Resolving the Science Religion Problem

[0] Welcome to Season 2, Episode 38 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

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

[2] Girl who only eats meat and does extended fasting.

[3] Believe it or not, my brother is basically completely normal.

[4] He's probably adopted, or he takes after my mom's side.

[5] I haven't figured out which.

[6] Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life lecture, recorded in San Jose on January 22nd, 2019.

[7] I've named it resolving the science religion problem.

[8] Last week, I walked on the beach for the first time with no pain in almost 12 years.

[9] I had my ankle replacement re -replaced last January, and that is kind of a hellish surgery.

[10] I was awake during it too because I opted out of general anesthesia.

[11] About a quarter of the way into the surgery, I regretted that, but hey, I survived.

[12] Anyway, the surgeon fixed the problem, the problem being a crooked ankle replacement, installed 10 years prior.

[13] Isn't that crazy?

[14] So after about a half a mile walking in the sand, I literally cried with appreciation.

[15] It was beautiful.

[16] I had overlaid my experience of beaches with sadness and hatred and frustration, and that's gone now.

[17] It's a hell of a lot easier when you're not in pain.

[18] Sometimes the beauty in life is overwhelming.

[19] I just wanted to share that with everybody because it was really overwhelming and It made my day.

[20] Exciting news.

[21] Dad is launching his very first e -course on December 17th, 2019.

[22] It's available for pre -sale currently.

[23] A lot of people have been asking us for a more structured and condensed resource where they can learn about personality without needing to spend 30 -plus hours watching videos, reading resources, etc. So earlier this year, we recorded a new video series that will be packaged as an online course with eight videos, supplementary materials, including lecture notes, additional reading materials and resources, transcripts, a free license to the Understand Myself Personality Assessment and an exclusive discussion group, all designed to give you an in -depth look and understanding of your personality.

[24] Personality is my favorite topic in psychology.

[25] It's worth checking out if you've been intending to learn about personality and want to do it in a concise and structured format.

[26] Dad's released a lot of information about personality on YouTube for free, but this is a is a more concise structured way of learning and feature some information on personality differences between genders so that's cool go to jordan b peterson .com slash personality to check it out if you're listening to this podcast before december 17th 2019 we're currently offering a presale for a 15 % discount on the course at $120 if you're interested this is a great opportunity to get it at a lower price or buy it for someone for Christmas even hopefully you find it cool i did i sat in on all the last lectures, even though I had food poisoning at the time.

[27] Imagine getting food poisoning when you only eat one thing.

[28] Not ideal, but I still sat through the lectures.

[29] They're that good.

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

[31] Resolving the science religion problem, a Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[32] It's been a while since I talked to a large audience, so I talked to an audience in Zurich a week ago, but that was in a completely different time zone.

[33] So, And I was just trying to recapitulate in my imagination what it is that I was trying to do with 12 Rules for Life and with my first book, Maps of Meaning.

[34] And so I was laying that out, and I think I'll walk through that again.

[35] I kind of get warmed up to the topic.

[36] It's a complicated thing to lay out in total.

[37] So the first issue is, I think, that these are issues that everybody knows, but all these issues that I'm going to lay out are related.

[38] So the first issue that everybody knows is that there's a conflict between religion and science.

[39] And so that's a conflict that that's torn at the heart of our culture for about 500 years.

[40] especially as scientific progress has become more self -evident.

[41] And there's been a lot of really good things about that, obviously.

[42] Science has driven a technological revolution, and it's radically improved our standard of living, our material well -being, and it's very difficult not to think of that as a good thing.

[43] And one of the things that's really remarkable about that is that it's accelerating by all appearances.

[44] It really took off in the late 1800s and that it's happening everywhere in the world.

[45] And so there's been an unbelievably rapid economic transformation throughout the world, especially in the last 20 years.

[46] So, you know, the bulk of the population in the world now is middle class.

[47] And starvation is virtually a thing of the past, although not entirely, although, and even extreme privation, from a material perspective, is declining very rapidly.

[48] The UN defines extreme privation as existence on less than a dollar 90 a day in today's dollars.

[49] And that's declined 50 % since the year 2000, which is absolutely phenomenal.

[50] And the UN projects that it will be eradicated completely by the year 2030.

[51] And just to put things in perspective, in the West, before 1895, the typical person lived on a dollar a day.

[52] So that's less than the current UN standard for extreme privation.

[53] And so the technological revolution that's been driven in large part by the dawn of scientific thinking has radically altered the West and its standard of living.

[54] But now is doing the same thing everywhere else.

[55] in the world.

[56] So, you know, here's another example.

[57] The child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952.

[58] So that's just absolutely beyond belief.

[59] So this is a good thing.

[60] But the conflict between the scientific viewpoint and the religious viewpoint still exists.

[61] Carl Jung, who's a favorite thinker of mine, a psychoanalytic thinker who lived who wrote and thought through most of the 20th century, he died in 1960, so I guess for the first six -tenths of the 20th century, he believed that what had happened about 500 years ago was that as science developed out of alchemy, which was like the dream, the alchemy was the dream out of which science emerged.

[62] Alchemy was the dream that you could discover a material substance, which was the philosopher's stone, that would confer upon everyone health, wealth, and longevity.

[63] And, of course, there is no philosopher's stone, but the dream was correct, because the dream was, that if we studied the material world with enough care, that we could discover something that would produce wealth and health and longevity, and that did happen.

[64] And so, sometimes things that occur in actuality have to be dreamed before they occur.

[65] Alchemy had an ethical aspect and a practical aspect, let's say, and the practical aspect exploded up into the scientific revolution.

[66] and gave us this incredible technological power.

[67] But it was Jung's belief that the ethical element remained undeveloped, and that that was dangerous, and that we were now in a situation and have been for quite a while, where our technological power outstrips our ethical knowledge.

[68] And part of that's manifested in an uncertainty about ethics in general, about how to behave, about whether there are, about where, whether there is even an answer to the question how to behave, about whether or not there is such a thing as an ethic that isn't morally relative or arbitrary in some sense.

[69] And I think you see that manifested, that critique manifested most particularly in the postmodern doctrine, which claims with some justification that there's a very large number of ways of looking at the world, and that none of those ways, There's no straightforward way to determine which one of that multitude of manners that you can view the world is correct.

[70] Now, there's a corollary problem.

[71] You have the religion and science problem, and you have a philosophical problem that David Hume pointed out, which is that it isn't obvious how you can derive an ought from an is.

[72] and an ought is an ethic.

[73] It's how you should behave, and it is is a description.

[74] And you could think of the scientific method as an attempt to describe what is, and the ethical endeavor as an attempt to describe what ought to be.

[75] And according to Hume, there was a gap between the two, and it wasn't a straightforward thing to bridge.

[76] And that seems to be right, so there's a parallel problem, the is aught problem, the science, religion, problem.

[77] So I was very interested in those parallel sets of problems, and that's what I've been trying to address, and that's what I wrote about in 12 Rules for Life and in maps of meaning.

[78] I started to hypothesize a long while back that in a similar manner that there were two ways of looking at the world.

[79] you could look at the world as a place of objects a place of material objects or you could look at the world as a place to act and that that's the same idea reflected in a different way the world as a place of objects that's the is world that's the world science describes and the world as a place to act that's the ought world and then I realized too and this was partly from studying the psychoanalysts but also from studying literature literature first and the psychoanalyst second was that the world as a place to act is laid out in stories and then maybe the world is like a stage that's set for a drama you know you walk in like you walked in tonight you look at the stage and there's nothing there's no characters on it to begin with There's just the objects on the stage, the speakers and the chair, and the stage is set.

[80] And you could know everything about the stage setting from a scientific perspective, and you still would have no idea what drama was about to take place.

[81] Yet the purpose of the stage and the purpose of the play is the drama and the stage setting, the objects are in some sense almost peripheral to that.

[82] And you know that too, because you've seen plays and movies, and you know how many different ways you can set a stage for the drama to occur.

[83] The question is, well, what constitutes the drama?

[84] So I got interested in the drama.

[85] And because the point of the stage is the play and not the setting.

[86] I got interested in the drama.

[87] I started to understand that the drama had a structure.

[88] and that the structure, just like the material world has a structure, just like there's a periodic table of the elements, there's a periodic table in some sense, there's a periodic table of dramatic personae.

[89] And if you understand them, you can start to understand how to act in the world.

[90] And there is actually a way to act in the world that's not arbitrary.

[91] When I was writing Maps of Meaning, which was my first book, I was trying to address a question that, It was a postmodern question, although I didn't know it at the time.

[92] I hadn't conceptualized it at the time.

[93] The question was this.

[94] I was obsessed by the fact that the world had divided itself into two armed camps, the armed camp that constituted essentially the Soviet Union, but you could say the entire communist bloc and then the West, and that each of those two blocks had arranged their societies according to different axiomatic presumptions and were at odds with one another.

[95] And it wasn't obvious, the world wouldn't have divided itself into those two arm camps, if it was obvious which of those two sets of axiomatic presuppositions were more valid, let's say.

[96] Or maybe the problem was even deeper than that, which was those were just two arbitrary sets of axiomatic presuppositions out of a very large number of potential sets and they just happened to be the ones that emerged and they were at odds with one another.

[97] And so I started to study the understructure of the two belief systems to see if one of them had more validity than the other.

[98] If I could figure that out, if there was something underneath at least one of them.

[99] And what I discovered, I think, was that the belief system that characterized the societies of the West, the underlying belief system wasn't arbitrary.

[100] It was just correct.

[101] And I think the fact that the Soviet Union fell apart so precipitously in 1989 is actually evidence of the unplayability of the Soviet game.

[102] That's a really good way of thinking about it.

[103] There are some games you can play and there's some games you can't play.

[104] If you iterate some games, they degenerate, and if you iterate others, they improve.

[105] And that's actually one of the pieces of evidence that suggests that one system is preferable to another, that you can iterate it across time and that that's actually not a degenerating game but an improving game and you know if you have a relationship with someone and it's an iterated game right it's iterated because it repeats if you have a permanent relationship with someone a marriage a friendship a relationship between siblings relationship between you and your children you want to be able to interact with them in a matter that doesn't get worse across time maybe at least it stays flat but it would be better if it would even got better, that would be lovely, and your successful relationships are at least ones that maintain the status quo, but the great ones improve across time.

[106] And so there are ways that you can act, interact iteratively with people in a manner that sustains and sustains that iteration and fortifies it.

[107] And so some games aren't playable.

[108] and some games are, some games improve as you play them, and the game that the communists played was a degenerating game.

[109] And that meant that there was something wrong with it.

[110] And that meant that at least that way of looking at the world wasn't as good as any other way, which is interesting, because at least it suggests that there's one way of looking at the world that isn't as good as another way, right?

[111] And that's a bothersome fact in some sense if you're a moral relativist, because as soon as there's any evidence that one game isn't as good, is another, you've got some evidence that some games are better than others, and so then you have some evidence that there's a rank order, let's say, of games.

[112] When Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Nazi Holocaust, he talked about the Nuremberg trials, and he believed that the Nuremberg trials were among the most important events of the 20th century.

[113] It's a similar, he's making a similar case, and the reason he believed that was because the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, you have to think about whether or not you believe this, because there's a cost to believing it, and there's a cost to not believing it, so there's no scot -free way out of this conundrum.

[114] The conclusion of the Nuremberg trials was that there were some things that you could not do if you were human without being subject to moral sanction, regardless of your cultural milieu.

[115] Those were what have come to be known as crimes against humanity.

[116] So the Nuremberg trials made it axiomatic that some things were wrong, independently of the moral structure within which you were raised.

[117] Or another way of thinking about it was that no matter what moral structure it was within you were...

[118] It was that you were raised within.

