questions.

[205] Because of that, I went on there thinking, I'm going to talk to this guy and see what happened.

[206] which is much more entertaining in some sense way of progressing.

[207] But there was none of that with him.

[208] And I kept trying to get under his questions and talk to the person, you know, but that wasn't happening.

[209] And then I thought, well, why isn't it happening?

[210] Then I thought, well, of course it's not happening.

[211] And it isn't him, and that's why this isn't an insult about him.

[212] Well, first of all, television, studio television is unbelievably expensive, right?

[213] especially if it's a big network, it's hundreds of thousands of dollars per minute.

[214] You don't muck about with that.

[215] And there's advertisers who are advertising and paying for it, and they don't want to see a mistake, that's for sure.

[216] And so, of course, it's going to be scripted right down to the last detail.

[217] And so there's nothing dynamic about the conversation, and therefore there's nothing real.

[218] And so it ends up being something more like canned entertainment or scripted.

[219] It's like propaganda.

[220] Back to the artist issue.

[221] It's like propaganda instead of art. And the medium, to use Marshall McLuhan's term, the medium can't afford the risk of genuine interaction.

[222] So there isn't any.

[223] And then, so that's really interesting.

[224] That's really worth thinking about because that's something that television, and to a lesser extent radio, and to an even lesser extent, classic print media has done.

[225] It's made everything scripted.

[226] And part of the reason for that is because it's too expensive.

[227] to not script it.

[228] Okay, but YouTube has blown the bandwidth requirements out of TV, and so a podcast, right?

[229] Length is free, and so you can take risks.

[230] And not only can you take risks, but the length is free.

[231] So, Sam Harris was talking to Dave Rubin a couple of weeks ago on Rubin's podcast, and he was talking about the difference between the new media and the old media.

[232] Just for your information, you might find this interesting.

[233] The London Times published two days ago a statistic that said that more people in the UK are now getting their television and, especially more people are watching television, so to speak, on YouTube and online than through the networks.

[234] It's tilted, so it's the majority are now online.

[235] So that's a big deal, man. That's a walloping big deal.

[236] And as far as I can tell, the networks are just, they're in a death spin, and they're dying so fast that it's beyond belief.

[237] And of course, so are the newspapers.

[238] And that's why they've gone cap and hand to the federal government, for example, which is definitely a sign of their demise, having to do that.

[239] So, and I'm not saying that with any great joy.

[240] It's just a technological fact.

[241] And the reason YouTube and online TV is killing network TV is because YouTube can do absolutely everything that network TV can do, and a bunch more, with way less expense in a much wider format.

[242] And so, of course, it's going to kill it.

[243] And so here's another consequence, and this is relevant to what happened with Harris in Vancouver and in Dublin and London, and here, with all of you people coming out tonight.

[244] TV makes people look stupid.

[245] Narrow bandwidth, to be more precise, makes people look stupid.

[246] So Harris said to Rubin, so let's say he goes on John Anderson on CNN.

[247] And John Anderson's really interested in what Harris has to say and gives him six minutes, which is staggeringly generous by TV criteria, right?

[248] You're lucky if you get 30 seconds.

[249] And even if you get 30 seconds, it isn't usually you that gets the 30 seconds.

[250] As your face shows up and someone says for 15 seconds what it took you 30 seconds to say.

[251] So it's really mediated.

[252] And so everything is compressed into this tiny little channel.

[253] And so, well, then you might think, well, what happens?

[254] So everybody looks stupid because you can't take something complex and compress it into a tiny little channel like that without oversimplifying it like mad.

[255] A sound bite, right?

[256] And then, of course, politicians and everybody who's trying to act in public have to craft their message to fit the sound bite or they don't get any time at all.

[257] And then, so that's not good.

[258] It's like, I'm not going to think much of you if I have to look at you through an opening that's only this big all the time.

[259] I'm not going to think there's much of you at all or much to you.

[260] And then I think what happens with TV is two other things is, first of all, the journalists that operate on TV have to be those who will accept being scripted because they'll just leave if they can't accept it.

[261] So the guy that I was talking to on hard talk, Part of the reason I couldn't get underneath him to talk to him was because he hadn't been there for like 20 years.

[262] He'd been scripted for so long, that's what he did.

[263] And I explained why, so fair enough.

[264] And he adapted to the medium, or the medium chased out all the people who weren't like him, and that's all that was left.

[265] But now all of a sudden, there's no bandwidth requirement.

[266] There's no bandwidth restriction.

[267] And so what's happened?

[268] Well, how many of you watch, how many of you binge on, like, Netflix series?

[269] Yeah, okay, so that's really cool.

[270] So this is another thing that's really interesting.

[271] So, you know, the plot complexity of TV shows has shot up massively since the 1970s, hey?

[272] So if you're trying to figure out how intelligent the audience was, the intelligence of the audience in the 1970s is nothing compared to the intelligence of the audience now.

[273] You might think, well, great, we're so much small.

[274] It's like, well, no, yes, perhaps, somewhat smarter, but mostly the bandwidth restriction is gone.

[275] And so it turns out that people don't want half an hour sitcoms or even one and a half hour made for TV movies.

[276] Because that was pushing the envelope on TV, man, 90 minutes, you know?

[277] No, you want 48 hours of dense drama with multi -layer characters.

[278] You actually want, what you want, actually looks a lot like literature.

[279] You know, because the closest analogs to stories like Breaking Bad, say, or the Sopranos is great literature, like the Russian literature with its multitude of characters and its layered plotting and its complex themes, Breaking Bad being a very good example of that, because that's a, what would you call it, that's a variant on the theme of beyond good and evil, or a variant on the theme of crime and punishment.

[280] And it approaches that complexity and depth of great literature.

[281] And so it turns out that, hey, look at that, we're all smart enough to actually appreciate great literature.

[282] Maybe not in its written form.

[283] But who cares, in some sense?

[284] It's the density of the ideas that matters.

[285] And so you remove the bandwidth requirements, and we look way smarter than we did.

[286] And then the same thing's happened with YouTube, and the podcast is like, well, now you can listen to a three -hour discussion, despite your fragmented attention span.

[287] That was the theory.

[288] These young people have no attention span.

[289] whatsoever.

[290] It's like, that's wrong, clearly.

[291] And so if you have the opportunity to listen to an in -depth three -hour discussion that's real time and that's spontaneous, there's a huge market for it.

[292] And so that's absolutely cool.

[293] And it's just in time, too, because we have a lot of complex problems to solve and a lot more coming up because of the rate of technological transformation.

[294] It turns out we're capable of having discussions that are much more profound than anybody realized.

[295] So that's very cool.

[296] We have a new medium or a set of new medium.

[297] The other thing you see is with podcasts, because they're also revolutionary.

[298] So video online is revolutionary because it allows for this long -term, in -depth discussion on your terms, on your time, with no production barrier, and also delivered in a format that people can discuss, can engage in discussion with because you can put up your own damn videos and cut things up and comment on them.

[299] And so right now, people, with my videos online, there's about 300 videos that I put up, people are cutting 20 ,000 clips a week out of them and commenting on them.

[300] So there's this huge, so the technology enables this discussion that wasn't possible with television, two -way discussion.

[301] That's very cool.

[302] And then if that's transformed into podcasts with Rogan, Rogan's a great example.

[303] so I think Joe Rogan is the most powerful interviewer who's ever lived if you look at just sheer numbers so he gets 1 .5 billion downloads of his podcast a year 150 million a month right which is just absolutely beyond comprehension I asked him at one point I said Joe you know I think you're probably the most powerful interviewer that ever lived what do you think about that and he said I just I just try not to think about it so and but I'm sure Joe thinks about it because he's a lot smarter than, even if you think he's smart, he's actually smarter than you think.

[304] So he's quite an interesting person because he's like 95th percentile for tough because he was a fighter and 95th percentile for being in good physical shape and 95th percentile for being funny because he's ridiculously funny and 95th percentile for being smart.

[305] So he's quite the person to contend with.

[306] You don't meet someone who lines up at the high end of the distribution on that many dimensions very often.

[307] So it's not by accident that he's where he is, even though he is a beneficiary of this technological revolution.

[308] So, well, so that's all very interesting, as far as I'm concerned, and it's helped me also account for why everyone is showing up to these talks.

[309] We are on the cusp of a technological transformation in communication.

[310] and it looks like it's one that's deepening our capacity to discuss things in an intelligent and profound manner and even more importantly it looks like we're up to the task so that's exceptionally cool so and it's really remarkable thing to be able to participate in the dawning of that right with the podcasts not only do you enable those long -form discussions but you enable people to capitalize on found time which is a big deal because if you're going to read a book, you have to sit and read it.

[311] And lots of people really haven't made friends with books.

[312] They're not as literate as they might be, and they're a little leery of books.

[313] They don't buy them.

[314] Very few people buy hardcover books.

[315] I think it's 1%.

