The Necessity of Aim

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 39 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson, dad's daughter and collaborator, mother of a toddler who is continually infecting her with a cold.

[2] This podcast is a 12 Rules for Life podcast recorded in Riverside on January 24th, 2019, called The Necessity of Aim.

[3] Updates on the Peterson fam?

[4] Not a lot.

[5] I'm swamped.

[6] But Dad is still taking a break, a much -needed break.

[7] If you guys haven't checked out Dad's very first e -course, discovering personality with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, I helped design the course.

[8] I love the topic of personality and think everyone would be helped if they learned about the Big Five personality traits.

[9] It comes with a code to Understand Myself .com for Dad's scientifically backed personality quiz.

[10] We're currently offering a presale for a 15 % discount on the course at $120.

[11] If you're interested, this is a great opportunity to get it at a lower price.

[12] or buy it for someone for Christmas.

[13] Check it out at Jordan B. Peterson .com slash personality.

[14] What else?

[15] I survived my eight -day fast.

[16] It was supposed to be longer, but I couldn't do it.

[17] I do not recommend fasting that long unless you have a lot of weight to lose.

[18] And even then, I find the sweet spot is 36 hours.

[19] I'm doing one of those fasts weekly from Sunday night to Tuesday morning if you want to join.

[20] I comment on it, mainly on Instagram, Michaela Peterson.

[21] There are a lot of health benefits to letting your body go hungry.

[22] It's a serious way to clean up damaged tissue with autophagy, which I probably have enough of.

[23] So, weekly 36 -hour fast for me, intermittent fasting, which is basically skipping breakfast, but no more super long ones.

[24] Enjoy the podcast.

[25] The Necessity of Aim, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[26] Thank you very much.

[27] Now, I just have to take a few seconds and remind myself what a privilege it is to come here and talk to all.

[28] of you.

[29] It's much appreciated that you take time out and come and listen to this.

[30] So I was thinking backstage about what I'm doing tonight and I want to talk about values.

[31] And really I'm going to produce a set of variations, I would say, on Rule 1, which is stand up straight with your shoulders back and Rule 10, which is to do.

[32] to be precise in your speech.

[33] I want to dig underneath those and elaborate on them.

[34] And I want to do that.

[35] I was thinking about a good metaphor for how I want to do that, because I've been thinking about it all day.

[36] I've got this complicated problem that I'm trying to solve.

[37] And it's like there's a target that I'm aiming at, and I want to send like seven armies marching toward the target all at the same time.

[38] and so I'm going to line them up and hopefully I'll be able to pull that all together.

[39] That's the plan and something will emerge out of it that will take that will take my thinking farther than it's gone along these lines.

[40] It's a very important issue, the issue of value.

[41] So I'll tell you first a little story I think.

[42] No, I'll do something else.

[43] So in Rule 10 I talk about the necessity for precision in speech and partly the reason for that is to discuss the importance of precision of aim or even more fundamentally to discuss the necessity of aim you have to aim at something and the question might be well why do you have to aim at something and there's a variety of ways to answer that but I like to answer it biologically to begin with because it's solid it's a good solid of the answer.

[44] And it's, and it's, it's, what would you say?

[45] It's useful knowledge.

[46] It helps you understand what you're like and how you have to function in the world.

[47] And you can, and you can learn a lot very quickly about yourself and about human psychology by knowing this.

[48] I derived most of this knowledge from a book by a man named Jeffrey Gray, and the book is called Neuropsychology of anxiety.

[49] And it's a really, really difficult book.

[50] I read it when I was in graduate school and took me like eight months to read it.

[51] And he cited like 2 ,000 papers, something like that.

[52] And he read all of them and he understood all of them.

[53] And a lot of it was hard -going neuroscience, psychobiology, neuropsychopharmacology, animal behavioral psychology.

[54] The animal behaviors were very good psychologists.

[55] And it was all...

[56] also heavily influenced by early thinking about computation that was derived by a man named Norbert Wiener who wrote a book called a book on cybernetics.

[57] He was the founder of cybernetics.

[58] And so it tangled all of that together.

[59] It's a brilliant book.

[60] I think the best book on neuroscience written in the 20th century.

[61] There's one other contender, but I think it's the best.

[62] And so reading that book, helped me understand the relationship between perception and emotion and at a really fundamental level and so here's how it works essentially so when you when you aren't yourself in any sort of landscape wherever you happen to be you're in order to in order to act in any coherent manner you have to orient yourself towards a destination.

[63] So that's the first thing to know.

[64] That's the first thing to know is that in order to respond coherently to the world, you have to orient yourself to a destination.

[65] And so there's some, there's, there's, there's, that, that has implications.

[66] One, one implication is that the question of what your destination needs to be arises.

[67] If you have to orient yourself towards a destination, what should your destination be and then the second consequence is well what or the second question that arises might be well what happens if you don't orient yourself towards anything and and the third question might be well what happens if you do so we can look at it simply so this is how your this is how you your your brain works biologically and you can experience that.

[68] I'd say that I want to do something simple.

[69] I orient myself towards a direction.

[70] I just want to walk across the stage.

[71] And so I've made a decision of value.

[72] That's another emergent consequence of this.

[73] I've made a decision of value.

[74] And the decision is that going across the stage is better than staying where I am.

[75] So that's the answer to the old question about the chicken.

[76] You know, why did the chicken cross the road?

[77] And the reason was, well, the chicken thought the other side of the road was better, because why else would you cross the road?

[78] Right?

[79] So now you know.

[80] That's why the chicken crossed the road.

[81] And so one of the things this implies is that if you establish a destination, you've already established something like a hierarchy of value.

[82] It's a very simple hierarchy, but you're acting out the presupposition that where you're headed is better than where you are, because otherwise why would you put in the time and effort necessary to transform your current situation into that hypothetical future situation.

[83] You've instantly entered a world of value where one thing is more important than another.

[84] And you can't act without that.

[85] And you can't orient yourself in the world without that.

[86] So there's no orienting yourself in the world without establishing a hierarchy of value.

[87] That's a really useful thing to know.

[88] So now you decide that you're going to walk across the stage.

[89] And then your emotions kick in.

[90] and they kick in right away they kick in right with a very active perception so for example if I stand here a little bit backstage and I look across there's a clear vista there's nothing in the way and that actually produces a little bit of positive emotion on my part because I am I see a destination that I'd like to pursue and there's nothing in my way and the fact that there's nothing but clear sailing in front of me produces a little bit of positive emotion.

[91] If I stand here by contrast, and then I look at the same, if I look at this, look, if I aren't myself in the same direction, then that chairs or that stool's in the way.

[92] And like, that's not a catastrophe, you know?

[93] And that's because I know how to walk around a stool.

[94] But it's not, but that's the only reason, because otherwise, you know, it would be in the way.

[95] And, and, and, and, and, whenever you observe a pathway and it's cluttered with it's cluttered in a manner that would interfere with your movement forward then that produces negative emotion and so that's and that's part of the reason why it's so useful it's useful to know this if you're thinking about how to set up your house it's part of the reason that I've suggested to people that they clean up their rooms because your your room is a place of pathways and if it's cluttered then and you experience chaos and negative emotion in relationship to your goals.

[96] It's not a clearly laid -out vista.

[97] And if it's clearly laid out, then you look at it, and you experience positive emotion, and it's cluttered, and the traveling is difficult, then you experience negative emotion, and it's logical that that would be the case, because if your pathway forward is cluttered, then it's more difficult to get where you want to go, and if it's more difficult, that takes more time and energy, and that should be signaled by something biological, because it's costly.

[98] And so that's exactly what happens.

[99] And that's actually how we look at the world.

[100] That's how the world manifests itself to us not only emotionally, but also even perceptually, because we don't exactly appear to perceive objects.

[101] You know, the way we think about how we think is we think we look at the world and we see objects and then we evaluate the, we think about the objects and we evaluate them and then we make decisions about them.

[102] But that isn't actually how you perceive the world at all.

[103] That's just wrong.

[104] The way you perceive your world is this is a place of obstacles and obstacles, things that get in your way and things that move you forward.

[105] And you want things that move you forward and they produce positive emotion and you don't want things that get in the way and they produce negative emotion.

[106] And you don't look at the objects and then decide if they're obstacles or facilitators, let's say, is that you see obstacles and facilitators.

[107] That's how your brain is set up.

[108] And so that emotional perception is part of direct perception.

[109] It's not a secondary consequence of thinking.

[110] So when you orient yourself towards some aim, and then you start to implement the actions necessary to undertake that aim to make it manifest itself in the world, and then you observe the consequences of that, and if the consequences are that as you implement your plan, you move towards the goal, then that produces positive emotion.

[111] And that positive emotion is of a very particular type.

[112] We understand this very well, the neurology of this is laid out very well.

[113] The system that produces positive emotion when you're moving towards a valued goal runs on a neurochemical known as dopamine, and it's technically known as the incentive reward system.

[114] It's different.

[115] Often people think of a reward as, you're hungry, and you have Thanksgiving dinner, and then you're sort of complacent and satiated after that, and that's the reward.

[116] That's consumatory reward.

[117] You actually aren't that motivated by consumatory reward.

[118] It actually shuts you down, right?

[119] If you're hungry and you eat, then you're no longer hungry.

[120] Incentive reward is a different thing.

[121] incentive reward is what pulls you along towards a goal and almost all the positive emotion that people really value in their lives is incentive reward that the feeling that you're engaged in something important and it's so important it's so vital that incentive reward system that it can be hijacked by different kinds of chemicals and so almost all the drugs that people abuse like cocaine and methamphetamine and opiates all the really all the drugs that really hook people hook people because they activate the incentive reward system.

[122] And so they produce the facsimile of purposeful engagement.