[119] there was something common across all of them that would make the sorts of things that the Nazis did wrong by any reasonable standard.

[120] Now, you don't have to believe that, but if you don't believe that, then that puts you in an awkward position with regards to the Holocaust, say.

[121] Well, that's what I mean by a cost.

[122] It's like you either admit that there's something wrong, or you admit that there wasn't anything wrong with the Holocaust and that it was just an arbitrary cultural decision, one of many such arbitrary cultural decisions and of no more distinction than any other.

[123] And that seems like a, well, it seems like a conclusion that in the main we're not willing to draw.

[124] So, maybe there is a difference between wrong and right.

[125] And that's worth thinking about.

[126] And then if, and maybe that difference is real, whatever real might mean.

[127] Now, let's think about the problem of how to act.

[128] I think about it biologically, because that's what I tried to do when I was writing maps of meaning, and in 12 Rules for Life, there's also a biological approach.

[129] I drew on a lot of religious stories when I wrote both those books, which is a strange thing to do if you're also trying to think biologically.

[130] because those two things don't necessarily exist harmoniously.

[131] You know, the more strict scientific types, Sam Harris being a good example, aren't comfortable with religious presuppositions.

[132] And so the attempt to use a physical standpoint derived from physics and a standpoint derived from biology, say, social science, for that matter, and to ally that with religious presuppositions is an awkward marriage.

[133] But it can be done.

[134] I should tell you a story about Jean Piaget.

[135] Jean Piaget was probably the greatest child developmental psychologist of the 20th century.

[136] He invented the field.

[137] He had a messianic crisis when he was a young man, and he was tormented by the contradiction between science and religion, and decided that he was going to devote his entire life to rectifying that.

[138] And I actually think he managed it to a large degree.

[139] You know, it's not generally how Piaget is discussed.

[140] When we discuss great people, we generally don't discuss them in their full peculiarity.

[141] You know, you remember a while back, Elon Musk was sort of savaged for smoking, you know, one -one thousandth of a joint on Joe Rogan.

[142] And I thought it was so comical because Elon Musk is a very strange person.

[143] Now, obviously, you have to be a strange person to build an electric car and then shoot it on your own rocket out into space.

[144] Right?

[145] Seriously, like, either one of those things is really strange, but the joint probability of doing both is way below zero.

[146] So I thought it was constantly.

[147] that people went after Musk because I thought, yes, well, we like our insane geniuses, predictable and normal.

[148] It's like, anyways, Piaget did do a very good job of reconciling religion with science, although people don't really know that because that isn't how they read Piaget.

[149] And I think that's partly because they're afraid of that if you read someone who's really a genius, the depth of their genius will frighten you.

[150] And so you'll only read down into their work till you hit what you can't abide, and then you'll stop.

[151] And that's the case with Freud, and it's the case with Jung, for sure, because if you read Young and you have any sense, you're terrified instantly.

[152] And then it's also the case with Piaget.

[153] And so I'll weave in what it was that he discovered.

[154] Okay, so we're going to think about this biologically, so let's say, well, one of the problems, problems you have is what the world is made out of.

[155] Now, one of the things that's kind of interesting about human beings is that we really didn't care about that very much for a very long period of time, right?

[156] I mean, we didn't invent science until about 500 years ago.

[157] Now, you can argue about that, and you could say that the precursors for the scientific viewpoint were laid down by the Greeks, and then we could say, okay, well, that was 2 ,500 years ago, or 3 ,000 years ago.

[158] But who cares?

[159] If you're thinking biologically, the difference between 500 years and 3 ,000 years is, that's no difference at all, you know, because human beings in their current form are 150 ,000 years old.

[160] That's the estimate.

[161] There's been creatures basically identical to us genetically for 150 ,000 years.

[162] And we diverged from chimpanzees seven million years ago.

[163] And so, you know, and so we were vaguely human for seven million years.

[164] And so in the span of, let's say, two million years, just to, you know, give the later proteins.

[165] proto -humans, their advantage, the difference between 500 years and 3 ,000 years is completely trivial.

[166] The point is that we didn't invent anything approximating science, and we weren't concerned about the structure of the material world in any objective sense until like yesterday.

[167] And really, and we managed to survive without it.

[168] And then, of course, there's the 3 .5 billion years of biological evolution that precede.

[169] even the emergence of human beings that existed in the absolute absence of anything approximating a scientific perspective which indicates that well A that that perspective appears to not be strictly necessary from the purpose from the perspective of survival and and B that something else something else was occurring to provide us with the knowledge that we needed during all of that time And so, when I read Nietzsche decades ago, he talked about how philosophy emerged.

[170] So he was an analyst of philosophers.

[171] And it was Nietzsche's idea that what the typical philosopher, perhaps even including him, but perhaps not him, produced, was an unconscious recapitulation of their own knowledge.

[172] that they felt that what they were doing was coming up with a rationalistic account of the structure of behavior, let's say.

[173] But really what they were doing was noticing how they acted and then describing that and providing it with a rationale.

[174] And so it was bottom up, not top down.

[175] So we might think about that.

[176] We might think about that because one of the things we do know is that however it was that creatures, animals, us, figured out how to act over the millions of years that they figured out how to act it was bottom up and top not top down the simpler the animal the less capable it is of thinking and so if you go back far enough and you don't have to go back that far you get creatures that can't think at all like there's lots of complex multi -celled organisms that don't have much of a nervous system and they don't think they just act they just exist and so what whatever they're doing isn't a consequence of thinking.

[177] It's a consequence.

[178] The fact that they know what they're doing is a consequence of something other than thinking.

[179] And even more sophisticated animals, mammals, let's say, act and don't think.

[180] And so, but they act in sophisticated ways.

[181] And so I was reading some of the ethologists about the same time.

[182] Ethologists are scientists who study animal behavior.

[183] They're not like laboratory behavior.

[184] They don't put the animals in a controlled environment and do experiments on them.

[185] They just use naturalistic observations.

[186] So you can imagine Jane Goodall was an ethologist, for example, and she studied chimpanzees.

[187] This guy named Conrad Lorenz in Scandinavia, he studied geese and other animals' dogs as well.

[188] And so these are people who just, and Diane Fossi, I think it was Fossi.

[189] Was she guerrillas?

[190] I think it was gorillas.

[191] Yeah, yeah.

[192] And so.

[193] So you go out and watch the animals and, you know, Goodall, when she was watching chimpanzees, what she'd do is, well, she'd look for regularities, but she also found herself telling stories.

[194] You know, so you read Goodall's accounts of chimpanzees.

[195] You get stories about what the chimpanzees are like, and she gave them all names, and you can see the personalities of the chimpanzees emerging in her accounts.

[196] And that's kind of interesting, because what it suggests is that if you're looking for how a set of creatures, how a set of creatures interact, you tend to look at them as if their personalities acting something out, acting out patterns.

[197] Say like wolf pack.

[198] If you watch a wolf pack for a while, you're going to see patterns, regular patterns of behavior that characterize the interactions between the wolf pack.

[199] Has to be that case, right?

[200] Because otherwise the wolves couldn't predict one another.

[201] If there was no regularity, there'd be no predictability.

[202] There'd just be.

[203] And so what happens is the wolves settle into predictable patterns of behavior.

[204] The chimpanzees settle into predictable patterns of behavior.

[205] And then you can tell stories about those predictable patterns of behavior.

[206] And you might even be able to derive rules.

[207] You might say, well, it's as if the chimpanzees are acting out this rule.

[208] So here's a rule that you might act out if you were a wolf.

[209] So let's say you're a male wolf and there's another male wolf around and you decide that you're going to have a dominance dispute, right?

[210] And so you puff up your fur and you look rough and tough and you bear your teeth and you growl and you threaten and you terrify.

[211] And maybe you even fight to some degree, but not too much because you don't want to damage each other because the person, the wolf that you're fighting with, you might need tomorrow to bring down a moose with.

[212] So that's an interesting thing to consider.

[213] because it constitutes a limit on the kind of aggression that's allowable in the pursuit of dominance.

[214] Anyways, two wolves would go at it, and usually what happens is one wolf decides it's not worth the risk, and he rolls over and presents his throat to the victor.

[215] And that basically means something like, well, I'm useless and weak and you can tear out like a prey animal, and you can tear out my throat if you...

[216] so choose and the dominant wolf acts out something like well I know you're useless and weak but I might need you to hold down a moose tomorrow so despite the fact that you're not good for anything you might as well get up and we'll get on with it now obviously the wolves aren't thinking that but that's how they act and so if you're watching and you can think and you describe how they act that might be how you describe it and so I just described it In words, I used what would be approximately the description of a rule.

[217] The rule would be, if you're a wolf pack, don't kill each other because you need the whole pack to pull down your prey.

[218] Right, right.

[219] So there's a constraint on striving.

[220] And you can lay it out in a rule like manner.

[221] And I told a little story, and then I derived a rule from it.

[222] And that's how we act emerged.

[223] So, each of us pursues our own motivated behaviors.

[224] But then we aggregate together in groups.

[225] And the fact that we aggregate together in groups put certain restrictions on how it is that we manifest our motivated behavior.

[226] Partly because we depend on each other, like the wolves depend on each other.

[227] And so what that means is that there's an ethic that emerges out of the interactions between those motivations, and that ethic manifests itself in a certain kind of pattern behavior.

[228] Now that's about as far as it goes for wolves, because they don't sit around at the campfire at night and talk about how it is that wolves interact with one another.

[229] But human beings do that, see, because we've got this next level of cognitive ability, imaginative ability.

[230] It's not just pure abstract thought.

[231] It's not like we've got motivation like other animals, and then we've got the patterns of behavior that emerge as a consequence of the interaction of those motivated behaviors.

[232] We then have the ability to watch ourselves like we would watch a wolf pack, right?

[233] Because an anthropologist, an ethologist, can go out in the wild and watch a wolf pack or watch a chimpanzee troop and take notes.

[234] Say, look, this is what's...

[235] Here are the patterns.

[236] I can write down the patterns.

[237] And when I write down the patterns, then I'm telling a story, and out of the story, I can abstract...

[238] rules.

[239] But the chimps aren't doing that.

[240] The wolves aren't doing that.

[241] But the human being can do that.

[242] And then the human being can say, well, it's as if wolves follow these rules, which they don't, because they're wolves, and they don't follow rules.

[243] But they do manifest patterns.

[244] And the patterns emerged as a consequence of something approximating an evolutionary competition.

[245] Now, it's interesting, it's very interesting to think this through.

[246] So Franz de Wall, who's a another ethologist who studies chimpanzees, he's written a bunch of great books.

[247] You might be interested in them if you're interested in this sort of thing.

[248] He's been interested in the emergence of morality among chimpanzees.

[249] And so, one of the things DeWall has found was that, and this is partly why the postmodernists who insist that the fundamental motivator for the structure of hierarchies is power, are wrong.

[250] Okay, so I'm going to repeat that.

[251] They're wrong.

[252] Okay, it's seriously important because one of the claims that's tearing our culture apart is that our hierarchical structure, which would be our entire culture, is an oppressive patriarchy, and that the people who occupy the positions, especially the higher positions, let's say, in the hierarchy, got there because they exercise power.

[253] That's a fundamental claim of Foucault, for example, who's an absolutely reprehensible scholar on about 15 different dimensions.

[254] But one of them is his narrow -minded insistence that power is the only justification for hierarchical position.

[255] Now, I think that's patently absurd in the case of human beings, but I won't go there to begin with because I might as well make the case that it's patently absurd in the case of animals where it's more like power.

[256] De Waughal has shown, well, you got the example of the wolf already.

[257] It's like you just can't be savaging up your packmates because all you do is demolish the structure within which you live.

[258] And that's true for wolves You know, it's true for chimpanzees.

[259] So Duol has shown in sequence of observations.