[316] You know, only 8 % of people go to a movie in a theater once a month or more.

[317] So even movies are relatively, what would you call it?

[318] It's a rarefied taste, and books are even more so.

[319] But God only knows how many people can listen.

[320] Maybe it's 10 times as many people can listen as can read, you know, read thoroughly.

[321] And then you can listen while you're gardening or driving or exercising and doing whatever else you might be doing and you can't read or watch videos when you're doing other things.

[322] And so, you know, the audiobook market is also exploding like mad.

[323] And so anyways, all this bodes extraordinarily well for our ability to communicate in effective and profound manner.

[324] And Hooray for that.

[325] Maybe we'll all get a lot smarter than we were very, very rapidly.

[326] And that would be wonderful.

[327] And I do believe that it's possible.

[328] Okay, so that sort of brings you up to date and me as well on the sorts of things that I've been thinking about.

[329] And now I want to talk to you a little bit about, mostly, I'm going to talk about the first rule in 12 Rules for Life.

[330] Because there's a problem that I want to address tonight.

[331] and the problem is it's the problem it's the problem of the left but I'm not approaching it precisely as a critic of the left any more than I would be a critic of the right I want to approach the problem of the left as if it's a technical problem because I do think it's a technical problem and I want to lay out why it's a technical problem so a little bit of background for this and I'm going to do that in the context provided by the first rule which is stand up straight with your shoulders back, which is a meditation, at least in part, on hierarchies and their permanence, and the strategy that you need to implement if you're going to be successful in the permanent hierarchy.

[332] Now, in 12 Rules for Life, in the first chapter, I talk about hierarchies, and there's a reason for that, and the reason is, at least in part, to address what would you call it a profound but also very attractive criticism of the West it's capitalist structure it's private property structure, it's individualism leveled by the radical leftists, most particularly the Marxists.

[333] Now the Marxist types with a little help from the postmodern types tend to conceptualize the West as a patriarchy and as an oppressive patriarchy.

[334] And that's a hierarchical structure of the patriarchy, within principle a few people dominating the top of it, and to also lay the fact of that hierarchy and its unequal distributions at the feet of Western civilization and capitalism.

[335] And so it's partly what I'm trying to address in the first.

[336] rule.

[337] It's like, okay, let's take a look at that.

[338] And what I was attempting to put forward was a proposition, which is the problems is way deeper than that.

[339] Like, we could give the devil his due and say that those who criticize the structure of hierarchies for their tendency to tilt towards domination by power and their proclivity to dispossess people, to make people stack up at the bottom, that's all accurate.

[340] But it's even more accurate than the Marxist types presume, because they make the presumption that that's a consequence of the political system and the economic system and the social system and so forth that exists particularly in the West.

[341] But that's not the case because hierarchical structures that dispossess, that are rigid and dispossess, have been around for 350 million years.

[342] And so I traced them back to crustaceans, lobsters, somewhat famously now.

[343] Now I'm being pursued by lobsters everywhere I go.

[344] People give me lobster oven mitts and our lobsters salt and pepper shakers.

[345] And Jesus, I've got more lobsters than you can shake a stick at, which isn't something I ever really planned, you know, but it serves me right.

[346] But the point that I was trying to make was, well, first of all, that hierarchies are the most common method for solving the problem of cooperation and competition in relationship to scarce resources by living creatures, period.

[347] Not capitalists, not Westerners, not human beings, not even mammals, right?

[348] Not even reptiles.

[349] Glorified insects have hierarchies.

[350] And hierarchies have been around for so long that the most fundamental neurological structures of our nervous system, the ones that run on serotonin, and serotonin is the neurochemical that actually sets up your nervous system and kind of organizes its functions like a conductor, organizes an orchestra.

[351] Hierarchies have been around for so long that the primary phenomenon to which your nervous system has adapted is, in fact, the hierarchy.

[352] And that's the 350 million -year problem.

[353] So if we're going to talk about hierarchies and their problems, and we should, we'll get to that in a minute, we're not going to lay the damn problems at the feet of the West or capitalism or even human beings.

[354] We're going to look way deeper than that.

[355] Okay, so, right, and so let's say that you're, you tilt towards the Marxist end of things, and you actually care about the dispossessed, not that you actually necessarily genuinely care about the dispossessed.

[356] if you're a Marxist.

[357] But you might be using that as a nice cover story, and a little bit of it might be true.

[358] But let's say that, let's give the devil his due and say that, well, some people and some parts of each person actually do care about the dispossessed, the poor, the struggling, and all of that, in a genuine manner.

[359] And so then the first thing I would say is, well, if you actually do care about the dispossessed, then you should bloody well take the problem a lot more seriously than the Marxists do.

[360] And that's partly what I was trying to do in chapter.

[361] one.

[362] It's a way worse problem than you think.

[363] Okay, let's run through a couple of propositions.

[364] Proposition number one, you actually have to do something in the world.

[365] You have to act.

[366] And the reason for that is that you'll die if you don't.

[367] You'll suffer and then you'll disappear.

[368] You can't just sit there and live for a little while you can because there you are sitting there and you're alive and all of that, but it's not something you can do for a very long period of time.

[369] You can't do it physiologically, and you can't even do it psychologically.

[370] Most people are very, very miserable if they're not actively engaged in something on a pretty regular basis.

[371] So it's like the demand for action is built into you.

[372] And it's been built into you ever since single cells started to move actively in the world.

[373] That's a very, very long time.

[374] So approach and avoidance, so that's movement towards and movement away from things are the most, that's the most fundamental, apart from the ability to reproduce, it's like the most fundamental element of active life.

[375] It's a very old issue that you have to act in the world.

[376] All right, in order to act in the world, which you have to do, in order to survive, then you have to, you have to value things.

[377] so what things well a small number of things because part of what you're doing when you're acting in the world or even looking at the world which is actually a form of action by the way because when you look at the world it isn't like you're a passive it isn't like your eyes are just taking in what's there your eyes are moving around like mad constantly they have little tiny movements called saccads and if they stop then you go blind right away your eye is moving constantly and then and then there's larger movements because your eyes dart around all the time and so I'm telling you that because it shows that perception is dependent on action and then not only that you have to focus your attention on something rather than everything so like when I'm talking to the audience I don't just sort of glance blindly at everything I'm focusing very intently on a single person and not even on the person but on their face and not only on not even on their face but on their eyes, like our focus is unbelievably intense and narrow.

[378] And so you have to act even to perceive, and to perceive an act, you have to select, and the way you select is by ignoring almost everything and privileging something.

[379] And to ignore everything and to privilege something is to value, right?

[380] Because what you're doing just by looking at something is acting out the proposition that one thing is more important than everything else.

[381] So there's no perception or action without a hierarchy.

[382] Period.

[383] You can't even see the world without a value hierarchy.

[384] So that's a really cool thing to know.

[385] Sorry about that.

[386] And then, so a hierarchy, a hierarchy is inevitable because you can't even see without one, let alone act.

[387] You know, and if your hierarchy isn't quite pointed so that you can figure out what the point of things is, then you're just confused.

[388] It's like it isn't even though you can reduce the world to two or three things that you value, because that doesn't work out.

[389] If you wake up in the morning and you don't know which of two or three things to do, what you end up doing is nothing, right?

[390] Because you're tortured by the conflict between the two or three things, even though there's maybe like 50 ,000 things you can do, even way more than that reducing them to two or three doesn't do the trick you have to reduce what you're going to do to one thing which you privilege above everything else perception and action are dependent on a value hierarchy well there's no getting rid of the damn hierarchy okay next thing let's say that you do decide that you're going to do something and you start to act but then it turns out that you're going to act in the world in the social world because you're not alone ever not really maybe for brief periods of time, maybe if you live away the hell out in the bush, but you don't, and very few people do, and even the people who do often have something that's not so right about them, and they tend to go off the rails very rapidly, because we don't do well as individuals, purely isolated.

[391] You outsource your sanity.

[392] You surround yourself by people, to whom you make yourself vaguely acceptable, and then they slap you a little bit all the time to keep you in line.

[393] And that's how you stay sane.

[394] It's not like you got all that organized by yourself.

[395] You certainly don't.

[396] And so, you know that because you have your family around you, and although they probably drive you crazy, they also keep you on the straight and narrow to quite a remarkable degree.

[397] And your friends do the same thing, and your employers and so forth.

[398] So anyways, when you're out in the world and you decided to act, you have to act in a context that's composed of all these other people.

[399] And so how do you do that?