[123] And they can do that in a very, very potent way, in an exaggerated way.

[124] But the reason that people experience them as positive is because the drugs hijack the system that actually does indicate what constitutes positive.

[125] And so you need an aim in order to experience what's positive.

[126] That's really an incredible thing to know, you know, is that there's a direct relationship between having an aim and experiencing the sort of positive emotion that engages you meaningfully in life.

[127] And there's more to it than that, too, because the neurochemical system that's activated as a consequence of the observation that you're moving towards a valued goal also is analgesic.

[128] And so cocaine is an incentive reward drug, and it's also analgesic.

[129] It's something useful to know.

[130] If you ever know somebody who's suffering from intractable cancer pain, for example, you can use a drug like an opiate, which is a direct analgesic, and you can use a drug, a psychomotor stimulant, a cocaine analog, to increase the potency of the opiate.

[131] So if you ever know someone who can't have their pain managed, it's a very useful thing to know if someone's approaching the end of their life If you give them a combination of Ritalin and opiates, that's much more effective than just opiates, and it also helps people be alert So that's a, you know, a useful side effect of knowing something about Well, it's a useful side effect of knowing something about the underlying neurochemistry So in any case, in order to activate the systems that produces the sense of positive meaningful engagement in life, you have to be pursuing an aim.

[132] You have to have an aim and you have to be pursuing it.

[133] And then I would also say, at least to some degree, you have to be pursuing it successfully because otherwise it just gets too complicated and too chaotic.

[134] So no aim, no purpose, no meaning, no positive emotion.

[135] And so that's a good thing.

[136] Now part of the reason for that, there's a bunch of reasons for it, but one reason is that we're actually active creatures, right?

[137] We have to make our way through the world.

[138] We don't just stand there.

[139] We're not rooted in one spot like plants.

[140] We have to negotiate our way through the world.

[141] We have to navigate.

[142] We're navigating creatures, you know.

[143] And we're also hunting creatures.

[144] We specify targets and lock on them, and we throw things at the targets, and we chase the targets.

[145] And we're very, very much goal -oriented.

[146] And you can't even look at the world without a goal because you can't focus your eyes unless you pick something out as the thing.

[147] that you're aiming your perception at.

[148] You literally can't see the world without having an aim in mind.

[149] And so you're nested inside a system of aims.

[150] And the question is, well, what do you aim at?

[151] Well, maybe you want to walk across the stage.

[152] I was talking to a friend of mine the other night and he's trying to restructure a big company that isn't doing very well.

[153] And he's quite a deep thinker and he was, he was, and he's done this before.

[154] He's restructured other companies and that's worked.

[155] He's a very honest person.

[156] And the way he restructures companies is he tries to figure out what it is that they should be doing and then tries to figure out why they're not doing it, and then tries to set that right.

[157] And he sort of starts at the bottom to find out why things aren't working, and he gets obstacles out of the way of the people who want to be productive, and he establishes a set of goals, and he puts in a system of rewards and punishments that are commensurate with those goals, and he gets everybody pointed in the same direction.

[158] And so he said to me, well, this particular company said, well, we make the computers that are going to change the world.

[159] We're going to change the lives of billions of people.

[160] And that's what we're doing.

[161] That's what this company does.

[162] And so that means that if that's communicated properly within the company, then the secretary who's doing nothing in principle but shuffling paper isn't exactly just doing nothing in principle but shuffling paper.

[163] She's part of a process that's got as a. name the creation of computational technology that can transform the world and it's always an open question what you're doing so we're talking about that remember watching this video a while back can't remember the guy name of the guy who made it but he's some guy who goes out in the bush and he like he makes like houses out of nothing he just goes out there with nothing shorts on and then he this is literally true and then he like he tears down a tree and he ties it to a sharp rock and now he has an axe, and then he goes and cuts down a bunch of other little trees, and then he makes a little wall out of the trees, and he takes mud, and he makes a foundation, and then he bakes it, and then he has this nice hut, and he makes little bricks for the top of it, and it's just absolutely amazing watching him to create out of nothing.

[164] It's really something to watch someone create out of nothing.

[165] There's something absolutely profound about it, and so I was thinking about that.

[166] I watched him make bricks, and so he'd go dig in the mud, in the clay and come up with like a massive clay and then he made this little frame out of sticks that was rectangular and he packed the clay in the frame and then pull the frame off and then he'd have a nice square brick and then he'd do that over and over and then he was baking the bricks and and so it's interesting to watch him do that and so I was thinking about brick layers and I was thinking of talking to that talking to my friend about that and he was thinking about bricklayers in medieval Europe.

[167] You say, well, you know, you might get kind of nihilistic about making bricks because it's kind of a local activity and you might get kind of nihilistic about laying bricks and you might wonder what it is that you're up to and why that's worthwhile and what place that has in the world.

[168] But imagine that you're making bricks and the bricks make a wall and the wall is part of a great building and the building is a cathedral and the purpose of the cathedral is the glorification of God, let's say.

[169] So you have a hierarchy of aims there, right?

[170] It's the local is attached to the transcendent, and that means that the local activity partakes in the transcendent, and that there's a justification for the action in some sense at every relevant level of the, what would you say, of every, at every relevant layer of the world.

[171] And so if someone's a brick layer in a, and they're working on a medieval cathedral, the question, the real question might be, well, what exactly are they doing?

[172] Are they laying bricks?

[173] Are they building a cathedral?

[174] And if they're building a cathedral, well, what then are they doing?

[175] What are they participating in by building that cathedral?

[176] And I think it's a good question.

[177] You know, I've been in Europe a lot, and lots of people go to Europe.

[178] It's unbelievably packed with tourists.

[179] And the reason they go there is because there's an unbelievable amount of beauty in Europe, you know?

[180] There's these amazing central cities, and they usually surround a cathedral, and there was something deeply aesthetic going on in Europe for hundreds of years that produced this absolute outpouring of staggering beauty, and all the people who worked hard for hundreds of years building those buildings, because some of the cathedrals took hundreds of years to build, were all participating in whatever that was, right?

[181] And so they had their local activity, their trivial activity, their day -to -day activity, but it was associated with something transcendent.

[182] And it gave everything, it imbued everything with deep meaning.

[183] And the reason it did that, because there was a deep aim, and having a deep aim imbues things with a deep meaning.

[184] That's how it works.

[185] It works that way technically.

[186] Then you don't need to substitute.

[187] You know, I was writing about this a little bit today, and something I cut out, I think, of what I was writing, But it's relevant.

[188] You know, I studied addictive drugs for a long time when I was a graduate student and learned some of the things that I was telling you tonight.

[189] And, you know, animal experimentalists who studied addictive drugs, the psychomotor stimulants that I was talking about that affect the system that produces engagement with the world, positive emotion, engagement with the world.

[190] you can study the effects of those drugs on animals, on rats, say.

[191] Rats are typical laboratory animal.

[192] It actually turns out that those drugs are so addictive.

[193] And the addictive process that's associated with those positive emotion circuits is so deep that you can get animals as primordial as crustaceans addicted to the same drugs that human beings get addicted to.

[194] That's interesting.

[195] because it tells you how deep those systems of meaning are, right?

[196] They're hundreds of millions of years old.

[197] They're unbelievably profound in ancient systems that manifest themselves within you as emotions and grip you.

[198] So it's not a trivial thing to talk about the relationship between aim and emotion.

[199] In any case, if you want to get a rat addicted to cocaine, you have to, well, that's your goal, as you're a behavioral scientist.

[200] I know.

[201] I know it's pretty weird.

[202] It's like, what do you do?

[203] I get rats addicted to drugs.

[204] It's like, well, how do you get a rat addicted to drugs?

[205] Well, you have to be rather mean to the rat, as it turns out.

[206] So, imagine there's two ways that you can have rats in your lab.

[207] You can have rats one by one inside a cage.

[208] Or you can have rats in a sort of naturalistic rat environment.

[209] Rats are actually, pretty social.

[210] They have rat families and they have little rat communities, they have rat hierarchies and they communicate with one another and they're quite social, they play.

[211] They actually laugh, Yaak Panksep, who's a great, who recently died, unfortunately, a great emotional neuroscientist, he discovered that rats laugh.

[212] If you tickle them with an eraser at the end of a pencil, you can get them to laugh but you can't tell because they laugh out ultrasonically like bats and so you have to slow down the recording and order to hear them.

[213] And so, now you know that too.

[214] You know, and it's funny because you think, really, we're paying scientists to tickle rats with racers?

[215] It's like, yeah, but I'll tell you some of the, something that came out of that.

[216] It's not trivial.

[217] You know, if you take a rat, this is a bit of a sideways venture, but whatever, if you take a rat pup away, rat pup away from its mother, it'll just die.

[218] Even if you feed it and you give it water, it'll just die.

[219] It's same with human infants, by the way.

[220] And like nourishment and shelters not enough.

[221] You need tactile stimulation.

[222] It's a primary need.

[223] It's without it, small mammals die.

[224] And with baby rats, if you massage them with the end of a pencil eraser, which is kind of soft but firm, then they'll live.

[225] But you have to do that massaging.

[226] And they enjoy that and we'll giggle away while you're doing that, but you have to tape them ultrasonically.

[227] So it turns out to be of crucial importance.

[228] One of the derivations of that was a woman named Tiffany Fields, took Yak Panksep's work on massaging baby rats and transformed it into massaging premature infants in incubators in hospitals.

[229] You know, because what happens if you have a premature infant is he put it in an incubator, it usually loses weight for a while, which is not good because a baby, especially one that shouldn't be born yet, should be gaining weight like man. And so any weight loss is not good.

[230] If you take a premature infant and you massage it three times a day for 10 minutes, then it gains weight as fast as it does in utero, and you can detect the positive effects of that six months later, which is a very long time, right, in human developmental terms.