[260] And chimps are a good test case because we're rather chimp -like.

[261] Now, well, there are our closest biological relatives, right?

[262] So it's only a 7 million -year gap between us and the common ancestor.

[263] So if you're going to look at any animal and derive conclusions about the base, Mesal motivations of human beings, well, then it would be chimps that you would look at.

[264] You might look at Bonobos, too.

[265] Although the differences between Bonobos and chimps has been exaggerated by all appearances.

[266] In any case, you can get to the top if you're the roughest, toughest, toughest, meanest, most physically powerful and cruelest chimpanzee.

[267] But your rule is unstable.

[268] And there's a reason for that.

[269] And the reason is, is that chimpanzees, the males, females as well, but the fundamental hierarchy for chimps is male.

[270] Chimpanzees are competitive, but they're also cooperative.

[271] They spend a lot of time grooming each other, and they actually have long -term friendships.

[272] And it turns out that two chimpanzees that are three -quarters as tough as the toughest chimpanzee make a pretty vicious.

[273] set of opponents if you get a little bit too tyrannical.

[274] And the problem with pure power for the chimpanzees is that if you're a chimp that climbs to the top as a consequence of nothing but psychopathic dominance, you have no allies and no friends because you don't engage in any cooperative behavior, you'll have an off day and your two lieutenants, each of whom is three quarters as strong as you, will band together and tear you into bits.

[275] It's an unstable medium to long -term solution, power.

[276] And I see no reason to assume that exactly the same thing isn't the case with human beings.

[277] If it doesn't work for chimpanzees and it doesn't work for wolves, why in the world would it work for human beings?

[278] Especially when you think that our hierarchies are way more complicated than the hierarchies that characterize animals, and that we do all sorts of things with our hierarchies that animals don't do.

[279] I mean, most of you have jobs, and most of those jobs are, while you're performing most of those jobs, you're not doing things that any animal would have done, would do now, or that any human being would have done 300 years ago.

[280] Now, there's certain exceptions to that.

[281] Some of you might farm, but even if you're doing that, you're not doing it in a way that people did it 300 years, ago, whatever your job is, and it's likely to be very abstract, you're pursuing some goal that is fairly distant from a fundamental biological motivation.

[282] It's very abstract.

[283] And you're actually creating something of at least sufficient value so that other people will trade with you for it.

[284] And the idea that you're going to move up in your hierarchy of production by exercising something like psychopathic power, is, I think that's insane to think that.

[285] You know, and I think about plumbers, for example.

[286] I've used this joke before, but I like it, so I'm going to use it again.

[287] It's like, you know, if the post -modernness were right, this is how you'd hire a plumber.

[288] First of all, the plumbers would have all banded together, although they'd be fighting within themselves, because, of course, there's nothing but power.

[289] But they would have all banded together, and they'd go from door to door, And they basically knock on your door and tell you that if you didn't hire them, there was going to be hell to pay.

[290] It'd be like mafia plumbers.

[291] And then you'd pick the roughest, toughest, toughest plumber who's best at exercising power to not fix your pipes.

[292] Because why would he be interested in fixing your pipes?

[293] He'd just be interested in pretending to fix your pipes and taking your money, which is how you'd expect a mafioso plumber to operate.

[294] But that isn't how it works, right?

[295] I mean, if you hire virtually anyone in your day -to -day life, you suss out their reputation for their ability to provide the service that they promised to provide, which is predicated on their skill, their technical skill, their skill as workmen and craftsmen.

[296] It also is predicated on their ability to generally work in some reasonably interactive way with their employees because otherwise they don't stay in business for that long, and also to treat their customers with a modicum of reciprocal respect, or their reputation is savaged immediately, and they fail.

[297] And so, this patriarchal structure that we hypothetically all occupy that's fundamentally predicated on oppression and power breaks apart into something approximating cooperative, competence when you look at any of its sub -components.

[298] You know, you don't have power -hungry massage therapists, you know?

[299] Well, I don't understand how the entire structure can be a power -dominated, oppressive patriarchy if none of the sub -components are.

[300] It doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm not saying at all that within large hierarchies, there isn't room for relatively psychopathic people to now and then manage a certain amount of success.

[301] You know, you know that as a hierarchical structure grows in size, that pure power politic players have a higher probability of success.

[302] But all that happens to large organizations when they get completely dominated by people who are using power in politics as a means to climb to the top is that they precipitously collapse because you end up with no one.

[303] who can actually perform the function that the structure is supposed to perform, and a whole plethora of people who are good at doing nothing but playing politics.

[304] And then the company dies.

[305] And the thing is, companies die all the time.

[306] The typical Fortune 500 company lasts 30 years.

[307] And the reason for that often is that it's functional for a while, and then it gets corrupted by internal politics, or it gets blind, or it can't keep up, or whatever it is, and that's the end of it.

[308] It falls apart and, you know, breaks into its constituent elements and they reformulate.

[309] Maybe there's some new companies that come out of it, but it's not a permanent structure by any stretch of the imagination.

[310] And so, I don't think there's any reason whatsoever to assume, well, we can think this through.

[311] Are our hierarchical structures based on power, or are they based on competence?

[312] And look, the answer is, well, they're a bit based on power, You know, because you shouldn't be naive about this.

[313] Hierarchical structures can, and do, become corrupt in some ways.

[314] And we have to keep an eye on that all the time.

[315] But my sense is that by and large, things work.

[316] You know, I mean, here we are.

[317] We're sitting in this hall, and there's 3 ,000 of us.

[318] And you all got here, because your car's worked.

[319] And the highways work, sort of.

[320] I mean, I was in a traffic jam for like an hour and a half getting here.

[321] But, you know, that's what happens when you drive somewhere at 5 o 'clock.

[322] You know, you can predict that.

[323] So they worked, and the lights are on, and they seem to work, and that's no trivial thing.

[324] And it looks like the big TV screen is working.

[325] And you're all sitting here peacefully, not engaging in an overt power struggle, as far as I can tell, even though there's a hierarchical arrangement of seats, right?

[326] You accept that, you know, and you're all, and you accept the fact that, you know, some of you paid a premium for sitting closer, and that that seems to be a reasonable way of distributing somewhat scarce resources, and, you know, everyone in here is behaving peacefully, and, like, all this seems to work quite, nicely and so since this all works it's very difficult for me to understand how it's not predicated at least in large part on competence and then of course there's the other evidence which is well you know a lot of you are older than the average person would have been when he or she died throughout the history of the entire human race and so that seems to be working out pretty good for you and you're none of you are skinny and quite the contrary So there are more obese people in the world now than there are starving people by quite a substantial majority.

[327] And I think that that's worth quite the celebration, even though it's perhaps not exactly optimized.

[328] But it's definitely better than the alternative.

[329] And, you know, by and large, we're moderately healthy.

[330] And most women don't die in childbirth like they used to.

[331] And most children don't die within a year of being born.

[332] like they used to, not very long ago.

[333] And so things seem to be working.

[334] Not so bad, given what a bloody catastrophe life is and how difficult it is to get things to work and how fragile people are and how short -lived we are intrinsically and how vulnerable we are to suffering.

[335] We're not doing so bad, you know?

[336] We must be doing something right.

[337] and the well this is the thing this is the thing that I would say enrages me about let's call them universities and it's the intellectual and moral laziness of the of the resentful victimization power postmodern doctrine because look it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the history of humanity is a bloody nightmare.

[338] And, you know, to lay that only at the feet of human beings, I think, is a mistake because life in the natural world is a bloody nightmare.

[339] And so you can't just blame that on people.

[340] You know, like you can blame it on people to some degree.

[341] We take a bad thing, or we take a deadly thing, or a dangerous thing, and we can make it worse, and we definitely do.

[342] that but it's not like the problem is simple to begin with because it's clearly the case that at every moment the planet is trying to kill you and eventually it will succeed and so that's a big problem and it's reasonable for us to group together and to try to stop that and well we're doing that we're cause we cause some trouble you know we pollute things and we break things and we don't play as good an iterating game as we might.

[343] But, you know, for creatures that only last eight decades and have a lot of trouble during all eight of those, we don't do that badly.

[344] And we've got our reasons for being as perverse and useless as we are.

[345] And all of that shouldn't be laid at our feet, even though we need to take responsibility for it.

[346] And so one of the things that I find extremely disturbing about the emergent hypothesis that our culture is nothing but an oppressive patriarchy is that it's ungrateful beyond comprehension and worse if you adopt that stance well it bestows a certain amount of benefit on you I mean first of all if you posit that there's nothing in your culture except what's correct then that immediately elevates you above all of it as that sort of critic, right?

[347] It's like, well, I'm taking the high ground, and I'm looking at the entire history of humanity and calling it unacceptable.

[348] It's like, well, that's fine, I suppose, except it isn't necessarily obvious that you could do any better, and you probably haven't, you know, and maybe you could try, although then you might say, well, just trial that trying does is make it worse, and participate.

[349] in that terror, doing anything of any utility, is just playing the power game and making it worse.

[350] It's like, yeah, well, you know, pardon me for being a bit skeptical about your motivation.

[351] I don't think that moral virtue is that easily come by.

[352] And I think that there are difficult problems to solve and that you could contend with the world and try to solve them instead of complaining about the fact that they haven't been solved properly.

[353] And that if you did manage to solve a problem or two, which you might, then maybe you'd have the right to stand up as a more global critic.

[354] But until then, well, what's Rule 6?

[355] You should get your house in order before you criticize the world.

[356] And that's no simple thing.

[357] So the moral virtue thing, that's annoying, because I don't think that moral virtue should be unearned.

[358] You know, this is why I'm an admirer of the doctrine of original sin.

[359] You know, I think you're stuck with some concept of original sin, no matter how you think.

[360] I mean, I see that in the atheistic environmentalist types, and I know all environmentalist types aren't atheistic, and I know that all environmentalist types aren't reprehensible either.

[361] But there's a nice selection of atheist environmental types who are reprehensible.

[362] And they're...

[363] Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're usually the ones that say that the world would be better off if there were fewer people on it, which is not a sentiment that I find particularly attractive.

[364] And it's also one...

[365] If, when I meet someone who utters that, I always think two things.

[366] One is, well, why are you still here, then?

[367] That's the first one.

[368] And the second one is, just exactly who it is that you're planning on getting rid of, and how exactly would you go about doing that if you had the opportunity?

[369] So, I don't find that...

[370] I don't know.

[371] find that particularly admirable and I don't think that there's any sympathy in it you know because I think that we should have some sympathy for ourselves so that's rule 2 is you should treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping or rule 3 which is you should make friends with people who want the best for you it's like corrupt and useless as you are you do have a hard lot you know and so there's some reason for sympathy and to say that human beings are nothing but the spoilers of the planet is to miss half the story which is as fast as we're trying to kill mother nature she is returning the favor in spades so that doesn't mean that we should be foolish about it you know and a certain balance has to be attained but it's nice to look at both sides of the equation before you lay out too much judgment you know back in the late 1800s, Thomas Huxley, who was eldest Huxley's great -grandfather and also a great defender of Darwin, was commissioned by the British Parliament to do a study on oceanic resources, because there was some concern at that point that human beings might be overfishing.

[372] And his conclusion was, the oceans were so bountiful and plentiful, and human beings so comparatively small in number and power, that there wasn't a hope in hell that we would ever be able to put a dent in the vast resources of the ocean.

[373] That was only at the beginning of the 20th century.

[374] You know, we didn't get to the point where we could harvest on an industrial scale until after World War II.

[375] You know, that's only about 70 years ago.

[376] And so it's only been 50 years, say, maybe a bit more, 60 years, maybe since 1960, that we woke up to the fact that some of our actions, had now become powerful enough to be considered on a global scale.