[400] well generally what you do is you make a hierarchy that's what you do at work there's a hierarchical structure you know that's what you do in the government that's what you do in well that's even what you do in friendships to some degree you can do that in bars you know there's a hierarchy in a bar everyone knows that so so especially if it's a bar where people are striving to meet each other there are people who are very successful at that and people who aren't you you organize your cooperation and competition in relationship to a valued goal into a hierarchy and then and you have to because otherwise you cannot organize what you do socially so you can't see the world and you can't act without a hierarchy and then you can't act in the world without producing a social hierarchy and that's why even lobsters have hierarchies and chickens I wrote about them a little bit in in the first chapter of 12 Rose for Life too chickens chickens have a pecking order so when the farmer comes out to feed the chickens it's the celebrity chickens that get to eat first and the hangers on there at the back and they get the leftover grain and the price they pay for moving ahead in the hierarchy is that they get pecked a lot maybe to death and so the less successful chickens except waiting for food as a viable alternative to being pecked to death and that's exactly what we do with our hierarchies is that instead of having a fight about who gets access to what all the time and risking the fight and the fights are very very unpleasant we formulated hierarchy and then everyone is positioned and then we all know whose turn it is wind and then and then if we're smart we don't base the hierarchy on power this is another problem with the radical leftist view of the world because we don't care that much about power except when things deteriorate and power doesn't solve problems so for example there is a hierarchy of plumbers and you know if you go into any town some of the plumbers are doing very well and those are usually the plumbers whose pipes don't leak and who get a reputation for being able to do the job properly.

[401] And maybe they're also good business people and maybe they have a marketing flare and maybe they're good at self -promotion.

[402] Who the hell knows?

[403] But at the basis of it, at least, especially with something like plumbing, is they know how to put pipes together that don't leak.

[404] And it turns out that we actually want pipes that don't leak because nobody wants a house full of sewage.

[405] And so you actually try to find the competent plumber, and you peel from the top of the dominance hierarchy.

[406] And so if we're smart, we make our hierarchies based on competence.

[407] And competence would be the ability to pursue something of value, but even more importantly, to pursue something of value that everyone values.

[408] Not just you.

[409] It has to be something that other people want to.

[410] And so it's okay that there's a hierarchy, because what you want, if you're trying to solve a problem, that everybody wants to solve is to produce a structure where the people who are the best at solving it get to solve it.

[411] Otherwise, you don't solve the problem.

[412] So you need the damn hierarchy.

[413] So let's stop complaining about them.

[414] Let's stop assuming their secondary consequences of the Western capitalist patriarchy, because they're not.

[415] Now, that's a right -wing position, fundamentally, because one of the things that characterizes the right -wing is comfort with and respect for hierarchies.

[416] And so there's a place for the right because we need the damn hierarchies.

[417] And we should have some respect for them and some gratitude for them because we can't organize our perception without them and we can't act towards valued ends in the world without them.

[418] But, and this is why the left is necessary, just because hierarchies are necessary and just because they've always existed, essentially, doesn't mean they're without their problems.

[419] And they have intrinsic problems.

[420] And this is part of the postmodern criticism of hierarchies.

[421] When you privilege something above everything else so that you can see it or act towards it, you dispossess everything else.

[422] You make it of lower status.

[423] Now that's okay when you're looking at the world because you can't look at everything at once.

[424] It's an impossibility not to ignore and dispossess most of everything.

[425] But if it's an economic situation, it gets kind of brutal.

[426] So we set up hierarchies, even if they're hierarchies of competence, first of all, a hierarchy of competence can degenerate, which it does.

[427] You know, like the mafia is not precisely a hierarchy of competence.

[428] It's a hierarchy of power.

[429] And so as a hierarchy of competence deteriorates, it can transform into a hierarchy of power.

[430] And that means that people who aren't necessarily competent come to dominate it and to extract resources from it.

[431] And that's how hierarchies degenerate.

[432] And they do degenerate.

[433] And part of what the left says is, yeah, you claim that your hierarchy is one of competence, but I can see it becoming corrupted by nothing but power.

[434] It's like, yes, that's a valid criticism.

[435] We've known even the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Egyptians had a god of hierarchy that was Osiris.

[436] I wrote about that a little bit in 12 Rules for Life, but more in my book, Maps of Meaning.

[437] And they also had a god of the degeneration of hierarchies.

[438] And that god was named Set.

[439] And Set was set as a name.

[440] Set was the name that becomes Satan as the Christian revolution emerged out of its Egyptian and Greek background.

[441] we've known forever, at least in dramatic form, that hierarchies of competence can degenerate into hierarchies of power, and that that's bad news, and that part of what we need to do is to be awake and be careful and to adjust our hierarchies to make sure that they stay functioning as the useful tools they're properly designed to be.

[442] And then the other thing that the left says is, well, what if you can't function in the hierarchy?

[443] even if it's a hierarchy of competence.

[444] Now, this is a very complicated problem, and this is why I wanted to address this as a technical issue.

[445] I mean, the first issue is there's going to be some time in your life when you're not very good at maneuvering in the hierarchy.

[446] Even if you're competent, right?

[447] Because you're going to be sick, or someone close to you is going to be sick.

[448] And that's going to take you out, too.

[449] You know, if you have a really close family member, like a child, and they're ill. It's like you're compromised in a serious way.

[450] Directly proportionate to their illness or maybe you have to take care of a of a sick parent and so there's going to be some time in your life where you're part of the dispossessed and so and that's going to be true for everyone and so we probably need to do something about that because it's a situation.

[451] We're all going to find ourselves in at one point or another and then also there's the problem of the people who are more permanently dispossessed so here's a here's a real vicious problem that no one will talk about, that everyone needs to talk about.

[452] So, imagine you have this hierarchy, and you have this hierarchy, and you have this hierarchy.

[453] So you have a whole set of hierarchies, because our society isn't a hierarchy, it's a whole set of hierarchies.

[454] And they're sort of loosely aggregated into a meta -hierarchy, because there's recognized power structures across all those sets of hierarchies.

[455] Wealth might be one, and political power might be another.

[456] then you think, well, are there, it's good that we have all those hierarchies because if you're not good at one thing, maybe you can be good at another.

[457] And so you're dispossessed because you don't know how to sing, but maybe you're a pretty good engineer, and so you don't have to sing.

[458] And hopefully in a pluralistic society, we can set up a lot of different hierarchies, and everyone can find one in which they're a contender.

[459] Even if you're not at the top, that might not even matter.

[460] What you really want is, some hope that you can move towards the top, right?

[461] That's even better than being at the top, I think, most of the time, because people live more on hope than actuality anyways, and you need a vision for the future and something to work toward.

[462] So if you found a hierarchy where your particular competence might express itself properly, then you have something to live for.

[463] And hopefully we could provide that for everyone.

[464] And in a diverse society, a properly diverse society, to use a word I really despise because of the way it's being used, you might set up enough hierarchy so that everybody would have a chance to move toward the top.

[465] And I think in the West we've done a remarkable job of that, you know, because most people can find their place.

[466] But here's a problem.

[467] So intelligence is a problem, because one of the things that predicts your ability to be successful in any hierarchy, virtually any hierarchy, is how intelligent you are.

[468] And you can assess that with IQ tests quite accurately, by the way, despite the fact that people don't like that idea, and no wonder they don't like it.

[469] And so what that means is that if you happen to be born at the lower end of the cognitive distribution through no fault of your own, the probability that you're going to end up among the permanently dispossessed is quite high.

[470] And so I can give you an example of that.

[471] So the United, the American armed forces have been using IQ tests to screen for officers and enlisted men for a long time, more than 100 years.

[472] They're really good at it, and they know what they're doing.

[473] They've published a lot of a seminal research on IQ.

[474] And partly with the reason they did that was because during war time, you want to screen a lot of people really fast, and you want to find people who are generally competent, and you want to make them into officers, and you want to do that at an incredible rate because otherwise you lose.

[475] So, like, you're driven by absolute necessity, and that's why the military uses IQ tests, because there isn't a better way of screening people rapidly for competence than IQ tests.

[476] And so one of the upshots of that was that the Army has the armed forces have has produced a lot of data on the relationship between IQ and your ability to function in the armed forces.

[477] And 20 years ago, something like that, they produced a policy that's now instantiated into American law that if you have an IQ of less than 83, you cannot be drafted into the armed forces.

[478] Why?

[479] Now, think about this, because you've got to think about the conditions under which a scientific proposition might be valid.

[480] So, if you discover a set of facts that you don't like, but you've discovered them, and you're so convinced by their truth that you're willing to state the set of facts, even though you don't like them, then that's one piece of evidence that they might be true.

[481] Right?

[482] They run contrary to your bias rather than affirming it.

[483] Now, the armed forces wants every single person they can possibly get their hands on to be in the armed forces, right?

[484] Because they have a chronic shortage of people in wartime, for obvious reasons, and they have a chronic shortage of people in peacetime.

[485] So it's a matter of American policy, necessity first, to pull people into the armed forces, and then it's actually also a measure, especially in peacetime, of compassion and care for people to pull them into the armed forces.

[486] Because one of the things the armed forces have been used for in the United States is to pull people out of the underclass and to provide them with the means of social mobility that might put them up into the functional working class or above.

[487] And so that's an explicit part of policy.

[488] And so you actually want to pull as many people as you possibly can into that training ground.