[231] So that's just a good example of how basic biological science can echo upward and have very practical consequences.

[232] In any case, back to the...

[233] back to the aim idea.

[234] And so my friend who's trying to restructure this company is trying to get the story straight.

[235] It's like, well, what are we doing?

[236] We're providing the computers that will change the world.

[237] Well, how are we going to do that?

[238] Well, we're going to do it in a way that'll make the world a better place.

[239] And he's actually serious about that, partly because he's dead, paranoid about how computers might be used to make the world a really not better place.

[240] And he's very, very cognizant of that.

[241] And so it's an important issue.

[242] And, you know, if you get that story right, then you can talk to everybody in the company.

[243] Say, look, you've got important things to do here.

[244] You know, you've got your little part in it.

[245] And maybe, you know, it just seems like a tiny fraction of the whole, but it's integrally associated with the whole.

[246] And how you do your job, how you do your job in your local environment there, is going to have an effect on the total function of the system in a non -trivial way and in a way that's more important than you think.

[247] I think that's exactly right.

[248] That's exactly, that's a very important thing to know.

[249] Okay, so that's a bunch of armies marching towards one destination.

[250] Here's another one.

[251] I built this program a while back called the Future Authoring Program, and I built that partly because I had been working with my students and in this class called Maps of Meaning, and some of you might have watched some of the Maps of Meaning lectures, and it's the first book I wrote.

[252] And it's out in audio, by the way, which makes it more accessible.

[253] It's a very hard book.

[254] But if you're interested in 12 Rules for Life, and you'd like to know more, then you could read Maps of Meaning, because it goes way underneath and much deeper, and that's more difficult, but potentially more worthwhile.

[255] Anyways, Maps of Meaning is a book about the importance of aim and the importance of direction and the importance of value, among other things, and the importance of stories, because stories lay out a power.

[256] and a name.

[257] They're actually a form of communication that we use to describe the world in terms of value.

[258] And I had my students do some practical exercises while they were studying maps of meaning and learning about stories and how they orient us in the world.

[259] And I had them write an autobiography.

[260] So there's kind of a rule, this is a good rule to know too.

[261] If you have a memory that's more than about 18 months old, and when the memory comes to mind, it still produces negative emotion.

[262] It means that you haven't fully delved into or understood all the significance of the events that are encapsulated in that emotion for reconstructing the aims of your life.

[263] And so something bad happened to you, and it froze you.

[264] It turned you into a prey animal and produced a powerful emotional response and the emotional response is to freeze and to avoid and to not go there again.

[265] But that's not a very sophisticated response.

[266] Really what you want to do if something terrible happens to you is you want to figure out exactly why that terrible thing happened, right?

[267] You want to figure out how you conducted yourself such that you increased your susceptibility to that terrible event.

[268] That has nothing to do with whether or not it's your fault.

[269] That's not the issue.

[270] The issue is, if something terrible happened to you, you do not want it to happen again, right?

[271] And so what you want to do is you want to untangle the terrible event until you reconstitute the way that you map the world so that you don't walk down that path again.

[272] And the reason for that, at least in part, is because the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past.

[273] The purpose of memory is to, at least in part, so that you don't repeat the same errors that you repeated in the past going forward, right?

[274] You learn from the past so you don't repeat it.

[275] That's the purpose of memory.

[276] It's very, very practical.

[277] Now, it also might be that the purpose of memory is to remember things that you did that worked and do them again.

[278] That's fine.

[279] But that, you know, that doesn't cause undue suffering.

[280] Undue suffering occurs when something terrible happened to you and you don't understand why.

[281] So I had students write an autobiography to bring themselves up to date, you know, to think about everything that had happened in their life.

[282] And they're trying to map their way forward.

[283] And if you want to map your way forward, you need to know two things, right?

[284] You need to know where you are, and you need to know where you're going.

[285] If you're using a map to get from one place to another in an automobile, and you don't know where you are, you can't figure out where you're going.

[286] And likewise, if you don't know where you're going, well, then you're directionless.

[287] And so you need those two points of orientation.

[288] Where are you?

[289] You want to collect yourself and be in that.

[290] place and then you want to figure out where you're headed and it's the case that we really don't help our students it's quite a remarkable thing we don't do a good job in our education systems of helping our students figure out where they want to go strangely enough you know one of the things I realized over a number of years when I was teaching was that students the students in my classes would have spent a certain amount of time writing essays about a variety of topics, mostly abstractions of one form or another, but almost never, never, not almost, just purely never, they never were sat down by someone who said, look, I want you to spend, I want you to write five pages about what in the world you're going to do with your life and why.

[291] Like it's important, you know, it's like, like, what are you aiming at exactly?

[292] What sort of character do you want to develop?

[293] And how about some justification for it, right?

[294] And how about some thought about how you're going to strategically approach that aim?

[295] And how about some strategizing about what will happen if obstacles get in your way?

[296] How are you going to overcome them?

[297] And that just never happens.

[298] And that, well, I've still not really recovered from that realization because it's so absolutely absurd that we can educate people for 16 years, let's say, and never, ever have them face the problem of their, their aim and their character in any rigorous manner.

[299] It's just beyond comprehension that that's the case.

[300] In any case, we built this program to help people do that.

[301] And it was first a workbook in this class and then we put it online and so that people could do it.

[302] And so that there was a bit of computational technology behind it to make it a little bit more sophisticated.

[303] And so basically what it does is this.

[304] says, well, look, first thing is, well, what do you want to do with your life?

[305] Well, that's a hard question, right?

[306] It's too big that question.

[307] And so it can just freeze you.

[308] And the reason it freezes you is because there's just too much to it.

[309] There's too many choices.

[310] And so you can't compute all that.

[311] And so you freeze and you avoid and it's difficult.

[312] And so you can break it down.

[313] It's what you do as a good behavioral psychologist.

[314] You know, if someone's got a problem and they can't solve it, then you break it down into subordinate problems.

[315] You know, like, let's say someone's really shy, say, well, I'm really shy, I can't talk to people.

[316] It's like, well, what do you mean you can't talk to people?

[317] That's pretty global.

[318] You can't talk to anyone, ever?

[319] You know, it's like, well, if I go to a party, I freeze up.

[320] It's like, well, do you know how to introduce yourself?

[321] You have no idea how many people don't know how to introduce themselves.

[322] You know, you have to know how to shake hands.

[323] You have to know how to put out your hand.

[324] You have to know how to take someone else's hand without like offering them something approximating a dead carp and you know and you have to kind of shake their hand in a friendly way but not too friendly and you don't pull them towards you like a certain person that we know and you know and you have to tell them your name and and you have to do that in a sort of sophisticated way and you have to do it loud enough so they can hear you and then they have to tell you their name and hopefully that those two things don't happen at exactly the same time you know there's a bit sophisticated, then you kind of have to remember the other person's name, and you have to look at them, that's helpful, instead of looking at your shoes, and so there's, you know, there's, there's, there's a variety of important behavioral strategies that have to be implemented so that you can introduce yourself, and then maybe once you introduce yourself, while you've said something to someone, and now they know who you are, and so maybe you can get the ball rolling with the conversation.

[325] Point is, is if you have a complicated problem, you can break it down, into simple problems until you find a problem that's so simple that even someone as incompetent as you has a reasonable shot at solving it and that's exactly what you do as a behavioral psychologist you take the big problem and you say well let's just figure out how you could make some progress and we'll just make the progress small enough so that at some point you'll say well i could do that and then away you go and so well that's kind of what we did with the future authoring program we said well okay first thing is imagine that you could have the life that would be good for you, just out of, just hypothetically, or at least one that's better, that would be something, but you could go all the way and think that you could have the life that would be good for you if you were taking care of yourself.

[326] That's rule too, by the way, and 12 rules for life, that you should treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping, right?

[327] It doesn't mean to be nice to yourself.

[328] It doesn't mean to have self -esteem.

[329] It's none of that nonsense.

[330] It means that you take responsibility for yourself, like you have some value, and then you try to construct a pathway that would be appropriate for someone that has value that you would be taken care of.

[331] And so we ask people questions, like, well, if you could have what you wanted from your family, what would that look like, hypothetically, you know?

[332] And everybody knows, because at least you know what you don't want from your family, right?

[333] So a fair bit of that's indicated with negative emotion.

[334] Well, I don't want this and I don't want that.

[335] I don't want to fight all the time.

[336] I don't want everybody drinking and causing mischief and grief constantly.

[337] And I don't want to have the same old stupid counterproductive conversations about what happened 15 years ago, you know, repeated constantly.

[338] I don't want Christmas to be never -ending miserable concatenation of the foolishness that we've encountered for the last 10 years.

[339] You know, you have some sense of what you don't want.

[340] And from that you can derive some sense of what you might want.

[341] if you could have what you wanted and so what do you want from your family what do you want from your friends if you could have what you wanted and you and you thought it through so that it wasn't just a random sequence of events how might you plot your career or your job because not everybody has a career but almost everybody has a job and you know jobs can be worth doing even if they're not careers how do you educate yourself so that you're a little smarter tomorrow than you were yesterday.

[342] How might you take care of yourself physically and mentally?

[343] What could you do with your time outside of work that would be valuable and productive?

[344] That's not bad.

[345] Seven questions, like maybe it could be 20, but seven's not bad, and maybe that could get the ball rolling.

[346] And I tell my students, don't do it, don't get all perfectionistic about this.

[347] You're not going to do a very good job of making your plan, because what the hell do you know?

[348] And as you move, well, exactly.

[349] And as you move towards your goal, the way that you look at what you want is going to change.

[350] And that's okay because as you move forward through a landscape, then your view of the landscape changes and your plot and your trajectory has to shift.