[377] And that's within the lifetime.

[378] That's within my lifetime.

[379] That's within the lifetime of a single person.

[380] I don't think we've done such a bad job of waking up since then, and starting to understand that, you know, maybe we have a larger scale moral obligation than we realized before that's proportionate to our technological power.

[381] It's another place where a little bit of sympathy might be in order.

[382] You know, and I mean, LA is a lot cleaner than it used to be in terms of its air quality, and so is London, and, you know, we've made a lot of progress, I would say, in a relatively short time, trying to clean up the mess that we made when we were trying not to die painfully young, you know.

[383] So, all right, well, back to this ethic.

[384] So I'll tell you another study that I really like that's really cool.

[385] So this was a study that was done by a guy named Yak Panksep, and he did it with rats.

[386] And now and then, I love reading animal experimental.

[387] work.

[388] If you want to study psychology, that's what you should read.

[389] You should just read animal experimental work because those people, it's not all good, but some of it's really good.

[390] And some of the people who've done it, they were real scientists.

[391] And this guy, Panksep, he's one of them.

[392] Got another guy's named Jeffrey Gray, who wrote a book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, which takes you like eight months to read.

[393] It's a really hard book, but it's brilliant.

[394] Anyways, Panksep has done a really good job of laying out the fundamental motivational systems and their biology.

[395] I'll just tell you a brief story about that.

[396] The American Psychological Association just came out with its guidelines for the treatment of men and boys.

[397] It's actually, it's like, they're not guidelines, they're not for treatment, and they're certainly not for the improvement of the health of men and boys.

[398] It's an absolutely reprehensible ideological screed on how psychologists have to think politically so they won't be punished by those who accredit them.

[399] That's it fundamentally.

[400] But one of the claims they made They made two claims that are beyond comprehension to me. The first one was that aggression is socialized.

[401] That's the first claim.

[402] And the second claim is that boys are socialized into aggression by men.

[403] Okay, so let's look at those.

[404] This relates to Panksep.

[405] So Panksep outlined a bunch of biological circuits.

[406] So human beings like mammals, but also like even more, what, archaic animals, speaking evolutionarily, have a variety of fundamental biological circuits.

[407] So I can tell you some of them.

[408] Some of them are obvious, and some of them are somewhat surprising.

[409] You have a circuit for pain.

[410] Well, there's no surprise.

[411] You have a circuit for anxiety.

[412] That's circuit, you know, it's a metaphor, obviously.

[413] You have a biological system that mediates anxiety.

[414] All of you have it.

[415] Animals have it.

[416] You have one for something called incentive reward, and that's what moves you towards valued goals.

[417] That's basically associated with positive emotion.

[418] You have one that satisfies you when you consume.

[419] That's a consumatory reward system.

[420] Lust, that's another one.

[421] Thirst, hunger.

[422] Play?

[423] That's cool.

[424] That's a fundamental circuit.

[425] Panksup discovered that.

[426] There's a circuit for care.

[427] that's another one and there's a circuit for rage that's not all of them but that's a good that's a good start rage it's there right from the beginning if you do facial expression coding analysis of infants say an infant learns to recognize its mother and then that's around nine months often or even earlier than that so a person comes into the baby's room and the baby starts to cry because that person isn't the mother and you think Oh, the baby's sad.

[428] It's like, no, the baby isn't sad.

[429] The baby is angry.

[430] That's why it's turning red.

[431] And if you do facial expression coding, it's like the baby is actually...

[432] The baby is cursing internally.

[433] And you already know this because you know that like a two -year -old isn't much older than a baby and two -year -olds have temper tantrums.

[434] And it's not because they're sad, as you can tell perfectly well.

[435] If you just watch a two -year -old have a temper tantrum, it's clear that they're completely possessed by rage.

[436] And that rage circuit, it's exactly right.

[437] That rage circuit is active.

[438] Even before the fear circuit is active, it's activated very early.

[439] And one of the things that's the case is that some children are much more aggressive than others, right from the beginning.

[440] And most of those are boys.

[441] And not all of them, but most of them.

[442] And if you take two -year -olds and you group them together, you find if you take one -year -olds, two -year -olds, three -year -olds, four -year -olds all the way up to 16 and you group them together they don't know each other and then you count aggressive actions the two -year -olds are by far the most aggressive bunch they kick and hit and bite and steal not all of them but but a good chunk of them and so 16 -year -olds don't do that when you put them together and look you're all here and you're not 16 you're like 30 and you're not doing any of that and so two -year -olds man they're aggressive little monsters and it's okay because they're small and soft and what the hell can they do you know so it's it's not like you know it's not it's not it's not blood warfare among two -year -olds but it's just because they don't have the sophistication and the weapons they've got they've got the motivation and it's it's really true it's really true for a subset of them so about five percent of two -year -old boys are hyper -aggressive but what's cool is that almost all of them are socialized into civilized behavior by the time they're four.

[443] And you can define civilized behavior actually quite nicely, using a Piagetian definition, is that other children will play with them.

[444] And that's Rule 5, by the way.

[445] Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

[446] What's your job if you're a parent?

[447] Your job as a parent is to socialize your children so that by the age of three other children will play with them.

[448] Because that means they've learned how to engage in reciprocal social interactions, and that'll start to spiral upward.

[449] So if your child is acceptable as a playmate by the age of three, age of four is the limit, by the way, so you better have it together by then.

[450] Otherwise, they get alienated and isolated, and they don't make friends, and then they never recover from that.

[451] It's not good.

[452] It's not good.

[453] So most kids are socialized, even the hyper -aggressive ones, are socialized into acceptable playmates by the age of four.

[454] And it's men in large, part that do that.

[455] Now, what's the evidence for that?

[456] Well, there's lots of evidence for it.

[457] The evidence among mammals is the use of rough and tumble play, for example, among males and their offspring in order to socialize and civilize them.

[458] But the evidence among human beings is that where do you get aggressive teenagers?

[459] What sort of families produce aggressive teenagers?

[460] Fatherless families.

[461] Right, so let's think about that with regards to what the APA said Okay, because what they said was the opposite of the truth Wasn't even a lie, wasn't even wrong It was they took the truth and then they claimed the opposite On two dimensions, number one, aggression isn't socialized Civilization is socialized Number two, if men were responsible for the creation of aggression among boys then fatherless families would produce boys that were more peaceful, and they don't.

[462] So what the hell?

[463] Fundamentally.

[464] All right, so you have the behavioral pattern that characterizes civilized behavior among wolves or civilized behavior among chimpanzees or civilized behavior among rats.

[465] I'll tell you the rest of the rat story.

[466] So rats like to engage in rough and tumble play, especially juveniles, especially juvenile males.

[467] And we know they like it because they'll work to do it.

[468] So if they know that if a rat has been somewhere and he got to play, and then you put him back there and you make him press a bar to open the door so we can go into where he played, he'll press that bar like mad.

[469] And so that's how you infer motivation among rats.

[470] Will the rat work to play?

[471] You will, right?

[472] Which is why you'll pay for tickets to a basketball game.

[473] Hell, you'll work to watch people play.

[474] Right.

[475] That's very intro.

[476] It's absolutely, like, that's so important.

[477] It's almost unbelievable that you will do that.

[478] I mean, because the question is, well, why?

[479] That's the first question.

[480] Well, seriously, it's like, what the hell?

[481] What are you watching a bunch of pituitary cases go, you know, bang a ball so that they can throw it through a hoop?

[482] And like, you'll pay outrageous sums of money to do that.

[483] It's like, you're not even throwing the damn ball.

[484] You're just like watching them do it.

[485] Can I have the ball?

[486] No. Well, I paid $200 for this ticket.

[487] They don't get the ball.

[488] It's like, you don't get to play.

[489] Okay, well, I'll just watch.

[490] It's like, so that's how important it is.

[491] That's how important play is that you'll work to make money to buy tickets to watch people play.

[492] Right.

[493] Man, that's crazy.

[494] So, but it's fundamental.

[495] And you think about how much of our entertainment is associated with exactly that.

[496] Think, well, we're just doing something random or is there something important going on there?

[497] I mean, it doesn't look that important.

[498] You know, in some sense, it's easy to be cynical about it, but it's foolish because it's crucially important, the fact that we're so wired up to admire fair play that we'll pay for it, will pay for the right just to watch it vicariously.

[499] That's a testament to the degree to which we're civilized and social, because a game is something that's civilized and social.

[500] to Piaget, Piaget believed that most socialization occurred as a consequence of integrating these underlying motivational systems into iterable games.

[501] And that's what you're doing with your kids, right?

[502] When you socialize your kids, when you teach them how to take turns, when you teach them how to play a game, then what you're doing is that you're socializing them into iterated reciprocal interactions with other people.

[503] And that's the fundamental, that's the fundamental, that's the fundamental aspect of ethic, of the ethic.

[504] That's how an ethic emerges from the bottom up.

[505] It emerges in games.

[506] That was Piage's fundamental observation.

[507] Much better than the Freudian hypothesis.

[508] The Freudian hypothesis was basically that human beings learn to inhibit their aggression.

[509] That's not Piage's model.

[510] PSHA's model is no, no, no. You integrate the aggression into a higher order game.

[511] And you know this, because you want an athlete, a good athlete is someone who's got that aggression.

[512] But it's directed, right?

[513] It's not random.

[514] In fact, if you see an athlete manifest, random aggression, you're not happy about that, right?

[515] Maybe you admire them because they're really competitive, highly skilled, really competitive, they're goal -driven, they want to win, but it's all focused on the goal, and, you know, they're cooperating with their teammates, and they're not hogging the ball, they're also facilitating the development of their teammates, and they don't cheat, they don't break the rules, so they're cooperating even with their adversaries, because they're all playing basketball, and they're all playing by the rules, it's all cooperative, That's an ethic.

[516] It's an emergent ethic.

[517] And, you know, the things that we do, what we do in our lives outside of the game is very game -like.

[518] We engage in a cooperative and competitive ethic.

[519] And we know the good players.

[520] We know the good sports.

[521] And that's the bottom -up emergence of an ethic.

[522] And it's also the solution to the post -modern conundrum, as far as I'm concerned, are part of the solution.

[523] Because the post -modernists claim that there's an infinite way of looking at the world.

[524] and there is, and that no way of looking at the world is better than any other way, which is wrong.

[525] The first part's right, because the world's very complicated, the second part's wrong.

[526] There aren't that many ways of playing a game properly.

[527] And you can tell that too, because even if you watch kids play, if you go out and you watch your kids play, you can tell which kids are good sports and which ones aren't.

[528] Right?

[529] That's easy.

[530] And the kids can tell too.

[531] And so you can tell when it doesn't matter what the game is, And if you're a good sport, it's the same across games, which is really another indication of the emergence of a transcendent ethic, right?

[532] The concept, good sportsman, is independent of the game, right?

[533] And it's very much what it is that you want.

[534] It's the dawning of the behaviors that you want from someone who's sophisticated and reciprocal in their day -to -day life.

[535] and it's not, it's by no means arbitrary.

[536] It's, in fact, very tightly constrained.

[537] Back to the rats, so rats like to wrestle.

[538] And so you can get them to work to wrestle, and so they work, and then the door opens, and out they go.

[539] And there's rat A and rat B, and rat A is 10 % bigger than rat B. And so they have a little wrestling match, and rat A, who's the bigger rat, the more powerful rat, pins rat B. And then the postmodern social scientists observing, derive their conclusion.

[540] Power produces dominance, and they publish it.

[541] But they're stupid.

[542] And so then you have a smart scientist, and he thinks, wait a second, you don't just wrestle once if you're a rat.

[543] You wrestle a bunch of times.

[544] And so what happens if you get the rats to wrestle more than once?

[545] Because that's the issue.