[489] Nonetheless, they concluded that if you had an IQ of 83 or less, you can't be in the armed forces.

[490] And the reason for that was, despite years of effort, the people who make the selection decisions have determined that if you have an IQ of less than 83, you cannot be trained under any circumstances whatsoever to do anything in the armed forces that isn't positively counterproductive.

[491] That's 10 % of the population.

[492] 10 % of the population.

[493] And as our society becomes more technologically complex, which it is doing at a very, very rapid rate, the necessity for higher -level cognitive function is increasing, not decreasing.

[494] And so despite the fact that we have hierarchies and despite the fact that we need them, and despite the fact that we have a very large number of hierarchies, We also have a situation where it's increasingly going to be the case that a narrow band of the population, 10%, it's not that narrow, is going to be permanently set outside those hierarchies.

[495] And that actually constitutes a real problem.

[496] Now, there's all sorts of other reasons you might get dispossessed, but that's a big one, man. And it's one that really does seem arbitrary, too, because, you know, you might be a very smart person, and you might be happy about that, and you might be proud of it even, but it's actually not your fault.

[497] Like, you might have not done anything so idiotic that you made yourself permanently stupid.

[498] And congratulations for that.

[499] But, you know, IQ, to a very large degree, is biologically determined.

[500] And so if you happen to be in the upper fifth percentile, let's say, tremendous amount of that is cards you were dealt with, cards you were dealt have birth.

[501] And, you know, you might not like that idea.

[502] Environment can make you stupider.

[503] But it's very, very hard for it to make you smarter.

[504] And that's part of the reason people don't like the IQ literature, and no wonder.

[505] It's a harsh literature.

[506] But then, you know, so there's the problem of people who aren't at the upper end or even in the middle of the cognitive distribution.

[507] There's a problem of people who are impaired in some manner.

[508] Their health is impaired physically or mentally.

[509] Plenty of people like that.

[510] There's all sorts of things that might put you outside the hierarchy, even though the hierarchy is necessary.

[511] And the reason that we need a left wing is to keep the criticism of the hierarchy out in the open, to make sure it doesn't degenerate into a power game, for example, and to speak on behalf of the genuinely dispossessed.

[512] And then the question is, well, how steep and purely functional should the hierarchy be?

[513] That's something you might promote if you're on the conservative end of things, and how flat and inclusive should it be to take care of the dispossessed?

[514] And that's something that you would push if you were on the left wing part of the spectrum.

[515] And the answer is, we don't know, and it always changes, so we need to talk about it all the time.

[516] And so that's why we have political dialogue, right?

[517] Yeah, well, that's why free speech is so necessary.

[518] It's not just another right.

[519] You have to be a fool if you think that.

[520] If you're a political figure, and you think that free speech is just another right, You have disqualified yourself from holding office.

[521] Because you don't understand how the system works at all.

[522] Say, free speech is the mechanism by which the left and the right keep society in balance.

[523] You don't mess with that mechanism, unless you want everything to become unbalanced.

[524] Okay, so now we've made a case for the left, right?

[525] So the left is, in its proper place, it speaks for the dispossessed, and it's a critic of the proclivity for hierarchies to become blind and rigid.

[526] Okay, and what motivates the left?

[527] Well, we know some temperamental features that motivate people on the left.

[528] So people on the left tend to be more creative.

[529] They're more open.

[530] Technically, that's a big five trait.

[531] And it's associated with the ability to think laterally.

[532] So if you're high in openness, if someone throws you an idea, you'll have a bunch of other ideas.

[533] And that's good because that's creative, but it's bad too, because most of your ideas will be stupid and dangerous.

[534] Well, that's the price you pay for creativity.

[535] right and you can even see that with creative people because creative people have a hard time catalyzing an identity because they can be so many things it's hard for them to be anything at all and so you see creative people who are often lost especially if they're also high in negative emotion because they can't organize themselves towards one thing and they get scattered and so and creativity per se is necessary because there's hard problems and we haven't solved them and we need new solutions, but it's also deeply problematic because almost all new solutions are stupid and pathological.

[536] So creativity, like all other gifts, comes at a tremendous price.

[537] Anyways, the left -wingers tend to be more creative.

[538] They also tend to be less conscientious, especially orderliness, orderly, which is part of conscientiousness.

[539] Conservatives tend to be more conscientious, and so they make good managers and administrators.

[540] They're really good at once someone's figured out how to do something conservatives are really good at doing it but they're not so good at figuring out how to do a new thing and so the way things look economically is that the liberal types generate new business ideas most of which fail catastrophically by the way and some of which succeed immensely and then conservatives leap in and run the new things and implement them insofar as they can be implemented algorithmically and then they run them until their conclusion the environment changes the company dies because that solution no longer works, the company dies and a creative person comes up with a new idea.

[541] So another reason why the left and the right are necessary from a temperamental perspective is the liberal left types create new things but the right conservative types run them.

[542] And so we need each other seriously.

[543] And so we have to have some appreciation across the temperamental and political divide.

[544] Okay, now the other thing that seems to motivate the left, at least to some degree, especially the more radical end of the left is compassion.

[545] We've done some research that shows that agreeableness, which is the compassion dimension in the Big Five, predicts politically correct belief.

[546] And you can kind of understand compassion as a motivator, you know, like if you're walking down the street and you run across someone who's homeless, some young person, for example, a runaway, or even someone who's sort of in the throes of alcohol addiction is laying on the street.

[547] It's not a pleasant experience.

[548] It's not like you take a moment to celebrate the oppressive hierarchy when you see somebody who's so obviously fallen out of the structure of the world.

[549] No one likes that.

[550] And if you're the more compassionate, if you're conscientious conservative type, you might be somewhat judgmental in a situation like that because conscientious people are less likely, for example, to give money to homeless people, partly because they judge they judge them as well as feeling compassion towards them, whereas the compassionate, low conscientious types are instantly awash in mercy and pity.

[551] And there's something admirable about that in the same way that watching a mother take care of an infant is admirable, right?

[552] Especially an infant who's under six months old, because the right response to an infant is compassion.

[553] So whatever an infant does before it's six months old is correct, whenever it manifests any distress, your job is to drop whatever you're doing and fix it.

[554] Pure compassion.

[555] And that's so deeply wired into us, and appropriately so, that it's hard for us to even understand that a compassionate response isn't always the proper response in every circumstance.

[556] And as your children grow, you start to temper compassion with judgment, right?

[557] And you increase the amount of judgment as they mature because you hold them accountable for their actions.

[558] And so compassion has to shade into something like judgment in order for development to proceed.

[559] You also see that on the social level.

[560] Compassion might be a perfectly good primary instinct of ethos for dealing with people who are truly, utterly dependent.

[561] But for setting up complex organizations like a business, well, there's no evidence whatsoever that agreeableness is a predictor of success.

[562] If you're an agreeable person, you get paid less and you don't do a better job.

[563] exception there might be if you're caring directly for people.

[564] So in healthcare, customer service and that sort of thing, being agreeable might give you an edge.

[565] But mostly it's conscientiousness, which is a cold virtue.

[566] It's the ability to forego immediate gratification, for example, and to work dutifully and orderly towards a kind of a cold end.

[567] So compassion doesn't seem to scale.

[568] But nonetheless, it's necessary for people who are truly in trouble.

[569] And it has this feeling of moral virtue that's automatically associated with it.

[570] And I think that's part of the reason why.

[571] So here's the other issue.

[572] It's like the right wing can go too far.

[573] The right seems to go too far when it holds up a hierarchy as absolute or when it starts to make claims of something like ethnic or racial superiority.

[574] You box the right wingers in, you say, no, you've gone too far.

[575] When does the left go too far?

[576] The answer is, well, we're not exactly sure, even though we know that the left can go too far if we have any sense, because we read our 20th century history, and we understand that when the left went too far in the 20th century, it destroyed 100 million people.

[577] So the evidence is absolutely overwhelming that the left can go too far, but it's not so easy to figure out when.

[578] And that's actually a problem that's causing us in the middle.

[579] amount of trouble in our society at the moment.

[580] It's part of what's driving polarization because we don't know how to box it in.

[581] And then the question I'm trying to address, at least in part, is, well, why not?

[582] Compassion is part of it.

[583] It's like compassion has the aspect of virtue about it.

[584] And it's especially true when people are genuinely dispossessed.

[585] Okay, and we don't know how to solve that problem.

[586] How much compassion is enough?

[587] Try making the rule, man. It's really difficult.

[588] Like, those of you have children, And you're debating between you, you know, mother and father, generally speaking, about how to discipline your children.

[589] Well, that's always the discussion you're having.

[590] It's like, well, compassion or judgment here?

[591] And, you know, if you're the devouring mother type, technically speaking, it's all compassion.

[592] And if you're the harsh, tyrannical father, then it's all judgment.

[593] And both of those are wrong.

[594] Every decision is some balance between mercy and justice.