[351] But you still have to, you have to get started and having a bad map is way better than having no map at all.

[352] And if you have a bad map and you start to use it and you learn more detail as you move forward in your sort of low resolution way, then you can improve the map and you can upgrade your plans.

[353] And that's fine, because part of having a good plan is to plan on having a better plan.

[354] But you have to at least implement the stupid plan that you have before you're going to move to a better plan.

[355] And this is also an important thing to know because people tell me all the time, especially young people, well, I don't know what to do.

[356] Well, so you ask, well, what are you doing?

[357] Well, nothing.

[358] Well, that's a stupid plan.

[359] Because all that happens is that you, You do nothing, and then you get old.

[360] And the problem with getting old is that you're old when you get old.

[361] You know, so doing nothing doesn't work because you can't do nothing.

[362] The best you can do is sit there and degenerate.

[363] And so that's not helpful, and so it's better to make a bad plan and implement it and take the risk that's associated with it because at least you learn something.

[364] And so anyways, people answer these seven questions, and then we have them right for 15 minutes.

[365] about what their life could be like three to five years down the road if they got what they needed, like they were taking care of themselves.

[366] So that's kind of cool.

[367] And then we have them do a couple of other things.

[368] We have them do the reverse, which is, because, you know, here's another thing about rats.

[369] It's kind of interesting.

[370] So you've already learned how to get them addicted to cocaine.

[371] You've got to isolate them in a cage, right?

[372] Because if they're isolated in a cage, you can get them addicted to cocaine.

[373] but if they're in their families doing like rat things, you can't get them addicted to cocaine because they have better things to do.

[374] And so that's a useful thing to know, you know, is that one of the ways that you stop people from being susceptible to things that can addict them is by ensuring that they have better things to do.

[375] So how do you motivate a rat?

[376] Well, let's say you've taught a rat to run, you get them hungry, and you teach them that there's food at the end of a, of a runway and you lift up the little door that stops him from getting to the food so too soon and he runs down the runway sort of in proportionate the speed is proportionate to hungry he is so hungry rat well if he's too hungry he doesn't run at all he just lays there and dies so that's not that's that's the limit part of the experiment so but you know if he's still functional rat he'll zip down there pretty quick to get the cheese and so you can tell the rats motivated by the hope of the food, but you can make them run even faster if you do something else.

[377] So rats don't like the smell of cats.

[378] It's instinctual.

[379] It's like rats don't like cats.

[380] We don't like snakes, rats don't like cats.

[381] It's a very similar thing.

[382] And so if you have your hungry rat and you wanna really get him zipping down the cage, you wanna waft a little cat odor over him at the same time, because then he runs really fast down the runway because he gets to get the food and get the hell away from the cat.

[383] And so it's good to be running away from something you don't want at the same time that you're running towards something you do want.

[384] And so we also have people write a little counter -narrative, which is, well, imagine you took stock of your bad habits, and then they augured you into the ground over about a three -to -five -year period.

[385] And everyone kind of has a vision of that, because all of you know which handbasket you would use to go to hell in if you had your option, right?

[386] some of you it would be martyrdom and some of you would be addiction and some of it would be obesity and some of it would be bad physical health and some of you would be killed by relatives you know and so and probably justly so and so you know how you would degenerate if you allowed that to happen and it's actually unbelievably useful to sit down once in your life and think okay if i let the things that that if I let the temptations that I am prone to succumb to have the upper hand, just exactly what sort of hell would I inhabit in three to five years.

[387] It's really worth thinking that through.

[388] Because then on those days when the thought of the cheese at the end of the runway isn't enough to get you out of bed, then the thought of the hell that you might be degenerating into if you just lay there might be enough impetus to get you moving.

[389] And to have both of those working for you is a big deal.

[390] And so anyways, with this future authoring program, we tested it out.

[391] And we found, we did this mostly with college and university students, but we found that people who completed this program, even if they did it badly, even if they only spent an hour doing it, the day that they came into the college for orientation in the summer.

[392] So just an hour, right?

[393] nothing, man, to think about your future.

[394] It increased the probability that they would stay in university by almost 30 percent and had a very salutary effect on grades.

[395] And that was particularly true for men.

[396] It was particularly true for ethnic minority men, and it was particularly true for men who had done badly in high school and who weren't aiming in college or university at something that was specifically associated with a career.

[397] So that was quite cool because it had its best effect on people who are doing the worst, which is the opposite of most psychological interventions, because what they usually do is help the people who are doing well do even better.

[398] So what, why am I telling you all this?

[399] Well, it's because in order to be properly motivated, you have to have an aim, and maybe the deeper the aim, the more well elaborated the aim, the more articulated the aim, the more justifiable the aim, the more you've thought about the aim, the more comprehensive the aim, the more motivation is associated with it.

[400] And so, you know, if you have to ask why you're doing something difficult, and the answer is, well, if I pursue this property, then I'm going to have the friends I want, and I'm going to have the family I want, and I'm going to take care of myself properly, I'm going to have the career I want, I'm going to educate myself properly, and I'm not going to degenerate into the particular hell that would otherwise be waiting for me, that's actually not a bad set of rationalizations to chase away the doubt that might otherwise be associated with what you're doing.

[401] And so that's, that's pretty useful and pretty interesting to know.

[402] And so then the next issue might be, well, you should aim at something.

[403] And then the question is, well, what is it that you should aim at?

[404] And this is a profound question in my estimation because that's really the question that's really that question is really something like what's the purpose of life that's the question what should you be aiming at you know and and one question might be that arises from that is that is it even reasonable to posit that there is something that you should be aiming at that's that's kind of a that's the question that a moral relativist might put forward or maybe a postmodernist might put that forward say something like, well, there's a lot of ways of looking at the world, you know, and who's to say that any way is better than any other way?

[405] It's like, well, that's not helpful in my estimation.

[406] And I think it's not helpful because it's actually wrong.

[407] You know, the postmodern claim, there's an element of validity to it because the element of validity is that there is a very large number of ways of looking at the world.

[408] That's the element of validity that characterizes the moral relativist position as well.

[409] There's a very large number of ways of looking at the world.

[410] And then the question arises, well, how can you be sure that one way of looking at the world is preferable to another?

[411] Turns out to be a difficult problem.

[412] However, if you're not sure that one way of looking at the world is better than another, well then you don't have an aim and if you don't have an aim you don't have a goal and if you don't have a goal then you don't have any positive emotion and that turns out to be a really bad thing and part of the reason for that is you don't have any positive emotion if you don't have a goal but you've got plenty of negative emotion so this is partly why I've laid emphasis to a large degree in 12 rules for life on suffering because you've got to know what's real and I mean I think there's a variety of things that are real, but there are two things that really stand out is real for me, experientially.

[413] One is pain.

[414] It's damn hard to argue yourself out of pain.

[415] Another is malevolence.

[416] I think malevolence is the willingness or the desire to produce pain when that's unnecessary.

[417] And it's very difficult for me to...

[418] I've never met anybody successfully.

[419] who could successfully argue themselves out of a belief in those things.

[420] Malevolence is a bit different because not everybody's encountered it.

[421] But let me tell you, if you've actually encountered it, you can't argue your way out of its existence because it will damage you.

[422] That's what happens to people who have post -traumatic stress disorder.

[423] And they can't think their way out of it.

[424] It's too deep.

[425] And we all suffer.

[426] We're all susceptible to pain.

[427] We're susceptible to misery and to death.

[428] death, all of that.

[429] Life is very, very difficult.

[430] And so what happens to you if you adopt a viewpoint that deprives your life of any transcendent or superordinate meaning is that all the positive elements go away, all the engagement meaning vanishes.

[431] You can destroy that rationally, but the pain and the misery and the malevolence remains.

[432] And then what happens is that you suffer without hope of respite and that makes you cruel and bitter and vengeful and none of that seems to be good unless you think that where you head when you're possessed by that sort of motivation is something that's desirable and you know you have to have gone a long ways towards the abyss before you start to think that and so a higher order purpose in some sense isn't optional.

[433] The discovery of that's not optional because the alternative is that degeneration that comes along with being susceptible to pointless suffering.

[434] And so, you know, we talked about the chicken who decided that crossing the road was a good idea because the other side of the road was better, at least as far as the chicken was concerned.

[435] And then, of course, you might question the chicken's moral knowledge.

[436] knowledge and wonder philosophically why the other side of the road would be better than the side that you're already on.

[437] And that's a very profound and difficult question.

[438] But I actually think, I believe that that question is answerable.

[439] So I think that the reason that, so the postmodern types who posit that there's a very large number, of ways of looking at the world are correct but when they stretch that and say there's no way of determining there's no way of rancordering ways of looking at the world in terms of their validity then they've made a mistake now it's not like it's a conundrum that's easy to solve what's worth doing well that's a very difficult question but it's worthwhile attempting to answer it.

[440] So that's the next thing we're going to do is we're going to attempt to answer it.

[441] So I'll get another army in motion here.

[442] So I want to tell you something first about consciousness.

[443] That's quite interesting.

[444] And it's an argument against determinism.

[445] And I have to make this argument before I can make the next argument that I want to make.

[446] So we don't know that much about consciousness.

[447] It's a real mystery.

[448] It's probably the ultimate mystery, as far as I can tell, because we don't understand how it is that we can be aware, or even what awareness means, that we don't understand the relationship between the existence of things and the fact that there is something that's aware of those things, because it's not obvious what it would mean for things to exist if nothing was aware of them.

[449] So the problem of consciousness isn't merely the problem of awareness, it's even in some sense the problem of being, because being without awareness seems, well, it's incomprehensible in some sense.

[450] There's something, but no one registers it.

[451] Well, in what sense is there something then?