[546] And this is the difference between a psychopath and someone who's not psychopathic.

[547] So the thing about being a psychopath is that it's all for you and none for someone else.

[548] But that only works once or twice, you know, depending on the naivity of your target.

[549] And if you're a psychopath, you have to move from place to place.

[550] Because people catch on to your lack of ability to play fair, and they don't get fooled again.

[551] And so psychopaths drift from place to place, and they can find their mark and their victim, but they can't do it.

[552] any stable manner.

[553] It's not a good solution because people track reputation and we're really good at that.

[554] In fact, there are evolutionary psychologists who believe that we have a module for tracking reputation, a cheating detection module and that you don't have to activate that very often before people will remember forever that you did.

[555] So, you got the big rat and the little rat.

[556] Now, the little rat's lost.

[557] Now you separate them.

[558] And then you let them come back and play.

[559] another day.

[560] And they still want to.

[561] Even the little rat wants to.

[562] And so then the little rat goes out in the play field and the big rat's there.

[563] And the little rat has to ask the big rat to play.

[564] And you think, well, how does a rat do that?

[565] It's like, well, you've been in dog parks and you see what dogs do.

[566] Maybe you've had dogs.

[567] You know how dogs act when they want to play.

[568] They sort of bounce around.

[569] They kind of look at you, you know, and they bounce.

[570] And if you have any sense, you all laugh because you recognize that.

[571] There's something playful about that.

[572] It's like I'm looking at you, signaling intent, and this is sort of like a little dance, and the idea is, why don't you come and do this with me?

[573] And if you have any sense, it's a big dog, and if you have any sense, the dog does that, and you kind of whack it on the side of the head, and it's not really that you hit it, and the dog knows.

[574] And it sort of bites you, but not really, because, you know, the dog knows how to play.

[575] If it had owners that, I could say that weren't psychologists, because the worst dog I ever met was the dog that a psychologist owned.

[576] And it couldn't play at all.

[577] It was just, it was just, it would just bite you.

[578] It's like, what?

[579] This is your dog?

[580] You're going to have clients?

[581] Not good.

[582] So anyways, the little rat has to ask the big rat to play, because the big rat's cool, because he won once.

[583] So he gets to sit there and, like, look cynical and pretend that he's ignoring the little rat, but he wants to play to.

[584] So the little rat bounces around, and the big rat thinks, he tosses away his cigarette butt and gets off the street corner and plays.

[585] And because he's 10 % bigger, he could pin the little rat, and maybe he does that.

[586] But if you pair them repeatedly, and the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30 % of the time, the little rat stops asking him to play.

[587] And that is so cool.

[588] I read that.

[589] It just blew me away.

[590] I thought, really?

[591] You're kidding.

[592] You're kidding.

[593] There's an emergent ethic of fair play in wrestling rats that's how fundamental that ethic is.

[594] I mean, they're rats, for Christ's sake.

[595] It's not like they're the world's most ethical animal, right?

[596] They're rats, and still, they have to play fair.

[597] So, what was I doing in Maps of Meaning and in 12 Rules for Life?

[598] Well, we're motivated creatures.

[599] Each of those motivations has to pursue its own goal, because otherwise we die.

[600] But then those motivations have to pursue its own goal, because otherwise we die.

[601] to get integrated.

[602] They have to get integrated within you.

[603] You kind of got that more or less under control by the time you're about to.

[604] You start to become something approximating the integration of your motivations.

[605] But that hasn't happened socially yet.

[606] That happens between two and four.

[607] You have to integrate that integrated structure with everyone else doing the same thing.

[608] And how do you do that?

[609] Well, you do that by learning how to play.

[610] How to play fair?

[611] And there's a reciprocity that goes along with that.

[612] I'll give you another example.

[613] So here's a game that behavioral economists have been playing with people.

[614] So here's the game.

[615] So you take person A and you take person B and you say to person A, look, I'm going to give you $100 and you have to share it with the person next to you.

[616] And you can offer them a fraction of it, whatever fraction you want.

[617] And if they take it, you get the $100 and you split it with them.

[618] But if they refuse it, you guys get nothing.

[619] so you say okay well here's a hundred dollars how much you're going to offer the person next to you now classical economists would say well you offer them a buck well why well because you're trying to maximize your own self -interest because that's what you are you're you're to maximize your own self -interest and why would they say no it's like they get a buck and that's better than nothing Why would they say no?

[620] So you say, well, will you take a dollar?

[621] And the person next to you says, well, they think things they won't say.

[622] But what they say is no. But what happens is if you do this experiment, is that isn't what people do.

[623] They offer 50%, cross -culturally.

[624] It's somewhere between 40 and 60%, but it's basically 50.

[625] 50 -50.

[626] And then the other person accepts it.

[627] And you might think, well, that's because you don't need the money.

[628] It's like, let's say, you're starving and you have the $100 and you offer your compatriot here a dollar.

[629] And like, he needs something to eat.

[630] So it's like, yeah, I'll take the dollar.

[631] It's like, no. The poor people are more likely to tell you to go to hell.

[632] Because along with having no money, they'd like not to have no pride.

[633] Right?

[634] You got to hang on to something.

[635] And so you can at least still tell someone to go to hell when they deserve it, and that's something.

[636] And so even in the simple behavioral economist games, you get emergent evidence for automatic reciprocity.

[637] Well, and why would you offer 50 % to the stranger?

[638] And the answer is, well, because it's a good rule of thumb.

[639] You know, if you want people to play with you across time, if you want to engage in as many games as possible, and you want to participate in the ethic properly, then what you want to, you're aiming at is something approximating reciprocity.

[640] The rules that I outlined, you know, in 12 rules for life.

[641] That's what they're based on.

[642] They're based on this observation.

[643] So this is how it works, is that we have these motivational systems and we get them together, maybe around the age of two.

[644] And then we integrate them with the motivational systems of others.

[645] We do that by producing games.

[646] And the games get more and more sophisticated, more multiplicitous.

[647] But there's a game ethic that emerges out of that.

[648] And it governs reciprocity.

[649] And the game ethic is something like, well, we're all equally valuable players and everybody deserves a fair shot.

[650] And you've got to bring your best skills to the table, but you have to play fair and you have to play reciprocally.

[651] And that works across time.

[652] And then you get an archetype that emerges out of that, which is something like the fair player.

[653] It's a variant of the archetype of the hero.

[654] And that's the thing that people are driven to imitate and admire.

[655] And this is hardly a mystery.

[656] I mean, look at, you think, why do we pay professional athletes the inordinate sums that we pay them?

[657] Well, it's possible it's because they're modeling something of crucial importance in a dramatic manner.

[658] You know, like a basketball game, a professional basketball game is a very complex drama.

[659] And the drama is skill, but also the ethic of fair play.

[660] And we're all observing that because we bloody well need to understand it.

[661] And then you see that echoed.

[662] So you get the emergent ethic, and that's the pattern of behavior.

[663] And then you get representations of that.

[664] You get abstract representations of it.

[665] That's what we're doing when we play these abstract games.

[666] It's also what we do when we tell stories and we make movies and we present plays.

[667] And we do everything that's dramatic is that we take a look at that behavioral patterns.

[668] that's emerged, that works, and then we try to represent it, because we need to understand it.

[669] It's like, well, what are you like if you're the hero of a story?

[670] And what are you like if you're the anti -hero?

[671] You're the cheat, you're the crook, you're the deceiver, you're the liar, you're the poor sport, you know, you're the person who fixes the game, and we abstract out those patterns, and then we try to imitate them.

[672] And all of that drives our, that's what drives our knowledge of the ethic of behavior.

[673] We elaborate that up.

[674] We elaborate that up into drama, and we elaborated into ritual, and we elaborated into religious representations.

[675] You have stories that emerge of people who play properly and people who play improperly, and then you abstract out the essence of that.

[676] You say, well, what's it like to play properly?

[677] If you were doing it perfectly, what would you be like?

[678] Well, you'd be a target for emulation and imitation, rather than a target for rejection.

[679] You get the archetype of the hero and the adversary, come out of that.

[680] It's a completely different way of constructing a knowledge system And I think that what I've been trying to do in maps of meaning and trying to do in 12 rules for life is to lay that out Say, look, there is a system of knowledge that underlies the ethic that we need to adopt to conduct ourselves properly in life And I'll close with this.

[681] Here's one way of conceptualizing it, I think And this has to do with Rule 7 do what is meaningful not what is expedient.

[682] It also has to do with Rule 8, which is tell the truth, or at least don't lie.

[683] Well, it's not so easy to tell the truth, but you can tell when you're lying and you can stop doing that.

[684] And then maybe you approximate the truth across time by doing that.

[685] You need to do, you need to take care of yourself, but then you think, well, what does that mean exactly?

[686] It's not a nine -ran sort of individualism.

[687] And the reason for that is, what self do you mean?

[688] There isn't just you.

[689] There's you now and you tomorrow and you next week You next month and you next year and you in a decade and you're old You're a community and you're a creature unlike other creatures in that you're aware of your own duration And so if you're going to treat yourself properly, you're already playing a game It's a game you play with yourself across time It's an iterated game and you better play fair Because otherwise the you that is to come is going to suffer for it And so there's no individual You outside of the community because just because of the way you are, you're already a community and so you have to take that into account When you tell your child to play fair and be a good sport You know, you're doing that partly because then they're better for their teammates, but you're doing it mostly because then they're better for themselves Across time, right?

[690] You have an intimation of that So you got to treat yourself fairly So the game's on with you, but then you know you the self.

[691] Well, what is that?

[692] You think what are you more important than you?

[693] your family?

[694] That isn't how people act.

[695] You know, if you take the typical parent, you say, well, look, I'm going to shoot you or I'm going to shoot your son.

[696] Well, the typical parent is going to say, well, take me. You think, well, which is you then exactly?

[697] Is it, you know, if what's you is what's most dear to you, what you identify with more, well, then you identify more with your kids and a tremendous amount with your parents and your siblings.

[698] It's like you're extended.

[699] You've got the community of yourself across time, but then you've got your family, and then you've got your family across time, right?

[700] And then, well, there's that, but then your family's nested inside a community, and you've got the same issue there, you've got the community now, all those other people, and the community across time.

[701] So what's the ethic of fair play?

[702] It's like, do what's good for you, in a way that's good for the future you, in a way that's good for your family and your future family, in a way that's good for the community and the future community.

[703] All of that, that unbelievably complex sequence of nested games.

[704] That's what you have to play properly.

[705] And you admire people who do play it properly, and you can see it, even though you might not be able to articulate it.

[706] It's too complicated.

[707] It would say it's a matter of balancing out things properly.

[708] And then to close, I would say, this is something to think about, too.

[709] We have an instinct for meaning.

[710] You know, you can get meaningfully engaged in things.

[711] You might get meaningfully engaged in a basketball game, for example.

[712] You might ask yourself, Why, and I shed some light on that, until you're watching play progress properly, right?

[713] Maybe you follow the team across an entire championship, because you don't give a damn about one basket successfully managed, and you don't give a damn about one game successfully won, you want the sequence of games to be won successfully.

[714] So the championship manifests itself, and you're deeply embedded in that, you know?

[715] You might track all the statistics because you care who wins the game that's iterated across time and you're dramatizing that.

[716] You're playing that out even though you can't articulate it.

[717] You don't really understand it.

[718] It still grips you like it should because that is what should grip you.

[719] Say it grips you and it's engaging and it's meaningful and the reason for that.

[720] Okay, imagine this.

[721] This is the final part of this.

[722] Well, let's say you managed to take care of yourself and your family.

[723] your community all at the same time.

[724] Let's say that you imagine you're successful as a consequence of that, like in the broad sense, right?

[725] You've got what it takes to live a rich life.

[726] What's that going to do to you biologically?