[595] And when you're, when you have children, you're doing that in real time.

[596] You're trying to figure out how to get that balance right, which is the same thing you have to do in a functioning political system, right, to get that balance right.

[597] So, okay, the compassion problem is a big problem.

[598] Here's another problem.

[599] The left tends to produce utopian vision, right?

[600] So for the communists, it was the eternal brotherhood of man, and everyone.

[601] It was an inclusive utopian vision, unlike the Nazi vision, which was for us and not for you.

[602] And so that kind of made it suspect right from the beginning, especially if you weren't included in the us, right?

[603] But the communists, they came out with this universal vision of brotherhood and the promise of a better future.

[604] And the thing is, that's attractive.

[605] And it's really, it's attractive even psychologically because one of the things that you are working towards is a better future, right?

[606] I mean, you go out there and you do something, and the reason you do it is because you think things will be better if you do it.

[607] And so you're always moved ahead by the promise of, of the dawning utopia in a sense you're always trying to improve your life and you say well of course you're trying to improve your life it's sort of like built into the definition of improve and so it's really easy to hook you with a utopian vision because it fits right into your psychology and it's also not easy to say what's wrong with it it's like well what's wrong with the utopian vision of eternal brotherhood isn't that what we want it's like the answer is well yeah kind of but another answer is the devil's in the details.

[608] Okay, so that's another reason why it's hard to box in the left when it goes too far, because they offer this universalist utopian vision that hooks into our psychology.

[609] I was talking to some very smart people in London two or three days ago, and we were talking about the utopian vision, and one of the people there, who was a professor at Cambridge, if I remember correctly, said something really interesting about the utopia.

[610] He said, well, what's the danger of a utopian vision?

[611] We've already outlined what might be good about it.

[612] Well, you'll make sacrifices to bring about something better.

[613] Right?

[614] Everyone does that in your life.

[615] You sacrifice the pleasures of today for the accomplishments of tomorrow.

[616] It's sort of the definition of being disciplined, right?

[617] And you might say, well, the better the outcome, the more justified the sacrifice.

[618] He said, well, that's the problem with the utopian vision of perfection.

[619] He was talking about this U .K. historian, I think his name was Hobbsbomb, famous left -wing historian, who was asked a few years ago, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the full revelation of the absolute catastrophes of the radical left in the 20th century, he was asked about his commitment to the socialist utopian ideal, the communist utopian ideal, and he was asked something like, Well, if we could bring about that utopia, would have all those sacrifices been worthwhile, and his answer was yes.

[620] So, well, if the goal is sufficiently elevated, then any sacrifice is worthwhile.

[621] And, you know, you can kind of understand that, because you're willing to make sacrifices of extreme sort for the health and happiness, continued happiness of your family.

[622] So where does that go wrong?

[623] Well, maybe it goes wrong when you put the cart before the horse.

[624] See, I thought about Hitler a lot The way Hitler ended his life, right?

[625] Berlin was in flames, Europe was in ruins, the world was torn apart, tens of millions of people had died, and he put a bullet through his head angry and despondent about the betrayal of his Germanic people Because that's how Hitler viewed the end of the war.

[626] He didn't think he'd failed, he thought the Germans didn't live up to his damn vision.

[627] You know, and when we look at someone like Hitler and his hopes for world domination, we naively assume that he was hoping for world domination.

[628] But, you know, he was a bad guy.

[629] And so it's not necessarily the case that he was aiming for what he said he was aiming for, or that he was aiming for what he was selling, as pathological as it might have been.

[630] Maybe he was aiming to put a bullet through his head in a bunker in Berlin with the city and flames in Europe and ruins and tens of millions of people dead around him.

[631] That seems to be far more accurate to me. And so we could say the same thing about the utopian radical leftists.

[632] It's like, well, hypothetically, they were going to bring in the beatific vision and the dawn of the new utopia.

[633] A lot of things had to be sacrificed along the way, and most of those happened to be other people.

[634] And so then we might just reverse that and say, wait a sec, maybe there's a dark part of each of us, including the utopians, who would actually like to sacrifice as many.

[635] people as possible in the shortest possible order with the most possible brutality and they're actually looking for a way to make that saleable to the general population or maybe even to themselves because who the hell wants to look in the mirror and decide that you're a tyrannical murderous monster you want to at least think you're motivated by the highest possible motives what's the highest possible motive well the beatific vision the heavenly utopia the brotherhood of man that justifies every murder and is perhaps created not to bring about that utopia but to justify the damn murders and that's another thing that we should be very careful about when we lay out our utopian visions because we're forgetting that we each have a very dark part and that that dark part has a say in how we construe our fantasies and what motivates us in the world that's a secondary danger of the universalist vision of the left.

[636] I was thinking about this tonight just before I came out here, and I was thinking about this issue of sacrifice.

[637] And one of the things that I'm trying to do in 12 Rules for Life is return to things.

[638] I'm trying to make a case that the Judeo -Christian platform on which our conscious political structure is predicated cannot be eradicated without terrible consequences.

[639] Now, I know why it's shaky in all of that, and that's partly what I was talking to Sam Harris about in great detail.

[640] But I don't believe that we can take what we have and tear the story out from underneath it without leaving a void that will be filled by all sorts of pathological things.

[641] Now, maybe we can't return to the past.

[642] We never can, really.

[643] And so it's a problem that's very difficult to solve.

[644] But here I'll tell you something about that story that's really interesting.

[645] You know, we already pointed out that you need a vision to kind of move you through life, right?

[646] You've got to have a sense that you're moving towards something better, and the better that better is, the more you might be motivated to pursue it.

[647] And so that would have a tendency to transform itself archetypally into something like the kingdom of God or heaven on earth or the eternal brotherhood of man, some ultimate ideal.

[648] And you can't just scrap the ultimate ideal, not so easily.

[649] But then you have the problem with the ultimate ideal.

[650] Demand sacrifice.

[651] And then you have the problem, I'm writing the preface to the Gula archipelago, the abridged version, the 50th anniversary version.

[652] And I have to deliver that in the next couple of days.

[653] And that's partly why I've been working through the problems that I'm sharing with you tonight.

[654] It's like, certainly the Russian revolutionaries were willing to sacrifice everyone, everyone to their heavenly vision.

[655] And that started right away as soon as the revolution occurred.

[656] It didn't take two years or five years or ten years.

[657] It wasn't dependent on the cult of personality.

[658] The rounding up and the sacrifices, they were happening right now.

[659] huge scale.

[660] And so it's a tremendous danger.

[661] You have to make sacrifices to obtain the vision.

[662] Who should you sacrifice?

[663] Well, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about the narrative substructure upon which our culture is predicated is that the answer to that question is provided in those stories.

[664] It's provided at least in part by the image of the crucifixion, right?

[665] Because that's a self -sacrifice.

[666] You have to sacrifice something to attain what's necessary.

[667] If it isn't going to be you who sacrifices yourself, then it's going to be you who sacrifices someone else.

[668] That's what it looks like.

[669] The sacrifice might be necessary.

[670] Well, and we know sacrifice is necessary, right?

[671] There's the archaic idea of sacrifice.

[672] You offer something up to God in the hopes that his benevolence will shine on you.

[673] And you can think about that as a kind of superstition and in a sense it is to sacrifice an animal to burn it so that its smoke arises to heaven so God can detect the quality of your sacrifice and determine whether you're living in accordance with with a heavenly what would you call with with with a heavenly ethic but it's acted out it's a very sophisticated idea that's acted out first we all know we have to make sacrifices when I ask my students what did your parents sacrifice so you could go to university.

[674] Most of them, children of first -generation immigrants, as they are, can list off a very long list of sacrifices that their parents made.

[675] And we know that a hallmark of maturity is to make sacrifice for something that's better in the future.

[676] What should you sacrifice?

[677] How about not other people?

[678] You have to sacrifice something, though.

[679] Well, if you're not going to sacrifice other people, well, then you offer yourself up as a voluntary sacrifice.

[680] Right?

[681] And that's part of that underlying story.

[682] And that's part of the antidote to the pathology of compassion, let's say, that's part of the ethos of the radical collectivist left.

[683] The antidote to that collective version of sacrifice is, as far as I'm concerned, the fundamental notion of individual sacrifice, and what that means is the adoption of individual responsibility.

[684] And what's so remarkable about that, I think, is that the story upon which our culture, our functional culture, is predicated, is the story that places the fundamental burden for putting the structure of reality right on you as a consequence of the necessity for you to make the proper sacrifices voluntarily.

[685] And I think that that story is true, and that we need to understand it.

[686] Because we acted out imperfectly, and we deviate from it at our peril, and we need to wake up, and we need to become conscious.

[687] of exactly what it means.

[688] Thank you very much.

[689] All right, my man. It's good to be back, isn't it?

[690] Yeah, it's good.

[691] I'm glad you're here, too.

[692] The lectures are definitely better with you introducing them.