[452] In any case, consciousness is a mystery, but one of the things we do know about it is that you're more likely to be conscious when you do a native language speaker, Danish, that was the language that was used for this study, and you put someone in a scanning machine and you compute how much glucose their brain is using and how many areas are active.

[453] If you play Danish forward to them, like in its proper order, a very small part of their brain is active and they don't use much glucose.

[454] But if you play Danish backward, which is equivalent in phonic complex, flexity, let's say, then huge parts of their brain light up.

[455] It's a way harder to listen to Danish backwards than it is to listen to Danish forward.

[456] And it turns out that under most circumstances, when you're doing something that you don't know how to do, then your brain is very, very active.

[457] And then as you practice, what happens is that smaller and smaller part of your brain is activated until, and it kind of shifts like this.

[458] It's like your right and left hemispheres are activated.

[459] when you're trying something new.

[460] And then the activity shifts over to the left as you practice, and the amount of your brain that's active gets smaller, and that continues to shrink until there's a small machine, let's say, that's formulated in the back part of the left side of your brain, and it's specialized for that particular activity.

[461] And then you've become expert at it.

[462] You've built the machinery that enables you to undertake that task in a rather deterministic manner, and now you don't have to be conscious.

[463] And so when you drive to work, you know, you're thinking about what you're going to do at work.

[464] You're not paying much.

[465] I mean, you're watching the road and all that, but you're not thinking about the road the same way you were when you first gripped the steering wheel when you were 14 and you were learning to drive, right?

[466] And that was absolutely exhausting after 10 minutes because you've got all the circuitry built.

[467] You're looking 300 yards down the road.

[468] You know exactly when to push the brake.

[469] You know exactly how much you need to turn the wheel.

[470] That's all automatized and you've turned into something approximating a deterministic organism.

[471] But that doesn't happen when you don't know what you're doing, and so that's what consciousness seems to be, that's what consciousness seems to be for in some sense.

[472] It seems to be the mechanism that's operative when you don't know what you're doing.

[473] And it can't be deterministic.

[474] And I think the reason for that is that in order for you to operate as a deterministic organism, all of the biological substructures that enable you to undertake the activity have to be built.

[475] And you build them through practice and then once they're built they can run in an automated automated manner and that is exactly how it works i mean you don't have to think much when you walk that's automated you don't have to think much when you write a bike you don't have to think much when you're playing the piano if you're playing a piece that you've practiced a tremendous amount but if you stumble over a phrase then you get conscious of where you stumbled and then you go back and you practice and you practice new practice new practice new practice and you build yourself a new automatic circuit that will run automatically, and then you can continue with the music.

[476] And maybe your consciousness when you're playing the music is, you know, it's bounced up above what you've practiced, and you can concentrate consciously on how you phrase the music and how you twist it and turn it.

[477] And on the higher order elements of their performance, consciousness is still operating, but a lot of it's running on automatic.

[478] And so consciousness is there when you can't run on automatic.

[479] Consciousness is what confronts the novel or what confronts the unknown as such.

[480] And I think that's right.

[481] That's what consciousness does.

[482] And so you're a deterministic organism in some ways when you're running through your practiced and habitual routines.

[483] But when you're facing what you've never encountered before, then consciousness is operating.

[484] And it's the thing that faces the unknown and builds new structure.

[485] All right.

[486] So that's worth thinking about.

[487] And it's a good, good way of thinking about what a human being is like.

[488] And so, okay, so now let's, let's play that out a little bit.

[489] So imagine, we're trying to figure out how it is that you're interacting with the world and what constitutes your mode of interacting with the world.

[490] And so you wake up in the morning and what do you face consciously?

[491] Now you're conscious, you weren't because you were asleep, but now you're conscious.

[492] And what you seem to face in the world in the morning are the possibilities of the world, right?

[493] You wake up and you think about all the things that you could do that day, and you can think, well, there's a very large number of pathways that lie there in front of you that you could conceivably walk down, and maybe you're worried about it, because, well, there's too much on your plate, right?

[494] There's too many decisions to make, and that's kind of overwhelming, or maybe you're excited about it because, you know, there's a, there's a landscape of new potential that you can explore, or maybe there's some balance there, But in any case, you wake up in the morning and you confront what's coming at you that you have not yet mastered.

[495] And that's the role of your conscience, of your consciousness, is to confront what's novel.

[496] All right.

[497] So you think about that for a minute.

[498] You see if you think.

[499] So that's the world that you confront as a conscious being.

[500] It's the world of possibility and potential.

[501] It's those things that you could do.

[502] You know, and you might play with that in your imagination.

[503] Well, here's some things I need to do, and here's some things I could do, and here's what might happen.

[504] If I don't do the things that I know I should today, for example, there's various cliffs that you might fall off if you don't manifest your responsibilities, and so you're toying with that field of potential that's in front of you.

[505] I think that's a good way of thinking about the reality that human beings occupy.

[506] We are in some sense deterministic creatures, but only once we've been transformed into, only once we've established our habits, and only then in an environment that's stable.

[507] But what we confront with the conscious part of our being is that territory which is as of yet unmapped.

[508] And consciousness is the attempt to map that territory and to plot our way through it and to establish the proper aims, and then maybe to become expert at it across time.

[509] but the consciousness is confronting the potential.

[510] That's what we do.

[511] We're the consciousness that confronts the potential.

[512] All right.

[513] Now, I'm going to put another army in operation here.

[514] I'm going to talk about the first part of Genesis.

[515] So there's this, and the reason for this is, well, I'm very interested in stories.

[516] I think they sit at the basis of our cognitive structure.

[517] In fact, I think the evidence for that is overwhelming, that we really look at the world through stories.

[518] And there's hierarchies of stories.

[519] Some stories are more fundamental than others.

[520] Some stories are deeper than others.

[521] And you know that because you know that there's great literature and there's cheap novels.

[522] And you know, there's a difference between them.

[523] And the great literature is deep, whatever the hell that means.

[524] And the cheap novels aren't.

[525] They're shallow.

[526] Right?

[527] And we understand that metaphor.

[528] And deep means affecting many things simultaneously or something like that.

[529] And the deepest of narratives are the ones that are at the base of our culture, that everything in our culture depends on.

[530] Among those deep narratives is the narrative, say, that's outlined in Genesis.

[531] And Genesis posits a particular structure to the world, and the structure is this.

[532] So there's a potential, that's the Tohu -Vabohu, that's the unformed chaos that exists, that co -exists with God.

[533] That's one way of looking at it.

[534] And that word, Tohu, Babohu, that comes from an older word, from a Mesopotamian word, Tiamat.

[535] And Tiamat was a particular kind of Mesopotamian goddess, and she was the goddess of chaos.

[536] And the originator of part of the structure that gave rise to the phenomenal world.

[537] And so the Tohu, Babohu, isn't nothingness exactly.

[538] It's not the right way to think about it.

[539] It's potential.

[540] And so there's this hypothesis in Genesis about the nature of, well, about the nature of reality, that reality manifests itself in part as potential and part as the structure that confronts potential.

[541] And that's laid out in Genesis as God.

[542] It's laid out as God the Father, actually.

[543] And the idea there is that it's the same idea that I just laid out with regards to how you're operating in the morning.

[544] You wake up and the potential of the world is sitting there in front of you.

[545] And the question is, how do you encounter that potential?

[546] And the answer is, well, not with nothing.

[547] I mean, there you are.

[548] And you're a deeply structured thing.

[549] Now, you're not structured enough so that that structure can just operate deterministically and transform the potential into actuality.

[550] You still have to make decisions, whatever that means.

[551] You have to make choices.

[552] You have to contend and wrestle with the potential before it manifests itself as reality.

[553] But it does do that.

[554] I mean, at least that's how we seem to treat ourselves, right?

[555] You get up in the morning, you know that there's decisions you have to make, and why does it matter whether you make those decisions and the answer is well the way the world lays itself out actually depends on the decisions that you make and you know you're not omniscient enough to know with perfect certainty that if you make decision x that event y is going to occur but you know you're not a you're not completely blind and stumbling about either and you often know perfectly well that if there's something important that needs to be done that you don't do that some little bit of hellish chaos will definitely manifest itself, right?

[556] You're certain enough of that.

[557] And so you do react to yourself and treat yourself like you're a structure of a structure, what would you say?

[558] You're a dynamic structure of ability, something like that that can contend with potential and transform it into reality.

[559] And that's exactly what's laid out sort of writ large in Genesis.

[560] You have God who's the representation of the structure that interacts with potential, that's two things, and then there's a third factor, which is the process that mediates the interaction.

[561] So the way that story is told in Genesis is that what God uses to confront potential and to transform it into habitable order is the word.

[562] And it's a separate thing.

[563] It's a process.

[564] Well, it's the same thing.

[565] It's akin, as far as I can tell it's akin to your communicative consciousness.

[566] Again, but it's on the large scale.

[567] It's something like that.

[568] And you use that to form the chaos into the world.

[569] Now, there's an ethical dimension to that too, which is quite cool.

[570] So as the biblical corpus developed conceptually across time, the word was associated with, the word is logos, and it was associated with a variety of virtues, let's say, and I would say the primary virtue that it's associated with is truth.

[571] And so there's this notion in Genesis that God uses truth to encounter potential, and the consequences, the consequence of that is the emergence of habitable order.

[572] And so what happens, God does that, uses the word, creates things out of the potential, and then says repeatedly, and it was good.

[573] And so there's a moral hypothesis there too, which is absolutely crucial.

[574] And the moral hypothesis is that which is extracted out of potential with truth is good.

[575] And that's a hypothesis.

[576] And so then you might think, well, what do you do?

[577] when you're lying there in the morning, trying to figure out how you're going to wrestle with the potential that constitutes the day that confronts you.