[727] It's like, well, isn't that going to make you an attractive partner?

[728] Isn't that make you an attractive mate?

[729] And isn't the case that if you're an attractive mate because you act out that partner that you're more likely to succeed from an evolutionary perspective, you're more likely to reproduce your children are more likely to live and so what that implies across time is that not only does that ethic exist not and not only do we recognize it but that the degree to which you're able to manifest that self in your life is associated directly with your long -term success on on a biological speaking on the biological time frame speaking in the biological time frame.

[730] Okay, so imagine that.

[731] Then imagine this.

[732] Imagine that you have instincts that guide you towards that pattern.

[733] I could tell you two of those.

[734] One is your conscience.

[735] And it says, you've fallen off the path.

[736] And what's the path?

[737] Well, the path is that balanced harmony.

[738] And you've deviated from it.

[739] You've betrayed yourself.

[740] You've cheated yourself.

[741] You're not playing the game properly with yourself.

[742] And something responds.

[743] And so that's the punishing end of it.

[744] And the positive end is, well, if you've got the pattern right, and it's deeply and meaningfully engaging.

[745] And that's not an illusion.

[746] You know, one of the problems that modern people have is that we think that the sense of meaning is an illusion.

[747] Because we think it's arbitrary or constructed.

[748] But there's no evidence for that.

[749] The evidence is quite the contrary that that sense of deep, meaningful engagement isn't rational at all.

[750] It's way deeper than that.

[751] And it signifies that you're where you should be doing what you should be doing.

[752] you know, with a bit of a whack from time to time from your conscience.

[753] It says, well, walk the straight and narrow path, right?

[754] The line between chaos and order.

[755] And get everything balanced harmoniously around you because that's where you should be and that's what you should be doing.

[756] I think that's portrayed in music.

[757] You know, music lays out patterns, layers of patterns.

[758] They're all interacting harmoniously.

[759] And you can put yourself in sync with that, you know, physically even, because you tend to dance to it, and you dance to that, and that's meaningful, and it's because you've allied yourself properly with all that multitudinous pattern, and it's a symbolic manner of, what would you say, acting out being positioned properly in the midst of all that complexity, and that's signified by that sense of meaning.

[760] Well, so that's a much better story than a moral relativist story, or a nihilist story, a hopeless story.

[761] It's like you have a sense of, you have an instinct for meaning, guided by conscience, that puts you in the proper orientation to yourself extended across time, to your family extended across time, and to your community extended across time.

[762] And if you attend to that, then you act out things properly.

[763] And then not only do you feel better, psychologically, you're facing the obstacles you need to face, you're playing the game properly.

[764] That's great.

[765] psychologically gives your life some purpose and some higher meaning and protects you from anxiety and pain wonderful but it's not just psychological because if you do that you're also actually useful right you're taking care of yourself so you won't die you're taking care of your family so they don't suffer unduly and you're doing that in a manner that actually strengthens the community right you're taking on your role as a sovereign and responsible citizen and that helps actually It sets the world right psychologically, but it also sets the world right.

[766] So what's so arbitrary about that?

[767] I don't see anything arbitrary about that.

[768] I think it's long past time that we stopped regarding any of that as arbitrary.

[769] It's self -evident.

[770] Play the game properly.

[771] Right?

[772] It's important.

[773] Everyone knows it.

[774] You do it, your life is meaningful and worthwhile.

[775] And you've got something to wake up for.

[776] And you've got some anxiety set at bay.

[777] At least you've got something worthwhile to do in the face of what you're terrified of.

[778] That's something.

[779] And then there's important problems to solve, and you're solving them.

[780] It's like, well, that's separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

[781] I say, well, there's something to our civilized society that's integral and valuable and that we need to protect and identify and then act out and support and manifest more and not criticize to death and leave nothing at all in the ashes.

[782] Well, and that's why I was working on Maps a Meeting and Twelve Rules for Life.

[783] Thank you very much.

[784] These are the most comfortable chairs we've had.

[785] Yeah, geez, wow.

[786] Maybe we'll just stay here.

[787] Yeah, this is nice.

[788] It's good to be back, brother, right?

[789] Yeah, it's good to be back.

[790] You feeling good?

[791] Yeah, it's good to be here.

[792] Thank you all for coming.

[793] It's much appreciated.

[794] All right, we got a ton of questions because this is a tech town and they actually know how to use They know how to use Slydo.

[795] That's good.

[796] Yeah, it's impressive.

[797] I like this first one.

[798] Now that you've destroyed Patreon, will the two of you save the internet?

[799] No, no, definitely not.

[800] There's no saving the internet.

[801] I don't know even if we'll save Patreon, you know, because this is part of the not taking the moral high ground too easily.

[802] You know, Dave and I and Harris as well, Dave talked to Sam in particular, but Dave and I talked about what had happened after Patreon banned Carl Benjamin Sargon of Akad and we thought, well, that's just not acceptable.

[803] And so we decided to stop using the platform and I'd been working on a program that was had some parallel functions to Patreon that we were producing for a slightly different reason, and we started talking about the possibility that could be repurposed as a Patreon alternative, which is something that we're working diligently on and which will happen.

[804] But I would never claim that the solution to the problem is going to be straightforward.

[805] So, we'll see what we can manage.

[806] I think Dave and I'll start using the platform in about month and a half something like that.

[807] But we don't know, maybe Patreon's time has come and gone already because there's already ways of supporting individual contributors.

[808] Maybe it's not possible to aggregate a tremendous number of creative people together in a single platform without attracting undue negative attention and the immediate probability of this kind of sensorial action.

[809] We don't know, right, because these technologies are all so new.

[810] You know, It looks like YouTube and Facebook are wrestling now, and Twitter as well, wrestling now with the conundrum that they've been presented with, which is, well, there's a billion opinions, and some of them are rough.

[811] What do we do about the rough opinions?

[812] And the answer might be, like in the frontier heyday of YouTube, when it wasn't run by a giant and increasingly rigid corporation, then anything went.

[813] But as soon as it's corporatized and systematized, then that can no longer work.

[814] I mean, you really think the Internet could have ever started if it would have been regulated to begin with?

[815] I mean, just think about it.

[816] What drove the Internet?

[817] Porn.

[818] No, but I'm dead serious, right?

[819] That's what happened, is that the Internet exploded over its first, say, 10 years of development, of public development, like, what was the percentage of porn on the internet for the first 10 years?

[820] It was some ridiculous amount.

[821] I didn't know that there was porn on the internet.

[822] Oh, yeah.

[823] See, everyone learned something at a Jordan Peterson event.

[824] You see what I'm saying?

[825] Yeah.

[826] So I don't know if it's a solvable problem, but we're going to try.

[827] I think at least we're going to try to build a platform where if you're on it, we're not going to kick you off arbitrarily.

[828] I think we can promise that.

[829] See, let me just say one more thing about that.

[830] So I went and talked to one of the guys who runs one of these big social communication systems, you know, social networks.

[831] And they'd faced a lot of pressure because ISIS was using the platform to recruit.

[832] Okay, so you got to ask yourself if you're a free speech absolutist You're going to let if you're in a war You're going to let the enemies of your state recruit with your platform And if the answer is no Which seems like a reasonable answer Well then you've already opened the door right Say there are things that should Could be censored Then the question is as soon as you open that door Like, it's Pandora's box.

[833] It's like, okay, well, what about what's right next to that?

[834] Maybe that would be, like, certain forms of communication about radical religious fundamentalism, because that's right next door.

[835] And then there's something right next door to that.

[836] It's like, those lines are really hard to draw.

[837] So it isn't obvious to me how large -scale social networks are going to solve this problem.

[838] And we're wrestling with that, trying to come up with a solution that's reasonable.

[839] So far, it's something like, you'll be able to stay on the platform unless you break an American law, an actual law, right?

[840] And I don't even know if that's a good enough guideline, but, well, it might have to be.

[841] But we'll see.

[842] And as for fixing the net, well, that's a no -go that is.

[843] So we offer whatever content we can manage, and people seem to enjoy it.

[844] and that's working pretty well, but that's about all we can manage.

[845] And maybe that's all that's all that's manageable.

[846] And there's porn out there, so who knew?

[847] The APA recently defined traditional masculinity as toxic, conflating virtuous and harmful aspects.

[848] How can we reverse this dangerous ideological progression?

[849] Oh, the purpose was to conflate the virtuous and the harmful.

[850] That's the purpose of the document, is to blur the distinction between the two.

[851] And I think the real reason, I'm writing an article about this right now, I think the actual reason was to damage the virtuous.

[852] Because that's the best way of doing it, right?

[853] If you want to damage the virtuous, what you do is you conflate it with the harmful.

[854] It doesn't hurt the harmful any to have it conflated with the virtuous.

[855] So let's say your real motivation is like a seriously deep resentment and spite.

[856] And that the best way to manifest that is to take, the virtuous and conflate it with the pathological and to take down the virtuous and maybe that's because you can't bloody manage it on your on your own that's what it looks like to me so welcome to season two episode 38 of the jordan b peterson podcast i'm macaela peterson dad's daughter and collaborator girl who only eats meat and does extended fasting believe it or not my boyfriend brother is basically completely normal.

[857] He's probably adopted, or he takes after my mom's side.

[858] I haven't figured out which.

[859] Today's episode is a 12 Rules for Life lecture, recorded in San Jose on January 22nd, 2019.

[860] I've named it resolving the science -religion problem.

[861] Last week, I walked on the beach for the first time with no pain in almost 12 years.

[862] I had my ankle replacement re -replaced last January, and that is kind of a hellish surgery.

[863] I was awake during it too because I opted out of general anesthesia.

[864] About a quarter of the way into the surgery, I regretted that, but hey, I survived.

[865] Anyway, the surgeon fixed the problem, the problem being a crooked ankle replacement, installed 10 years prior.

[866] Isn't that crazy?

[867] So after about a half a mile walking in the sand, I literally cried with appreciation.

[868] It was beautiful.

[869] I had overlaid my experience of beaches with sadness and hatred and frustration, and that's gone now.

[870] It's a hell of a lot easier when you're not in pain.

[871] Sometimes the beauty in life is overwhelming.

[872] Just wanted to share that with everybody because it was really overwhelming and it made my day.

[873] Exciting news, Dad is launching his very first e -course on December 17th, 2019.

[874] It's available for pre -sale currently.

[875] A lot of people have been asking us for a more structured and condensed resource where they can learn about personality without needing to spend 30 plus hours watching videos, reading resources, et cetera.

[876] So earlier this year, we recorded a new video series that will be packaged as an online course with eight videos, supplementary materials, including lecture notes, additional reading materials and resources, transcripts, a free license to the Understand Myself Personality Assessment and an exclusive discussion group, all designed to give you an in -depth look and understanding of your personality.

[877] Personality is my favorite topic in psychology.

[878] It's worth checking out if you've been intending to learn about personality and want to do it in a concise and structured format.

[879] Dad's released a lot of information about personality on YouTube for free, but this is a more concise structured way of learning and feature some information on personality differences between genders, so that's cool.

[880] Go to Jordan B. Peterson .com slash personality to check it out.

[881] If you're listening to this podcast before December 17th, 2019, we're currently offering a presale for a 15 % discount on the course at 100.

[882] $120.

[883] If you're interested, this is a great opportunity to get it at a lower price or buy it for someone for Christmas even.

[884] Hopefully you find it cool.

[885] I did.

[886] I sat in on all the lectures even though I had food poisoning at the time.

[887] Imagine getting food poisoning when you only eat one thing.

[888] Not ideal, but I still sat through the lectures.

[889] They're that good.

[890] Check it out at jordan B. Peterson .com slash personality.

[891] Resolving the science religion problem.

[892] A Jordan B. Peterson 12 Rules for Life lecture.