[693] Oh, I'm the top lobster.

[694] Isn't that nice?

[695] All right, there's a ton of good stuff here, so let's just get right to it.

[696] Your thoughts on the legalization of marijuana?

[697] I think it's worth the experiment, I think, while everyone's already experimenting with it anyways.

[698] You know, I think there's a Dutch law, if I remember correctly, that a law has to be scrapped if enough people break it.

[699] And I like that law because it's reflective of the will of the people.

[700] You know, and let's face it, people have been smoking pot for a long time.

[701] Like, really, it's 60 years since it's because, a widespread recreational endeavor and contrary to the utterances of most mainstream politicians the vast majority of people who smoke pot also inhale so and it's it's it's also possible that you know it's possible that it could go off the rails but it's possible that people will smoke pot instead of drinking and that would be good because the worst drug is alcohol by a huge margin.

[702] I'm saying that as someone who actually has a certain fondness for alcohol.

[703] So, but alcohol makes people violent.

[704] It's the only drug we know of that actually does that.

[705] And it's implicated in the vast majority of violent assaults and family assaults and murders.

[706] And being the, you're much more likely to be the victim of a murder if you're drunk, you're much more likely to be a murderer, if you're drunk, et cetera, et cetera.

[707] And so lots of people smoke pot.

[708] It doesn't really seem to make people aggressive.

[709] It's not so good for a minority of people, especially if combined with stimulant use.

[710] There does seem to be some evidence that it tilts some people towards psychosis under some conditions.

[711] It's not without its dangers.

[712] But neither is driving, which is generally by far the most dangerous thing you do, except to drink with family members.

[713] So, and other countries have tried this.

[714] You know, Portugal decriminalized all drugs 15 years ago, all of them.

[715] And Portugal hasn't turned into a catastrophe.

[716] And in the U .S. where some of the states where marijuana has been legalized, there's been quite a marked decline in opiate use, and in general criminality, which is quite interesting.

[717] So who knows?

[718] Maybe we'll get it right.

[719] And so it seems to me that it's probably worth the experiment.

[720] I have a feeling I know who submitted this question.

[721] If you had Wonder Woman's Lassow of Truth and could use it on one person, who would that be?

[722] Vladimir Putin.

[723] You know, what I'd really like to know, what I'd really like to know about Putin, I think, above all else, it's kind of an obscure thing in some sense.

[724] There's been, and when Solzhenitsyn wrote the, Gulag Archipelago, what he was hoping for was that the Russians would return to their Orthodox Christian tradition and develop their political system organically as a consequence.

[725] And what's happened since the fall of the Soviet Union is that Orthodox Christianity has been undergoing a revival in Russia, for better or worse, but certainly a revival.

[726] So that part of Solzhenitsyn's wish has come true.

[727] Now Putin seems to support that revival and has made gestures in the direction of affiliation with Orthodox Christianity and I'd like to find out if he does believe that there is a power that he's subordinate to because that would be a real relief you know so well one of the things that I learned about from studying religious structures from a scientific perspective let's say psychological perspective was that even thousands of years ago, among the Mesopotamians, for example, there was an idea that the ruler, the emperor, who was pretty much an absolute despot in some sense, was nonetheless responsible either directly to a higher power or was a manifestation of that higher power on earth and had certain ethical obligations as a consequence.

[728] And so, see, one of the things that our religious imagination has done over the course of millennia is abstract out the idea of sovereignty as something in and of itself and then to make everyone subordinate to that abstract notion including absolute rulers and that's a really big deal because you don't want your ruler to be the highest thing there is and you certainly don't want him or her to think that way you want them to be secondary to some other conception of absolute ethical sovereignty and I'm I'd really like to find out if Putin's reproshment with Orthodox Christianity is a facade and part of a power game that he's playing.

[729] You know, he's using the church cynically as a means to bolster his popularity, or whether there is at least a tiny little corner of him that thinks that he might be playing a part in some broader ethical game.

[730] There's been a lot of talk about sex education curriculum.

[731] since Ford has become the premier, where do you stand on the curriculum?

[732] Do you know specifically?

[733] Yes, yes.

[734] I think the faster that Ford undoes the radical maneuvers of win, the better.

[735] So, now, that doesn't make me naively optimistic about Ford and the conservatives.

[736] And so let me tell you what I'm hoping for and what I think we should all hope for.

[737] I don't think the Conservatives can win because I think that there has to be a balance between left and right dialogically in the manner that I already described.

[738] And so I hope that that dialogue can reestablish itself properly.

[739] And what I'm hoping for from Ford and the Conservatives is ordinary incompetence.

[740] Right?

[741] That's what we've had in Canada, enter government level forever that's why the country works well it's something this is see one of the things that's so remarkable about the founders of the American system was that that's what they were aiming for right they weren't utopians for the reasons that we already outlined they thought God we're all stupid and incompetent all of us and we're kind of malevolent too and we're stuck with it man stupidity incompetence malevolence willful blindness Yeah, we got lots of that, too.

[742] Okay, so, and that isn't going to change, and sometimes it will even get worse.

[743] So how can we produce a system that morons who are malevolent can't screw up too badly?

[744] He's never done this whole bit when we're in the States, by the way.

[745] Just want to say that.

[746] And so, you know, that the English system, with its common law, and the Canadian system, embedded in the same philosophical background, is sort of predicated on the same principles, is that we want a government that muddles through reasonably well.

[747] And that would mean avoids the pitfalls of total ideological commitment.

[748] And so I'm hoping that Ford is just as bad as the average politician, and no worse.

[749] And that would be a great relief for the next four years.

[750] What are your thoughts on the New York Times, not including you on their bestsellers list?

[751] Well, mostly my thoughts are of, I think it's extraordinarily comical.

[752] And here's why.

[753] So I wrote this book called Maps of Meaning in 1999, and some of you might be familiar with it because I lectured about it a lot.

[754] And so those lectures are online.

[755] And if you like 12 Rules for Life, if you found it useful, let's say, not whether or not you liked it, but if you found it useful, and you're interested in the abstract philosophical concepts that are part and parcel of it, then you might be interested in maps of meaning because that book goes into all of that way more deeply.

[756] And so it's a very, very difficult book.

[757] But I recorded the audio version and released that on June 12th.

[758] And I think the audio version is a lot more accessible because I could read the sentences, many of which are long and complicated, I could provide the proper intonation and more of a hint towards the meaning, and so I'm hoping that it'll be more accessible.

[759] And at any case, it hit the New York Times bestseller list.

[760] So despite the fact that I'm not a New York Times bestseller because of 12 Rules for Life, because they gerrymandered the damn selection criteria post hoc for reasons of their own, I'm a New York Times bestseller because of the audiobook of Maps of Meaning so I think that's spectacularly comical and that's sort of what I think about it.

[761] Did you always talk with your hands so much?

[762] Always is a very long time.

[763] Yeah I think so.

[764] As far as I know, I haven't just learned it recently and it's helpful for some reason.

[765] I don't know why.

[766] Shape things out You know, drawing little triangles in particular.

[767] Your voice should possess your body, you know.

[768] It's part of being embodied.

[769] So it's part of having your words make themselves manifest in your body.

[770] And you do want that to happen.

[771] You should act out what you say.

[772] So it's part of that.

[773] Does the amount of time teenagers spend on various, forms of social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. At school negatively impact their ability to learn.

[774] No, they should probably be on social media instead of being at school.

[775] I'm not much of a fan of the current education system.

[776] So I think it's mostly something to escape from.

[777] Look, having said that, you know, you don't want to be using something when it's interfering with something else that you know you should do.

[778] And so if a kid's going through school, there's obviously a certain amount of participation in that process that's necessary, partly so that the kid has a sense of accomplishment and partly so that they prepare themselves to move forward in the world.

[779] And so if they're using social media impulsively in an undisciplined manner and interfering with their own progress forward, then it's a bad idea, just like it is whenever you do anything that's impulsive, that interferes with your movement forward, and that's indicative of a lack of discipline.

[780] So everything in balance and in the right place is the proper attitude.

[781] And if you're a high school student and you're addicted to Twitter, which is a very easy thing to become addicted to, despite its horror, then it would be better to get your priorities straight and discipline yourself.

[782] What do you mean when you say that atheists aren't really atheists?

[783] Well, I can give you an example.

[784] So this is something I've argued with Sam Harris about constantly because he thinks that he's generated this entire ethic sort of out of his rational mind.

[785] So Harris basically believes that we should act in a way that minimizes suffering.

[786] and he tells a little horror story about someone suffering terribly, a fictional person in his account, born in the wrong country, tortured throughout her life by tyrants and rapists and predators and doing nothing in life but suffering and pointing out that we should try to help people arrange their lives so that that isn't their existence.

[787] He thinks we should move away from suffering towards whatever its opposite is, which he conceptualizes somewhat thinly, in my opinion, as well -being.