[578] And part of the answer is, well, you make ethical decisions about how it is that you're going to interact with what's in front of you.

[579] You know, like, maybe you didn't do something at work that you should have done, and so you're going to go give your boss a story about that isn't true about why it is that you didn't do it.

[580] And you think, well, that'll set things right.

[581] And of course, you don't believe that.

[582] You know perfectly well it won't set things right.

[583] But maybe it will stop you from being in trouble in that day.

[584] And maybe you feel guilty and ashamed about it if you have any bloody sense.

[585] And you know that the world that you're pulling into being as a consequence of your refusal to engage forthrightly, with what's in front of you is damaging to you, and it's damaging to the people around you, and it undermines the integrity of the fabric of being itself.

[586] And you still might be inclined to do it, because maybe you're deluded enough to think that you can get away with it.

[587] But I can tell you one thing, this is my opinion, but it's something that I've derived as a consequence of my thousands of hours of practice as a clinical psychologist, and one thing I've learned, which I'm not necessarily that happy to have learned, is that no one ever gets away with anything, ever.

[588] It always comes back to haunt you.

[589] And so if you take the easy way out while you're contemplating how you're going to interact with the potential that's in front of you and you decide that you can warp part of the structure and you can hide something that's happened that's actually happened, you can hide it and you can deceive yourself about it and you can twist the structure of the world around so that that's somehow no longer, exists.

[590] It's like, that's not a strategy that's going anywhere.

[591] That is not going to work.

[592] And all you have to do is think it through to know that, because first of all, you do know that when you do it, because you wouldn't feel guilty and ashamed and low about it if you didn't know that.

[593] And second, really?

[594] You think that you're capable of manipulating the structure of reality and transforming it into something that's false and that that's going to work?

[595] You think you can do that?

[596] It's like there's an arrogance in that that's, well, it's satanic fundamentally.

[597] Well, I mean that technically, by the way.

[598] But it's not, it's a non -starter.

[599] So anyways, in the book of Genesis, the notion is that, well, God uses the word, something roughly akin to consciousness, sort of, what would you say, something contemplated or conceptualized on the cosmic scale to interact with potential to produce habitable order and repeats the observation that it's good that's something seriously worth thinking about for the rest of your life it's it's a it's the fundamental element of a certain kind of faith and the faith is this that whatever it is that you bring into being as a consequence of participating in the truth is by definition good.

[600] And that's a hell of a thing to know.

[601] Now, you can ask yourself, and maybe you should, if you believe that to be true, and maybe you don't.

[602] But if you do believe it to be true, if you believe that there's some possibility that it can be true, it's very, it puts a rock underneath you, you know?

[603] It puts a foundation underneath you.

[604] Because you can think, well, what do I have to do in order to interact?

[605] with this potential properly and the answer is we just have to tell the truth and you know things will happen as a consequence of telling the truth and some of them will be a little hard to bear in the short term which is obviously why people lie right why do you lie so that you can reduce the short term consequences of your actions obviously that's why you do it and so sometimes if you tell the truth there's going to be some rough going in the near future but that doesn't mean that it's a bad medium to long -term strategy and everybody knows that anyways because if you have children or if you have people around you that you love you don't tell them look here's a good strategy kid it's like whenever you're in trouble just lie your way out of it that's what everybody else does if everybody did that properly the whole world would function perfectly it's like no one believes that and no one ever uses it as advice so i'll close with this so i made this diagram once i've been not written about it, but I haven't published it.

[606] I've been writing about it for a very long time.

[607] I was trying to decompose the idea of ethical conduct into something that was fully differentiated.

[608] And so I drew this diagram, said, well, imagine that one of the things you wanted, you want to be a good person.

[609] So what does it mean to be a good person?

[610] I was thinking about this as a behavioral psychologist.

[611] Well, it might mean being a good parent.

[612] That's not all it means because it might be being a good husband or it might be being a good wife it might be being a good employee you know it might be being a good sibling there's lots of sub elements to being a good person but being a good parent is a subset of being a good person so it's a little more focal and say well what do you have to do to be a good parent well you might be a good father and what do you have to do to be a good father's like maybe you have to cook now and that and hopefully something edible And so not poisoned with hate and bitterness that you happen to be stuck in the kitchen.

[613] And so, well, let's see, you're going to make a good meal.

[614] And whether you can decompose that, what do you have to do to make a good meal?

[615] Well, you have to set the table and you have to cut up the vegetables and you have to saute the sausage.

[616] And so that's getting pretty focal, right?

[617] The short -term, rather practical procedure.

[618] And you can decompose that even.

[619] You can say, well, you have to slice up the vegetables.

[620] How do you do that?

[621] Well, you move your hands back and forth, right?

[622] And at that point, it's no longer conceptual, right?

[623] And so it's an interesting way of thinking about ethics, because you can take something abstract, like be a good person, which is up in the air, right?

[624] It's an abstract virtue.

[625] It's an abstract conceptualization.

[626] But then you can decompose it, and you find out that it's actually a sequence of actions.

[627] And that's how the mind meets the body.

[628] And so you cut up the vegetables properly, and you do that properly so that you can make a good meal, and you do that make the good meal, so you can be a good father, so you can be a good parent, so you can be a good person.

[629] And so the reason that you're cutting up the vegetables is so that you can be a good person, is the local partakes in the higher.

[630] It's just like the bricklayer, who's doing something locally, but participating in the higher at the same time.

[631] And you need that participation in the higher because what imbues the quotidian things you do, the things that you do day to day with a deep meaning is their association with the whole hierarchy value, right, all the way up the chain.

[632] You want to be a good person, let's say, and that's why you're cutting up the vegetables carefully and properly.

[633] And, you know, if you know about the connection between cutting up the vegetables and being a good person, then you're going to cut them up carefully, and you're going to cook them carefully, and you're going to make a meal that's good.

[634] And if you do that every day, well, then you have a whole lifetime of pleasurable, high -quality meals that you share with people that you love.

[635] It's a non -trivial component of being a good person.

[636] So even as you decompose virtues down into their practicalities, you don't lose the importance of what's, being done.

[637] Well, what is it that's at the top of that hierarchy?

[638] The good person, well, what does that mean?

[639] Well, it can be decomposed into these practical processes, a myriad of them, and you want to practice all them so you're good at them.

[640] You want to aggregate them into the staged levels of your being, but there's something at the top that beckons.

[641] I'll give you a little example of that.

[642] In the movie, Pinocchio.

[643] Geppetto, who's God, for all intents and purposes, makes this puppet.

[644] And the puppets are wooden -headed marionette with no experience.

[645] Something else is pulling its strings.

[646] But there's a hope and a wish that's embedded in Geppetto's motivations, and that is that the thing he creates can be autonomous and genuine.

[647] And what happens is that to catalyze that process, He lifts his eyes above the horizon, right?

[648] And he wishes on a star, a very strange thing to do.

[649] But it's a symbolic thing.

[650] A star is a light that beckons in the darkness, and it's something that's a transcendent object above the horizon.

[651] And so there's this idea, then in order to catalyze the development of something autonomous and real, you have to lift your eyes above the horizon and establish a relationship with a transcendent goal, and that catalyzes the development of something that's autonomous and genuine, and Pinocchio has to learn, well, he has to learn not to be a victim.

[652] That's part of what he learns.

[653] And he has to learn not to be a crook, and he has to learn not to be a showman, and he has to learn to tell the truth, all of that.

[654] And then he has to learn to rescue his father from the belly of the whale, right, to become completely inculturated, to face his darkest fears, and to discover within the structure of his darkest fears what it is that he could be in potential.

[655] And so there's courage associated with that as well.

[656] but it's the truth element that I wanted to concentrate on.

[657] It's like there's this deep idea, and it's an idea that's correct, and it has to do with the reality of value.

[658] It's like the other thing that's stressed in Genesis after the description of how reality lays itself out, and the proposition that that which is engendered out of potential by the truth is good is the final proposition, which is that men and women alike are made in the image of God, which is staggering and miraculous claim, especially for that time, partly because of its unlikelyhood, let's say, that that would be posited, that something as lowly as a human being and fragile and vulnerable and and what would you say fatally corrupted could still have that transcendent value and then equally that it would be shared between men and women alike it's remarkable that that emerged as a concept so long ago it's so absolutely well i think miraculous is exactly the right way to think about it and it seems to be that that the insistence that men and women are made in the image of God has something to do with the capacity of human beings to engage in the process of generating the world out of the potential that confronts them and that they can do that properly by using truth as the fundamental tool of engagement.

[659] And it's that realization, I think, that constitutes the proper transcendent value that grounds our entire ethical systems.

[660] Well, you're performing your mundane activities.

[661] Well, they scale upwards towards some transcendent goal.

[662] Well, what's the transcendent goal?

[663] Well, it's to live in the truth so that you can confront the potential that is not yet realized as the world.

[664] and to transform it into the habitable order that is good.

[665] And I'll close with this, and you can think about this.

[666] Look, we already accept this is true.

[667] Like, our culture is predicated on the idea that this is true.

[668] And this is why.

[669] Like, you're all granted inalienable rights, right?

[670] No, you all possess inalienable rights.

[671] You're not granted them.

[672] They're intrinsic to you.

[673] Right?

[674] Even the state has to stay away from you because of your inalienable value.

[675] That's the predicate of your culture, particularly true of the United States.

[676] Why?

[677] Well, because there's some realization that you bring something to bear on the world, right?

[678] In your sovereign individuality, you're the bearer of the capacity to transform potential into actuality.

[679] Right?

[680] And there's something that's sufficiently divine about that.