[893] It's been a while since I talked to a large audience, so I talked to an audience in Zurich a week ago, but that was in a completely different time zone.

[894] So, and I was just trying to recapitulate in my imagination what it is that I was trying to do with 12 rules for life and with my first book, Maps of Meaning.

[895] And so I was laying that out, and I think I'll walk through that again.

[896] I kind of get warmed up to the topic.

[897] It's a complicated thing to lay out in total.

[898] So the first issue is, I think, that these are issues that everybody knows, but all these issues that I'm going to lay out are related.

[899] So the first issue that everybody knows is that there's a conflict between religion and science.

[900] and so that's a conflict that's torn at the heart of our culture for about 500 years especially as scientific progress has become more self -evident and there's been a lot of really good things about that obviously science has driven a technological revolution and it's radically improved our standard of living our material well -being, and it's very difficult not to think of that as a good thing.

[901] And one of the things that's really remarkable about that is that it's accelerating, by all appearances.

[902] It really took off in the late 1800s, and that it's happening everywhere in the world.

[903] And so there's been an unbelievably rapid economic transformation throughout the world, especially in the last 20 years.

[904] So, you know, the bulk of the population in the world now is middle class.

[905] And starvation is virtually a thing of the past, although not entirely.

[906] And even extreme privation, from a material perspective, is declining very rapidly.

[907] The UN defines extreme privation as existence on less than $1 .90 a day in today's dollars.

[908] And that's declined 50 % since the year 2000.

[909] which is absolutely phenomenal.

[910] And the UN projects that it will be eradicated completely by the year 2030.

[911] And just to put things in perspective, in the West, before 1895, the typical person lived on a dollar a day.

[912] So that's less than the current UN standard for extreme privation.

[913] And so the technological revolution that's been driven in the current UN standard for extreme privation.

[914] large part by the dawn of scientific thinking has radically altered the West and its standard of living, but now is doing the same thing everywhere else in the world.

[915] So, you know, here's another example.

[916] The child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952.

[917] So that's just absolutely beyond belief.

[918] So this is a good thing.

[919] But the conflict between the scientific viewpoint and the religious viewpoint still exists.

[920] Carl Jung, who's a favorite thinker of mine, a psychoanalytic thinker who lived, who wrote and thought through most of the 20th century.

[921] He died in 1960, so I guess for the first six -tenths of the 20th century.

[922] He believed that what had happened about 500 years ago was that as science developed out of alchemy, which was like the dream, the alchemy was the dream out of which science emerged, alchemy was the dream that you could discover a material substance, which was the philosopher's stone that would confer upon everyone health, wealth, and longevity.

[923] And, of course, there is no philosopher's stone, but the dream was.

[924] correct because the dream was that if we studied the material world with enough care that we could discover something that would produce wealth and health and longevity and that did happen.

[925] And so sometimes things that occur in actuality have to be dreamed before they occur.

[926] alchemy had an ethical aspect and a practical aspect let's say and the practical aspect exploded up into the scientific revolution and gave us this incredible technological power but it was Jung's belief that the ethical element remained undeveloped and that that was dangerous and that we were now in a situation and have been for quite a while where our technological power outstrips our ethical knowledge And part of that's manifested in a certain, in an uncertainty about, about ethics in general, about how to behave, about whether there is even an answer to the question how to behave, about whether or not there is such a thing as an ethic that isn't morally relative or arbitrary in some sense.

[927] And I think you see that manifested, that critique manifested most particularly in the postmodern doctrine.

[928] which claims with some justification that there's a very large number of ways of looking at the world and that none of those ways there's no straightforward way to determine which one of that multitude of manners that you can view the world is correct now there's a there's a corollary problem you have the religion and science problem and you have a philosophical problem that David Hume pointed out which is that it isn't obvious how you can derive an ought from an is and an ought is an ethic it's how you should behave and an is is a description and you could think of the scientific method as an attempt to describe what is and the ethical endeavor as an attempt to describe what ought to be.

[929] And according to Hume, there was a gap between the two, and it wasn't a straightforward thing to bridge.

[930] And that seems to be right.

[931] So there's a parallel problem, the is aught problem, the science -religion problem.

[932] So I was very interested in those parallel sets of problems, and that's what I've been trying to address, and that's what I wrote about in 12 rules for life and in maps of meaning.

[933] I started to hypothesize a long while back that in a similar manner that there were two ways of looking at the world.

[934] You could look at the world as a place of objects, a place of material objects, or you could look at the world as a place to act, and that that's the same idea reflected in a different way.

[935] The world as a place of objects, that's the is world, that's the world's science, describes, and the world as a place to act, that's the aught world.

[936] And then I realized too, and this was partly from studying the psychoanalysts, but also from studying literature first and the psychoanalyst second, was that the world as a place to act is laid out in stories.

[937] And then maybe the world is like a stage that's set for a drama, you know?

[938] You walk in, like you walked into, Tonight, you look at the stage and there's no characters on it to begin with.

[939] There's just the objects on the stage, the speakers and the chair, and the stage is set.

[940] And you could know everything about the stage setting from a scientific perspective, and you still would have no idea what drama was about to take place.

[941] Yet the purpose of the stage and the purpose of the play is the drama and the stage setting, the objects are in some sense almost peripheral.

[942] that.

[943] And you know that too because you've seen plays and movies and you know how many different ways you can set a stage for the drama to occur.

[944] The question is, well, what constitutes the drama?

[945] So I got interested in the drama.

[946] And because the point of the stage is the play and not the setting.

[947] I got interested in the drama.

[948] I started to understand that the drama had a structure and that the structure just like the material world has a structure just like there's a periodic table of the elements there's a periodic table in some sense there's a periodic table of dramatic personi and if you understand them you can start to understand how to act in the world and there is actually a way to act in the world that's not arbitrary when I was writing maps of meaning which was my first book.

[949] I was trying to address a question that was a postmodern question, although I didn't know it at the time.

[950] I hadn't conceptualized it at the time.

[951] And the question was this.

[952] I was obsessed by the fact that the world had divided itself into two armed camps, the armed camp that constituted essentially the Soviet Union, but you could say the entire communist bloc and then the West.

[953] And that each of those two blocks had arranged their societies according to different axiomatic presumptions and were at odds with one another.

[954] And it wasn't obvious, the world wouldn't have divided itself into those two arm camps, if it was obvious which of those two sets of axiomatic presuppositions were more valid, let's say.

[955] Or maybe the problem was even deeper than that, which was those were just two arbitrary sets of axiomatic presuppositions.

[956] of a very large number of potential sets and they just happened to be the ones that emerged and they were at odds with one another and so I started to study the understructure of the two belief systems to see if one of them had more validity than the other if I could figure that out if there was something underneath at least one of them and what I discovered I think was that the belief system that characterized the societies of the West the underlying beliefs system wasn't arbitrary.

[957] It was just correct.

[958] And I think the fact that the Soviet Union fell apart so precipitously in 1989 is actually evidence of the unplayability of the Soviet game.

[959] That's a good way of, that's a really good way of thinking about it.

[960] There are some games you can play and there's some games you can't play.

[961] If you iterate some games, they degenerate, and if you iterate others, they improve.

[962] And that's actually one of the pieces of evidence that suggests that one system is preferable to another, that you can iterate it across time, and that that's actually not a degenerating game, but an improving game.

[963] And, you know, if you have a relationship with someone, it's an iterated game, right?

[964] It's iterated because it repeats.

[965] If you have a permanent relationship with someone, a marriage, a friendship, a relationship between siblings, relationship between you and your children, you want to be able to interact with them in a matter that doesn't get worse across time.

[966] Maybe at least it stays flat, but it would be better if it even got better, that would be lovely, and your successful relationships are at least ones that maintain the status quo, but the great ones improve across time.

[967] And so there are ways that you can act, interact iteratively with people in a manner that sustains and sustains that iteration and fortifies it.

[968] and so some games aren't playable and some games are some games improve as you play them and the game that the communists played was a degenerating game and that meant that there was something wrong with it and that meant that at least that way of looking at the world wasn't as good as any other way which is interesting because at least it suggests that there's one way of looking at the world that isn't as good as another way right and that's a that's a bothersome fact in some sense if you're a moral relativist because as soon as there's any evidence that one game isn't as good as another, you've got some evidence that some games are better than others, and so then you have some evidence that there's a rank order, let's say, of games.

[969] When Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Nazi Holocaust, he talked about the Nuremberg trials, and he believed that the Nuremberg trials were among the most important events of the 20th century.

[970] It's a similar, he's making a similar case.

[971] And the reason he believed that was because the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials, and you have to think about whether or not you believe this, because there's a cost to believing it and there's a cost to not believing it.

[972] So there's no scot -free way out of this conundrum.

[973] The conclusion of the Nuremberg trials was that there were some things that you could not do if you were human, without being subject to moral sanction, regardless of your cultural milieu, right?

[974] Those were what have come to be known as crimes against humanity.

[975] So the Nuremberg trials made it axiomatic that some things were wrong, independently of the moral structure within which you were raised.

[976] Or another way of thinking about it was that, no matter what moral structure it was within you were it was that you were raised within there was something common across all of them that would make the sorts of things that the Nazis did wrong by any reasonable standard now you don't have to believe that but if you don't believe that then that puts you in an awkward position with regards to the Holocaust say well that's what I mean by a cost.

[977] It's like you either admit that there's something wrong, or you admit that there wasn't anything wrong with the Holocaust and that it was just an arbitrary cultural decision, one of many such arbitrary cultural decisions, and of no more distinction than any other.

[978] And that seems like a, well, it seems like a conclusion that in the main we're not willing to draw.

[979] So, maybe there is a difference between wrong and right.

[980] And that's worth thinking about.

[981] And maybe that difference is real, whatever real might mean.

[982] Now, let's think about the problem of how to act.

[983] I think about it biologically, because that's what I tried to do when I was writing maps of meaning.

[984] And in 12 Rules for Life, there's also a biological approach.

[985] I mean, I drew on a lot of religious stories when I wrote both those books, which is a strange thing to do if you're also trying to think biologically, because those two things don't necessarily exist harmoniously.

[986] You know, the more strict scientific types, Sam Harris being a good example, aren't comfortable with religious presuppositions.

[987] And so the attempt to use a physical, A standpoint derived from physics and a standpoint derived from biology, say, social science, for that matter, and to ally that with religious presuppositions is an awkward marriage.

[988] But it can be done.

[989] I should tell you a story about Jean Piaget.

[990] Jean Piaget was probably the greatest child developmental psychologist of the 20th century.

[991] He invented the field.

[992] He had a messianic crisis when he was a young man. He was tormented by the contradiction between science and religion, and decided that he was going to devote his entire life to rectifying that.

[993] And I actually think he managed it to a large degree.

[994] You know, it's not generally how Piaget is discussed.

[995] When we discuss great people, we generally don't discuss them in their full peculiarity.

[996] You know, you remember a while back, Elon Musk was sort of savaged for smoking, you know, one one thousandth of a joint on Joe Rogan.

[997] And I thought it was so comical because Elon Musk is a very strange person.

[998] Now, obviously, you have to be a strange person to build an electric car and then shoot it on your own rocket out into space.

[999] Like, right?

[1000] Either one of those things is really strange.

[1001] But the joint probability of doing both is way below zero.

[1002] So I thought it was comical that people went after Musk because I thought, yes, well, we like our insane geniuses, predictable and normal.

[1003] It's like, anyways, Piaget did do a very good job of reconciling religion with science, although people don't really know that because that isn't how they read Piaget.

[1004] And I think that's partly because they're afraid of the...

[1005] If you read someone who's really a genius, the depth of their genius will frighten you.

[1006] And so you'll only read down into their work till you hit what you can't abide, and then you'll stop.