[788] Well, for me, he's just laid out the landscape of heaven and hell.

[789] Hell is the place of maximal suffering, and heaven is whatever is the opposite of that.

[790] Now, he would object, yeah, but I'm not projecting it into the afterlife, but that's a different issue, because those concepts are much more complicated than concepts that merely encapsulate the afterlife.

[791] He believes that it's a fact that everyone can see that that movement is the right way to behave and that your primary moral obligation is to behave in that manner.

[792] But I would say, what he's saying is that you should embody the ethic of moving away from hell towards heaven, and that's your primary ethical obligation.

[793] And that's already embodied, for example, in the Christian ethos, which says that explicitly.

[794] And so that idea has been there for 2 ,000 years.

[795] It's not like Sam came up with it.

[796] He has said, well, here's how I came to that conclusion.

[797] But there's no reason to assume that he knows how he came to that conclusion, especially given that it's the same damn conclusion.

[798] And when pushed, he says, well, the ethics should be based on love.

[799] Fair enough.

[800] And that you should tell the truth.

[801] truth serving love well that's a Christian concept now it's not just a Christian concept but it's certainly a Christian concept might even be the highest Christian concept and so you know if it what do they say if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's probably a duck and so and you know I've come to this conclusion partly because of my reading of Carl Jung and Jung pointed out and I think he's right even from a scientific perspective that most of our ethic is unconscious and built into us, both biologically and then socioculturally.

[802] And Nietzsche himself said that every philosophy is an unconscious unfolding of the explicit axioms of the person.

[803] It's like you already have the axioms.

[804] What are you doing when you're thinking?

[805] You're thinking through an articulation of what you already are.

[806] Now, Sam would accept that because he's bound and determined to, indicate that you can come up with a viable ethical solution through rationality alone.

[807] But the other problem with that is, well, what exactly, precisely do you mean by rationality, which is kind of a 17th century concept?

[808] What do you mean?

[809] How does that instantiate itself neurobiologically?

[810] What's the underlying structure?

[811] What's the mechanism by which you use, you apply rationality to the world and derive an ethic?

[812] Well, all of these things are, I don't believe that the atheists have an answer to those questions and that's because they're stuck in time 300 years ago so do you think you guys moved each other in any direction throughout the talks?

[813] Oh definitely yeah yeah I mean I certainly I certainly you know I certainly have no doubt about his goodwill or at least I have no doubt that he has as much goodwill as I do.

[814] I have doubts about both of our goodwill because I have doubts about everyone's goodwill.

[815] You know, and you can say that you're full of goodwill forever, but, you know, you're not.

[816] So, yeah, I think the discussions were unbelievably productive, and I'm hoping they'll be released in August.

[817] That's the plan.

[818] And after the audio is edited, and they're all put together properly, that's the delay.

[819] We're also trying to figure out how best to release them, but that's a secondary issue.

[820] I think the discussions were unbelievably productive, but everybody will have a chance to figure that out for themselves if they want So and that'll be interesting too.

[821] It'll be really fascinating as far as I'm concerned to see what the public judgment is on each talk and then on the Because the talks did develop across all four events So but yeah, I think the in Sam himself, you know, I mean He's got his point, you know, I mean certainly the problem with religious thinking is is that it can degenerate into fundamentalism.

[822] That's a big problem.

[823] We also discussed that with Douglas Murray, who's particularly concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, and the threat it poses, hypothetically poses to the West and to itself, for that matter.

[824] And certainly it is the case that the problem with religious presupposition is that it can become fundamentalist and degenerate.

[825] That's a big problem.

[826] It might even be a fatal problem, you know.

[827] But the problem with the atheist perspective is it provides very...

[828] little antidote to nihilism.

[829] And Sam himself admits that.

[830] It's like, you know, atheism is fundamentally a doctrine of negation.

[831] There is no God.

[832] Okay.

[833] What else isn't there then?

[834] Well, is there any meaning?

[835] Well, meaning is what you create.

[836] That would be Nietzsche's answer.

[837] No, it's not.

[838] That's wrong.

[839] You can't create your own meaning.

[840] You have an intrinsic nature.

[841] You can't, you won't do what you say, you won't do what you order yourself to do.

[842] And you won't be interested in what you command yourself to be interested in.

[843] You have a nature that you have to take into consideration.

[844] And the problem with the atheist doctrine doesn't leave people with anything.

[845] You know, we should strive to maximize well -being.

[846] It's like, well, go write a symphony about that.

[847] You know, erect a cathedral to that.

[848] It's weak from a motivational perspective.

[849] It doesn't have any grandeur.

[850] It doesn't have any beauty.

[851] It doesn't have any motive force.

[852] And maybe it's true.

[853] Maybe it is true.

[854] You know, it's not like being an atheist materialist means you're stupid.

[855] The atheist materialists have got a long ways, and all of our remarkable technology is at least in part a consequence of that atheist materialistic critique of the superstitious element of religious dogma.

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

[857] But Sam's very concerned about the problem of fundamentalism.

[858] He's also concerned about the problem of fundamentalism.

[859] Nileism, but not nearly as concerned.

[860] And I think that's where we really differ.

[861] You know, we're both concerned about the swings in meaning to absolute meaning with no possibility of deviation, fundamentalism, totalitarianism, and then no meaning and the collapse into nihilism.

[862] That end of the spectrum doesn't disturb him as much.

[863] It really disturbs me. And so, and so that's partly, I think, what's oriented us towards different solutions.

[864] So, but, you know, we 10 hours of discussion and we probably took it as far as we could and so well we'll see what the consequences if any of that are well speaking of meaning when did you decide to become a male fashion icon well it's a it's a funny thing you know I one of the rules that that I did not write about which I think might be in my next book is dress like the person you want to become So, which is play the part before you're the part.

[865] It's something like that.

[866] It's act out your ideal.

[867] That's another way of thinking about it.

[868] And so I've thought about that.

[869] I've never been much into fashion.

[870] Although I bought some decent suits a few years ago when I was on, was working for TV, Ontario.

[871] And I bought some decent suits for that.

[872] And I've always lectured in a suit.

[873] And my father, who was the school teacher, always lectured in a suit.

[874] And so I kept that going because, well, Partly when I was a young professor and looked very young, it was part of a way that I could put a boundary of authority, let's say, between me and my students.

[875] But I also thought that it was appropriate because there is a hierarchy, at least of competence, at least in principle in universities, although we're doing everything we can to erase that as rapidly as possible, by making everyone equally incompetent, which is not a very bad solution.

[876] And then when I had the opportunity to go in these lectures and speak to all these people, I thought, well, I thought I'm going all in.

[877] You know, well, seriously, like, why wouldn't you do that?

[878] I mean, this is a ridiculous opportunity.

[879] It's an absolutely insane opportunity.

[880] It's like all these people, all you people, are coming to these events.

[881] It's like, I'm going to do everything I possibly can to make these events go as well as they possibly could.

[882] And so everything I could think of that I could put in place, I tried to put in place.

[883] place and that also meant going to a decent tailor and getting a good suit and thinking well that's just you know maybe that's it's not of crucial importance you know I could probably come out here in jeans and all of that and but you know why not go the extra 3 % or the extra 4 % or whatever because I want to do everything I possibly can to make this work right so all right I get it I got to invest in a suit.

[884] All right.

[885] And it's been fun, actually.

[886] So when lots of people now come to these shows in suits and some people in three -piece suits.

[887] So that's kind of cool to see people dress like grown -ups.

[888] And you told me right before you said you designed these shoes, didn't you?

[889] Well, sort of.

[890] I mean, I bought these from an online shoe company called Undandy, if you care.

[891] And they had a lot of mix -and -match styles, and so they're handmade in Portugal, apparently.

[892] And so they looked kind of 1920s, I guess, sort of like a hybrid between 1920s spat and a cowboy boot.

[893] And so I thought, what the hell?

[894] And I'm actually kind of happy with them, and my wife told me they glitter quite nicely on stage.

[895] Do you ever fear that you're being used by the conservative political agenda as a political puppet?

[896] No. Okay, moving on.

[897] Well, by who?

[898] I mean, you know, there's people on, who are these people?

[899] There are people online who clip my videos and use them to promote their particular viewpoints, but there's a lot of people who are doing that, like for all sorts of purposes, I can't even begin to keep up with it.

[900] I think I mentioned already that it's something on the neighborhood of 20 ,000 new clip videos come out a month.

[901] And so some of those, no doubt, are being used for purposes of which I wouldn't approve, but that's part of the public debate.

[902] And so I'm not, apart from that, I'm not concerned about it.

[903] The people that I'm in touch with most, you being one of them, for example I mean there's no conspiracy there except maybe what's an emergent conspiracy because we've been talking but I'm concerned mostly what I'm concerned about is that I'll do something stupid I'm really concerned about that I'm less concerned that other people will do stupid things because they will and I can't do anything about it and I'm not trying to stop it or facilitate it And I think it's gone fine so far that, from what I've been able to tell, you know, what I see, I really like coming to do these lectures.