[681] to be the source of what is the source of the inalienable rights that even bound the authority of the state and the story is that not only is this authority of the state bounded by that recognition and necessarily bounded and we bloody well know what sort of hell is produced when states forget that right that's clearly evident is that the story is that the integrity of the state itself depends on that which is partly why you have the responsibility as the sovereign citizen to choose the people that hypothetically lead you, right?

[682] Or more accurately follow you properly.

[683] And so our entire culture is predicated on the idea that the inalienable value that characterizes you constitutes the foundation of the of the free and just and productive and autonomous state.

[684] And we all act that out.

[685] It's like, so do we believe it?

[686] And if we don't believe it, well, then what?

[687] And if we do believe it, well, maybe we should take it seriously.

[688] It seems like a serious thing.

[689] And I mean, it is the case.

[690] You know, it's been, and I'll close with this, it's been so interesting for me over the last year, doing what I'm doing, because I've talked to so many people, and so many people have told me the same story.

[691] You know, they've been listening to what I've been, they've been listening to my YouTube lectures, or they've been listening to my podcast or they've been reading this book.

[692] And the book says, well, you know, take some bloody responsibility as much as you can bear and see if you can tell the truth, because that's the pathway to a proper life.

[693] And so people come and tell me, and they say, look, I've been trying to sort out my life.

[694] I've been trying some of these things.

[695] I've been trying to just tell the truth, or at least not to lie.

[696] And I've been taking more responsibility, you know?

[697] I've been trying to set things right with my family.

[698] And you know what?

[699] it's really working and so that's what's motivated me to continue traveling around like this and talking to everyone and something's motivating you all to come out and listen it's not so obvious it's not so easy to put your finger on that you know but I but this works it's works because it's true you know you are made in the image of God for what that's worth you know it isn't obvious what that means None of us are deep enough to fully comprehend that idea.

[700] You know, and it's easy for us to lose it because it seems, well, it's not something that you can grip so straightforwardly.

[701] But I don't see a flaw in the idea that your consciousness confronts the potential that's not yet manifested itself, and that the manner in which that potential transforms itself into your world and your family's world and your community's world is directly a consequence of the quality of the ethical choices that you make while you're interacting with what has not yet come to be.

[702] And so that means that the structure of the world, whether or not it's habitable or uninhabitable, right?

[703] Heaven -like or hell -like is dependent on the ethics of the choices that you make in that encounter.

[704] And I think if you, I think we all know that, and I think we judge each other and ourselves on that basis.

[705] And that if we knew it consciously and we acted it out properly with intent, that things would be much better than they would otherwise be.

[706] And if we didn't, they would be much worse.

[707] And so I'm hoping that we can become more conscious of what these sorts of things mean.

[708] We can understand them more deeply.

[709] and that as a consequence we're more motivated to take ourselves seriously and to bear the burden of transforming the potential that surrounds us into the order that we would like to see and that within that we could see and act out the destiny that what would you say the destinies that sustains us properly through the difficulties of our lives thank you very much well my friend you were not messing around tonight.

[710] Not that you ever do, but you really, I mean, I could feel it before the show back there.

[711] You were ready to bring it tonight.

[712] Good night, everybody.

[713] That's it.

[714] All right, here we go.

[715] There's a ton of questions, and there's a lot about this first one.

[716] You guys left Patreon.

[717] When and what can we expect from the new platform?

[718] Well, what is the first question.

[719] We're going to try to run it by rule of law.

[720] I guess, which means that if you don't break a law, you don't get kicked off.

[721] Right.

[722] What we hope to offer as well is a more comprehensive and civilized way of interacting online and perhaps a more mature way.

[723] We're trying to work out how to reward productive and civilized discussion.

[724] I mean, whenever you produce a new, you know, these internet systems are new societies, right?

[725] And they're kind of anarchic and frontier -like to begin with.

[726] And the problem with that, there's great freedom that goes along with that.

[727] But the problem is that they can be inhabited by people who misuse them.

[728] they're a game in some sense that starts to become unplayable because people break the explicit and implicit rules and cheat and so we're trying to figure out how we can create a system that will allow for maximal freedom while maintaining the minimal requirements for civilized discourse and it isn't obvious that we'll be able to manage that but at least one of the rules is going to be we're not going to arbitrarily dispense with your right to communicate because your views don't align with ours politically.

[729] So got anything to add to that?

[730] We got our work cut out for us.

[731] That's it, right?

[732] I mean, we're actually, we're trying to make Internet too and a mature level of it, and it ain't going to be easy.

[733] So, you know, Dave and I put up, it's tough, because it isn't the underlying technology shifts so damn fast that the problem that you're trying to solve might vanish as a problem by the time you move towards a solution.

[734] And, you know, Dave and I, when we went off Patreon, we set up just simpler funding services, and they actually work quite well.

[735] And so one of the conundrums that we're facing now is like it isn't obvious that you can group a large number of creators together in a group without running into the sorts of problems that Patreon either ran into or produced.

[736] And maybe the solution is that we don't need Patreon anymore because there's other ways that creators can arrange for public funding that makes each of them independent and much more difficult to take out as independent entities.

[737] But, yeah, well, I use Bitcoin on my own service, just more out of curiosity than anything else.

[738] But we're trying to make a collective platform, and we've got a long ways on it.

[739] We have a good team working on it, and we have the same vision, but, you know, software projects are mostly doomed to failure, and this is a very big problem to solve, but we're going to give it a crack anyway, so.

[740] Well, we've never gotten this one before.

[741] have you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?

[742] No. I tried to play it once when I was a kid, like, you know, 40 years ago.

[743] But we just had a rule book, and we didn't know, this is in this little town I grew up in a northern Alberta, and we didn't know anybody that knew how to play it, and we couldn't figure out how to play it just by looking at the rules, and so we got bored and, I don't know, went and drank like ice -cold vodka in the alley instead.

[744] You're getting Peterson on plug tonight.

[745] I have four teenage boys with me here tonight.

[746] What is the best piece of advice you can give them to get through the struggles they are going to face?

[747] I guess that was actually sort of the theme of what you did here tonight.

[748] Where are these guys?

[749] Right here.

[750] Don't underestimate yourself.

[751] That's the first thing.

[752] Don't shy away from responsibility.

[753] That's a tough one to figure.

[754] out, you know, because it's easy to consider responsibility, a burden that you, and that's that kind of premature cynicism that often does teenagers in, and it's really not good.

[755] That responsibility, civic responsibility, familial responsibility, responsibility to yourself, responsibility to the people that you date, it's easy to get cynical about that, and that's a big mistake because in that responsibility is your destiny and so if you get cynical about that you corrupt yourself prematurely and that's a terrible situation for someone young to be in i've seen lots of young people who were prematurely cynical about participating properly in in life and they're like they're old and worn out way before their time so so aim at something and aim high and don't underestimate your possibilities, you know, if you're forthright and you're dedicated and you're honest, which is a very difficult thing to manage, then the problems in the world will disappear as you confront them.

[756] You can do that.

[757] You know, people can really be something, and you could be one of those people, and you don't have anything better to do, so you might as well give it a shot.

[758] This is a terrible segue, but if I throw a blunt on stage, will you two smoke it?

[759] I didn't know a lot of Musk was here.

[760] It's a highly tempting offer.

[761] What advice would you offer the citizens of Venezuela?

[762] We probably should have smoked the blunt.

[763] What happened today?

[764] I didn't look at the news today.

[765] What happened?

[766] What's going on in Venezuela?

[767] Is it degenerating into conflict?

[768] So did anything new actually happen today?

[769] I was traveling most of the day, but...

[770] Yeah, I know.

[771] There's two competing presidents.

[772] No, I just wondered if that had degenerated something closer to civil war.

[773] Seven dead.

[774] Seven dead.

[775] Yeah.

[776] Well, I hope they hold their ground, man. Because Venezuela's been a rough place for a long time.

[777] And I don't know.

[778] It's very difficult to give advice when you see people trapped in a situation that's gone so far that it's almost it can't be straightforwardly fixed.

[779] The right advice is to not get yourself in a situation like that, right?

[780] I'm not trying to be flippant about that is that what's Leonard Cohn, what did he say, the poet, there's no decent place to stand in a massacre.

[781] Like sometimes you're somewhere where there isn't anything but bad options.

[782] That's not a good thing.

[783] And Venezuela might be one of those places.

[784] hopefully the current president will let go and disappear but that seems highly unlikely to me because he's not the sort of person who's likely to do that so best of luck to them that's all I can say I don't have any real advice all right well let's go with another sort of topical one what are your thoughts on the Coventry Catholic High School media debacle well I think part of it you know But you could say that those who criticize the kids jump to moral conclusions.

[785] But then you could say that those who criticized, those who criticized the kids jump to moral conclusions.

[786] And look, here's something you learn as a social scientist, as a psychologist, if you're a good psychologist.

[787] You learn that a lot of things that look psychological aren't.

[788] They're situational.

[789] and I would say what happened in that situation and what happens a lot online is actually a secondary consequence of the operation of technologies that we don't understand.

[790] Right?

[791] I mean why is there so much online mobbing?

[792] Well do you think human nature's changed fundamentally in the last five years or do you think there's something about the online technology that lends itself to online mobbing because we haven't figured out how to regulate it appropriately.

[793] That's a much wiser suggestion.

[794] I mean who knows how the hell Twitter works?

[795] I mean, all of a sudden 100 million people can communicate with each other but only with 140 or 280 characters.

[796] Well, that's a biological revolution.

[797] We have no idea what that's going to cause.

[798] Well, we know if you go look at Twitter and it's kind of ugly, you know, because Twitter seems to reward impulsivity and it can move impulsivity around very quickly and people are more likely to retweet things they're outraged by and outrage makes you impulsive you know and i mean i've used twitter lots and i can see in my reflected in my own behavior the propensity for it to magnify outrage well you know people it would have been better had people not jump to the to conclusions and reviewed all the evidence at hand but But these new media forms mitigate against that in many circumstances, right?