[904] And the reason for that is because my experience and your experience, too, you know, has been that these are unbelievably positive events.

[905] You know, I know, because I've talked to at least seven or eight thousand people now at these events, you know, and the story is fairly straight, is fairly consistent.

[906] most of the people who are coming to these lectures or buying them my book or listening to the lectures or watching Rubin or Rogan for that matter are people who are trying to learn things they don't know and make their lives better but not better in a sort of impulsive hedonistic way even though sometimes that's okay but by expanding the depth of their philosophical acumen and trying to live more responsible and truthful lives.

[907] And that's just absolutely great.

[908] And if there's some fuzziness at the edges and some trouble, well, there's going to be.

[909] And that's just how it is.

[910] But what I observe is that, and the way that I experienced this, is that it's overwhelmingly positive.

[911] And so that's good enough, as far as I'm concerned.

[912] I'll just add this one in.

[913] And what do you, because you just mentioned something about conspiracies, when we took that picture a couple of weeks ago at dinner with me, you, Rogan, and Sam, and Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro, you know, thousands of people retweeted it, loved it and all that.

[914] But then there was this secondary group of people that had all of these conspiracies about us sitting there having dinner.

[915] All we did was have dinner as far as we can tell these people.

[916] But I mean, really, we had dinner, right?

[917] the thing about that dinner, I really enjoyed that dinner.

[918] It was quite fun to see everybody there.

[919] It's like generating a conspiracy out of cats.

[920] You know, it's like, well, everybody, it's not like the people in that little group were the same.

[921] I mean, Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan, it's like they're not even members of the same species.

[922] So it's not that easy to organize a conspiracy when the people that you're dealing with, are marked out mostly by their proclivity for individual endeavors, I would say.

[923] It's a weird group to be in, right?

[924] Because what we've been trying to figure out, Dave and I in particular, because we spend so much time together, why this intellectual dark web nomenclature emerged and why it sort of stuck.

[925] It's like, well, a name doesn't stick unless it names something that at least has more than a nominal existence.

[926] And we thought, well, we're all early adopters of this long -form technology.

[927] And that's probably the biggest issue, really, right there.

[928] And that's so fundamentally, that's a technological issue.

[929] And then the next issue is we like to have long -form discussions, apparently.

[930] I think because everybody in that group would actually like to learn something.

[931] And so is capable of and willing to have an actual conversation.

[932] You really see that with Rogan, you know, because, and that's one of the things that makes him so attractive is that Joe doesn't care that there's a bunch of things he doesn't know.

[933] Well, partly because there's a bunch of things he does know.

[934] He's competent in many ways.

[935] So he doesn't care.

[936] He'll talk to anyone and try to figure out what the hell is going on.

[937] And he's skeptical about it, but only because he wants to, he's not skeptical for the, to tear something down.

[938] He's skeptical so that he can separate the wheat from the chaff.

[939] So anyways, sitting there with everybody, you know, it was interesting to watch, and that's mostly what I did, and to watch all these people who have their individual enterprises, let's say, micro empires and to discuss what it is that we had in common and where we might be going.

[940] But there wasn't anything apart from that that was conspiratorial about it.

[941] Even though it's fun to pretend that there is.

[942] Yeah.

[943] And I thought, I thought, this is kind of like being part of the rat pack back in the 1950s.

[944] So kind of a more diverse range of rats, but the same thing.

[945] We ain't that cool, Peterson No, I know.

[946] That's why I said sort of like...

[947] Although I did eat a giant piece of bacon right in front of Shapiro, which I thought was pretty good.

[948] I was like, if he eats it, then we've really made some moves here.

[949] All right.

[950] Oh, you know what?

[951] We only have time for one more, unfortunately.

[952] I want to make this a good one.

[953] Do you believe in a sixth sense?

[954] Do I believe in a sixth sense?

[955] Well, no. No. We should have a different question.

[956] Yeah, that was not me using my sixth sense, okay?

[957] I'm using a Peterson pause right now.

[958] You like that?

[959] All right, here's one that people can take away when they leave here.

[960] How do you stop yourself from comparing yourself to other people?

[961] Yeah, so that's rule four, right?

[962] Compare yourself to who you were yesterday.

[963] and not to who someone else is today.

[964] Well, I don't think you really can stop yourself.

[965] And under some circumstances, you shouldn't.

[966] You know, like when you're 16 or 17, when you're a young person, some comparison of yourself to others, especially others that are your age, is good because you're not really anything yet, and you need to become who you are.

[967] And so a little admiration and a little bit of, mimicry and a little and a little competition that's all a good thing i think what happens though as you get older i really noticed this in my clinical practice when i was helping people try to sort out their lives especially around 30 is that by the time you're 30 if you've established yourself to any degree in the world and even if you haven't your life has become so idiosyncratic that comparing yourself to other people isn't all that helpful you know i mean you can do it to sort of keep yourself oriented.

[968] You don't want to be too strange because you wander off the beaten path and you get lost and that's not a good thing.

[969] So you want to compare yourself to other people insofar as that keeps you on the beaten path, let's say.

[970] But most of the other comparisons just start to become, they're naively counterproductive.

[971] Like, you're the only person with your particular physical attributes and your particular intelligence in combination with your temperament.

[972] Like, you really are a unique creature in many ways.

[973] And you're the only one who had your parents, and you're the only one who has your siblings and your family, and your particular moral virtues and failings.

[974] You're really an idiosyncratic creature, and you're very, very complex.

[975] And so if you take that idiosyncrasy and that complexity, and you compare it casually to someone else, you're missing all sorts of things that are relevant.

[976] You know, like I've had clients, for example, who were fantastically successful at their chosen endeavor and who lived a fairly comfortable life as a consequence.

[977] And, you know, if you looked at them from the outside, you might think, well, there's someone who's got everything, and you might get bitter about that and envious and start to put yourself down and all that.

[978] But when you scratch below the surface and not very, very far in people's lives, and it doesn't matter who they are, you find out that they're carrying their own catastrophe and tragedy and history of betrayal.

[979] And, you know, so one of the clients I had who I admired very well, had a very harsh and tyrannical father, and another had a son who was seriously mentally ill, and another one who had, well, who was married to someone who had very, very serious health problems, and everyone is contending with their own feelings of inadequacy and fears.

[980] People who run successful businesses wake up in the middle of the night if they're not psychopathic in a cold sweat because so many people depend on them.

[981] And now and then the economy takes a downturn and they're not sure that they're going to be able to make payroll.

[982] And life is bloody hard.

[983] And to be envious of someone, generally speaking, is also to be very naive because you don't see the totality of their life.

[984] And then it's also unfair in a more profound sense.

[985] You can run a fair race with yourself because you're the only person who has your particular combination of talents and weaknesses.

[986] And it's perfectly reasonable for you to try to be better than you were yesterday.

[987] It's a fair game.

[988] But to match yourself up against someone else is, well, first of all, that's a gateway to envy.

[989] And that isn't a gateway that I would recommend opening because there are very, very, very, very dark things inside that door.

[990] But it's also just not that productive because it's an inaccurate comparison.

[991] And so you have to aim up, and you might think, well, you could compare yourself with others who are apparently up, and you can do that to some degree.

[992] But basically what you want to do is escape from the self -imposed strictures of your own past and continually transcend yourself.

[993] And that's just better.

[994] It's just a better game.

[995] And it's a sufficient game, I think, because you are bearing up underneath your own catastrophes and your own handicaps and able to capitalize on your own virtues.

[996] And it isn't what you're like compared to someone else.

[997] It's what you're like compared to who you were yesterday.

[998] And the other thing about that, and this is a good place to stop, is you can get a long ways doing that, man. incremental improvements, you make yourself a little bit better every day, like a humble little bit better, the little bit that you can manage.

[999] God, you'll be in such better shape in four or five years that you won't be able to believe it.

[1000] And you do that for 15 years, you'll be a completely different person.

[1001] And so, and hypothetically, God willing, with a certain amount of luck, a much better person for you and for your family and for your community.

[1002] And so you might as well just do that.

[1003] It's just better in every possible way.

[1004] If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, Twelve Rules for Life, and Antidote to Chaos.

[1005] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1006] See Jordan B. Peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1007] Next week's podcast is going to be a discussion between Dad and Ben Shapiro, so that That's exciting.

[1008] If you somehow don't know who Ben Shapiro is, he's one of the most recognized individuals on the American political slash journalism scene.

[1009] He's a lawyer, writer, journalist, political commentator, and author of 10 books.

[1010] He's editor -in -chief for The Daily Wire and the host of the Ben Shapiro show.

[1011] Talk to you next week.

[1012] Hope you have a wonderful week.

[1013] 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.

[1014] 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.

[1015] 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.

[1016] That's self -authoring .com.

[1017] From the Westwood One podcast network.