[799] And outrage can spread in a flash.

[800] And so, and people get caught up in that.

[801] And you can say, well, you know, that's also motivated by the desire to morally posture and to be to adopt the position of superordinate virtue and all of that.

[802] And that's a contributor.

[803] But I do think so much of this, the polarization that characterizes our current political discourse, I really think a tremendous amount of that is a consequence of technological change that's so rapid that we can't keep up.

[804] You know, like you see that traditional media degenerating very rapidly, and I'm talking about the degeneration as viable financial enterprises, right?

[805] TV stations are threatened.

[806] They're dead.

[807] because of YouTube, radio's dead because of podcasts, print journalism is dead because of blogs.

[808] And those are massive technological changes, but these old entities, the mainstream media entities still exist, they're still running on empty, they're still running on inertia, but as they fall apart under the stress of competition, they can't tolerate, they're more and more desperate for clicks.

[809] And so they're more and more desperate and they have fewer and fewer people and they have fewer and fewer fact checkers.

[810] So it's easy to to just chase after the outrage and so they're in a death spiral that's and it manifests itself in competitive outrage and you know you could say well that's a consequence of the moral the lack of moral rectitude on the part of the journalist but I think that in some sense they're they're caught up in something bigger and we don't know how to regulate it well and so I think that happened in this situation as well you know it's It's like the whole bloody country is one big junior high school class.

[811] If only two guys were working on a tech company that might be able to solve some of this.

[812] Yeah, well, we'll see about that.

[813] These things are very hard to solve.

[814] When did you decide to become a middle -aged male fashion icon?

[815] They love it.

[816] They love it.

[817] Yeah, well, you never know.

[818] You never know what you should attend to, you know.

[819] like I would say that I've always worn a suit to lecture with and I experimented with buying relatively high quality suits.

[820] I didn't know what I was doing really so it took quite a long time to learn.

[821] I wouldn't say that fashion has been a preoccupation of mine and I probably had the proclivity to consider it something of somewhat lesser importance and I'm not saying that that was justifiable but then when I thought about this tour you know when I became aware that this tour was a possibility I thought well and it was also the case for working on 12 Rules for Life and marketing it I mean my basic attitude and it was the attitude that I shared with my publishers was you know leave no stone unturned I was going to try to make this as as I was going to do everything I could to make this work as well as possible and so I thought well I'm going to go talk to you know 50 ,000 people or 100 ,000 people I might as well buy a good suit well you know what I mean it didn't seem I was kind of guilty about it because some of the suits I bought were way more expensive than I thought anyone sensible from northern Alberta should ever spend on a suit so I felt bad about it and I thought it was sort of an unwarranted luxury but by the same token I thought well you know I really am as I've indicated when I first came out on stage like I'm very I think it's a great privilege to speak to all of you you know I think this has been an unbelievable gift for me to have this opportunity and I wanted to do everything I possibly could to indicate that, you know, I was taking it with due seriousness and attending to all the details because it's important if you're doing something that might be of significance to attend to all the details.

[822] And so, and, you know, maybe it makes me 2 % more effective or something like that to come out and be closed properly.

[823] And that's worth at that extra edge.

[824] And if there's 50 decisions like that, then that makes you 100 % more effective.

[825] And, you know, 50 decisions isn't that many.

[826] And so that's the story of fashion icon.

[827] You know, one of the things that's happened is that lots of people who come to these lectures dress up.

[828] Lots of the young guys that come up when I meet people afterwards, you know, and lots of them are wearing two -piece or three -piece suits, and they look pretty damn sharp, you know.

[829] It's kind of nice to see young people dress like adults.

[830] And so I didn't expect that, but it's good, and they're happy.

[831] And I say, look, you're looking good.

[832] And they smile and they think, yeah, well, I put some effort into it, you know.

[833] And it's nice to have at least one more avenue to encourage people, young people, to grow the hell up, you know, because it's better than being an old child.

[834] This is interesting.

[835] Can someone find true joy in a career that only provides income and no sense of purpose?

[836] Well, I would say there's an internal contradiction in that question.

[837] You know, because the second part of the question sort of negates the first.

[838] Can you find true joy if, what's the end of it exactly?

[839] If the job only provides income and no sense of purpose?

[840] Yes, I would say no is the answer to that question.

[841] But then I would also, I'm going to answer it in a different way because I think the question, there's something else lurking in the question, in the question.

[842] First of all, only income.

[843] Well, that's not so only if your family depends on it.

[844] You know, and so sometimes something takes on a meaning because for a secondary reason.

[845] You know, maybe you're working at a job that isn't as fulfilling for you existentially as it might be, but at the moment, that's what you have to contend with because there are people depending on you and the fact that they're depending on you and that you're fulfilling that obligation can lend what you're doing meaning and that's perfectly reasonable that it's lent meaning in that manner.

[846] So context matters as we discussed in detail tonight and it would be better if you could find something that had a certain amount of intrinsic meaning as well as paying the bills But then I would also say, the question's artificial in some sense, because there's almost, it's very difficult to find a job that's so shallow that you can't derive something profound from it.

[847] You know, and I had lots of working class jobs when I was younger.

[848] I really liked working in restaurants, and I was a dishwasher for a long time, and then I was a short -order cook.

[849] and you know those are entry -level working -class jobs well perhaps not the cook part but the dishwasher part certainly but you know there was some real satisfaction this is something i learned when i was about 13 there was some real satisfaction in doing that job properly you know and the consequence of doing it properly i worked with a real hard -ass old german chef and his wife he was a real son of a bitch when i first started working well you know they'd get dishwashers and they'd all quit after a couple of days.

[850] And so you come in as a new employee under those circumstances, and you're kind of treated with a bit of content like you're disposable.

[851] But I didn't quit.

[852] And God, I was there to like two in the morning trying to catch up on all the damn dishes because I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

[853] And I struggled through that for about a week.

[854] I remember going home and talking to my father.

[855] I was about 13 or 14.

[856] I said, look, I don't know if I can.

[857] do this damn job.

[858] I'm working as hard as I can.

[859] I'm like, there are five hours after I'm supposed to be, and I'm still catching up.

[860] I said, I'm working as hard as I could.

[861] Well, after about a week, the chef took pity on me because he thought I wasn't going to run off, and he just showed me how to do it, how to organize all the dishes, and then, like, I was three hours ahead after that.

[862] And then I got to know the cooks, and I got to know the, you know, the chef, and I got to know the owners, and they all treated me like I was an adult, and I got to have, What were very high quality relationships when I was a teenager, that really helped me out a lot, like looking back on my teenage life, the best thing I did was work.

[863] And so, even in a job that's trivial, there are things you can do if you pay attention that elevate it beyond the trivial, because you're almost always working with other people, and there's things that you can do to make that better or worse, and then all of a sudden it's not trivial.

[864] you know and dishes have to be washed and meals have to be made and and then you know if you work as a line cook a short order cook there's a big difference between doing that right and doing it wrong you can make one dismal and wretched meal had one tonight as a matter of fact at the hotel i'm staying at you know they took this steak and just tortured the bloody thing to death it was it was barely edible and very annoying you know because it could have been decent and you know you can you can contribute your little hell to the world if you're bitter and resentful as a cook or you can do so I wouldn't you know there's this idea that Alexander Solzhenitsyn talked about it's an old especially an orthodox Christian idea but it's a deep idea and the idea is that you know each of us is the center of the world which I and I believe that to be the case and that wherever you are at the center and there are things that you can do in that position that are better than you think they could be.

[865] You're not as powerless in a powerless position as you think you are.

[866] I mean, I know there's gradations of power.

[867] I'm not trying to be naively optimistic about this, but I've seen this time and time again, you know, that people in menial jobs, let's say, in menial, pointless jobs, start to do them well.

[868] And then all of a sudden they're neither menial nor pointless, and their springboards for further movement.

[869] Lots of young people have come up to me often in restaurants.

[870] It's quite funny because, well, I go to restaurants and sometimes they recognize me and they say, you know, I've been putting some of your ideas in operation at this job and I've had three promotions in the last six months.

[871] It's like, yeah, no kidding, man, you've got a trajectory established so that's not trivial.

[872] So I think it's a rare job that's so constraining that you can't find something profound and meaning full in it.

[873] And if it is that job, then you should leave.

[874] If, you know, if you are in a situation where that can't happen, then you should leave.

[875] All right, we got time for one more, so I want to get the right one here.

[876] Can one of you please ask Shapiro to speak slower?

[877] That would just ruin it.

[878] You know, I've had the, I've had the great fortune, I think, of meeting two of the world's fastest talkers, right?

[879] Shapiro being one and Camille Pellia being the other and it's one of my dreams to get them in the same room.

[880] So I've proposed that, you know, because it'd be lovely to see because I don't know who would win.

[881] So because she's a force of nature that woman, man. It's unbelievable.

[882] She's so fast verbally.

[883] And Shapiro, he's in the same sort of league.

[884] So, yeah.

[885] No, you wouldn't want him to talk slower.

[886] That would just ruin the fun.

[887] On that note, guys, I'm going to get out of the way.

[888] Make some noise for Jordan Peterson, everybody.

[889] Thank you guys very much.

[890] Thank you very much.

[891] It was a great pleasure being here.

[892] I appreciate you all coming out.

[893] If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief, or his newer bestseller, 12, rules for life and antidote to chaos.

[894] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B Peterson podcast.

[895] See Jordan B Peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[896] And check out Jordan B -Peterson .com slash personality for information on his new course.

[897] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[898] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend.

[899] Thanks for tuning in.

[900] Talk to you next week.

[901] 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