[1007] And that's the case with Freud, and it's the case with Jung, for sure, because if you read Young and you have any sense, you're terrified instantly.

[1008] And then it's also the case with Piaget.

[1009] And so I'll weave in what it was that he discovered.

[1010] Okay, so we're going to think about this biologically, so let's say, well, one of the problems you have is what the world is made out of.

[1011] Now, one of the things that's kind of interesting about human beings is that we really didn't care about that very much for a very long period of time, right?

[1012] I mean, we didn't invent science until about 500 years ago.

[1013] Now, you can argue about that, and you could say that the precursors for the scientific viewpoint, were laid down by the Greeks, and then we could say, okay, well, that was 2 ,500 years ago, or 3 ,000 years ago.

[1014] But who cares?

[1015] If you're thinking biologically, the difference between 500 years and 3 ,000 years is that's no difference at all, you know, because human beings in their current form are 150 ,000 years old.

[1016] That's the estimate.

[1017] There's been creatures basically identical to us genetically for 150 ,000 years.

[1018] And we diverged from chimpanzees seven million years ago.

[1019] And so, you know, and so we were vaguely human for seven million years.

[1020] And so in the span of, let's say, two million years, just to, you know, give the later proto -humans their advantage, the difference between 500 years and 3 ,000 years is completely trivial.

[1021] The point is that we didn't invent anything approximating science, and we weren't concerned about the structure of the material world in any objective sense until, like, yesterday.

[1022] And really, and we managed, we managed to survive without it, and then of course, there's the 3 .5 billion years of biological evolution that preceded even the emergence of human beings that existed in the absolute absence of anything approximating a scientific perspective, which indicates that, well, A, that that perspective appears to not be strictly necessary from the perspective of survival and be that, well, that something else was occurring to provide us with the knowledge that we needed during all of that time.

[1023] And so, when I read Nietzsche decades ago, he talked about how philosophy emerged.

[1024] So he was an analyst of philosophers.

[1025] And it was Nietzsche's idea that what the typical philosopher, perhaps even including him, but perhaps not him, produced was an unconscious recapitulation of their own knowledge.

[1026] That they felt that what they were doing was coming up with a rationalistic account of the structure of behavior, let's say.

[1027] But really what they were doing was noticing how they acted and then describing that and providing it with a rationale.

[1028] And so it was bottom -up, not top -down.

[1029] So we might think about that.

[1030] We might think about that, because one of the things we do know is that however it was that creatures, animals, us, figured out how to act, over the millions of years that they figured out how to act, it was bottom -up and top, not top -down.

[1031] The simpler the animal, the less capable it is of thinking.

[1032] And so if you go back far enough, and you don't have to go back.

[1033] that far, you get creatures that can't think at all.

[1034] Like, there's lots of complex, multi -celled organisms that don't have much of a nervous system, and they don't think, they just act, they just exist.

[1035] And so whatever they're doing isn't a consequence of thinking.

[1036] It's a consequence, the fact that they know what they're doing is a consequence of something other than thinking.

[1037] And even more sophisticated animals, mammals, let's say, act and don't think.

[1038] And so, but they act in sophisticated ways.

[1039] And so I was reading some of the ethologists about the same time.

[1040] Ethologists are scientists who study animal behavior.

[1041] They're not like laboratory behaviorists.

[1042] They don't put the animals in a controlled environment and do experiments on them.

[1043] They just use naturalistic observations.

[1044] So you can imagine Jane Goodall was an ethologist, for example, and she studied chimpanzees.

[1045] This guy named Conrad Lorenz in Scandinavia, he studied geese and other animals' dogs as well.

[1046] And so these are people who just, and Diane Fossi, I think it was Fossi that, now was she guerrillas?

[1047] I think it was guerrillas.

[1048] Yeah, yeah.

[1049] And so you go out and watch the animals.

[1050] And, you know, Goodall, when she was watching chimpanzees, what she'd do is, well, she'd look for regularities, but she also found herself telling stories, you know, so you read Goodall's accounts of chimpanzees.

[1051] You get stories about what the chimpanzees are like, and she gave them all names, and you can see the personalities of the chimpanzees emerging in her accounts.

[1052] And that's kind of interesting, because what it suggests is that if you're looking for how a set of creatures, how a set of creatures interact, you tend to look at them as if their personalities acting something out, acting out patterns.

[1053] Say, like wolf pack.

[1054] If you watch a wolf pack for a while, you're going to see patterns, regular patterns of behavior that characterize the interactions between the wolf pack.

[1055] It has to be that case, right?

[1056] Because otherwise the wolves couldn't predict one another.

[1057] If there was no regularity, there'd be no predictability.

[1058] There'd just be chaos.

[1059] And so what happens is the wolves settle into predictable patterns of behavior.

[1060] The chimpanzees settle into predictable patterns of behavior.

[1061] And then you can tell stories.

[1062] about those predictable patterns of behavior.

[1063] And you might even be able to derive rules.

[1064] You might say, well, it's as if the chimpanzees are acting out this rule.

[1065] So here's a rule that you might act out if you were a wolf.

[1066] So let's say you're a male wolf, and there's another male wolf around, and you decide that you're going to have a dominance dispute, right?

[1067] And so you puff up your fur and you look rough and tough, and you bear your teeth, and you growl, and you threaten, and you terrify.

[1068] And maybe you even fight to some degree, but not too much, because you don't want to damage each other.

[1069] Because the person, the wolf, that you're fighting with, you might need tomorrow to bring down a moose with.

[1070] Right.

[1071] So that's an interesting thing to consider, because it constitutes a limit on the kind of aggression that's allowable in the pursuit of dominance.

[1072] Anyways, two wolves that go at it, and usually what happens is one wolf.

[1073] decides it's not worth the risk and he rolls over and presents his throat to the victor and that basically means something like well I'm useless and weak and you can tear out like a prey animal and you can tear out my throat if you so choose and the dominant wolf acts out something like well I know you're useless and weak but I might need you to hold down a moose tomorrow so despite the fact that you're not good for anything you might as well get up and we'll get on with it now obviously the wolves aren't thinking that but that's how they act and so if you're watching and you can think and you describe how they act that might be how you describe it and so i just described it in words i used what would be approximately the description of a rule the rule would be if you're a wolf pack don't kill each other because you need the whole pack to pull down your prey.

[1074] Right, right.

[1075] So there's a constraint on striving.

[1076] And you can lay it out in a rule like manner and I told a little story and then I derived a rule from it.

[1077] And that's how we act emerged.

[1078] So each of us pursues our own motivated behaviors.

[1079] But then we aggregate together in groups.

[1080] And the fact that we aggregate together in groups, put certain restrictions on how it is that we manifest our motivated behavior partly because we depend on each other like the wolves depend on each other and so what that means is that there's an ethic that emerges out of the interactions between those motivations and that ethic manifests itself in a certain kind of pattern behavior now that's about as far as it goes for wolves because they don't sit around at the campfire at night and talk about how it is that wolves interact with one another But human beings do that, see, because we've got this next level of cognitive ability, imaginative ability.

[1081] It's not just pure abstract thought.

[1082] It's not like we've got motivation like other animals, and then we've got the patterns of behavior that emerge as a consequence of the interaction of those motivated behaviors.

[1083] We then have the ability to watch ourselves like we would watch a wolf pack, right?

[1084] Because an anthropologist, an ethologist, can go out in the wild and watch a wolf pack or watch a chimpanzee troop and take notes.

[1085] Say, look, this is what's...

[1086] Here are the patterns.

[1087] I can write down the patterns.

[1088] And when I write down the patterns, then I'm telling a story, and out of the story, I can abstract rules.

[1089] But the chimps aren't doing that.

[1090] The wolves aren't doing that.

[1091] But the human being can do that.

[1092] And then the human being can say, it's as if wolves follow these rules, which they don't, because they're wolves, and they don't follow rules.

[1093] But they do manifest patterns, and the patterns emerged as a consequence of something approximating an evolutionary competition.

[1094] Now, it's interesting, it's very interesting to think this through.

[1095] So, Franz de Waal, who's another ethologist, who studies chimpanzees, he's written a bunch of great books.

[1096] You might be interested in them if you're interested in this sort of thing.

[1097] He's been interested in the emergence of morality, Chimpanzees.

[1098] And so, one of the things DeWall has found was that, and this is partly why the postmodernists who insist that the fundamental motivator for the structure of hierarchies' power are wrong.

[1099] Okay, so I'm going to repeat that.

[1100] They're wrong.

[1101] Okay, it's seriously important because one of the claims that's taken carrying our culture apart, is that our hierarchical structure, which would be our entire culture, is an oppressive patriarchy, and that the people who occupy the positions, especially the higher positions, let's say, in the hierarchy, got there because they exercised power.

[1102] That's a fundamental claim of Foucault, for example, who's an absolutely reprehensible scholar on about 15 different dimensions.

[1103] But one of them, one of them is his narrow -minded insistence that power is the only justification for hierarchical position.

[1104] Now, I think that's patently absurd in the case of human beings.

[1105] But I won't go there to begin with, because I might as well make the case that it's patently absurd in the case of animals.

[1106] where it's more like power.

[1107] Duval has shown, well, you've got the example of the wolf already.

[1108] It's like you just can't be savaging up your packmates because all you do is demolish the structure within which you live.

[1109] And that's true for wolves.

[1110] You know, it's true for chimpanzees.

[1111] So DeWall has shown, in sequence of observations.

[1112] And chimps are a good test case because we're rather chimp -like.

[1113] Now, well, there are our closest biological relatives, right?

[1114] So it's only a 7 million -year gap between us and the common ancestor.

[1115] So if you're going to look at any animal and derive conclusions about the basal motivations of human beings, well, then it would be chimps that you would look at.

[1116] You might look at Bonobos, too.

[1117] Although the differences between Bonnebos and chimps has been exaggerated by all appearances.

[1118] In any case, you can get to the top if you're the roughest, toughest, toughest, meanest, most physically powerful and cruelest chimpanzee.

[1119] But your rule is unstable.

[1120] And there's a reason for that.

[1121] And the reason is that chimpanzees, the males, females as well, but the fundamental hierarchy for chimps is male.

[1122] Chimpanzees are competitive, but they're also cooperative.

[1123] They spend a lot of time grooming each other, and they actually have long -term friendships.

[1124] And it turns out that two chimpanzees that are three -quarters as tough as the toughest chimpanzee make a pretty vicious set of opponents if you get a little bit too tyrannical.

[1125] And the problem with pure power for the chimpanzees is that if you're a chipmese, that climbs to the top as a consequence of nothing but psychopathic dominance.

[1126] You have no allies and no friends because you don't engage in any cooperative behavior.

[1127] You'll have an off day and your two lieutenants, each of whom is three quarters as strong as you, will band together and tear you into bits.

[1128] It's an unstable medium -to -long -term solution, power.

[1129] And I see no reason to assume that exactly the same thing isn't the case with human beings.

[1130] If it doesn't work for chimpanzees and it doesn't work for wolves, why in the world would it work for human beings?

[1131] Especially when you think that our hierarchies are way more complicated than the hierarchies that characterize animals and that we do all sorts of things with our hierarchies that animals don't do.

[1132] I mean, most of you have jobs And most of those jobs are, while you're performing most of those jobs, you're not doing things that any animal would have done, would do now, or that any human being would have done 300 years ago.

[1133] Now, there's certain exceptions to that.

[1134] Some of you might farm, but even if you're doing that, you're not doing it in a way that people did it 300 years ago.

[1135] Whatever your job is, and it's likely to be very abstract, you're pursuing some goal that, is fairly distant from a fundamental biological motivation.

[1136] It's very abstract.

[1137] And you're actually creating something of at least sufficient value so that other people will trade with you for it.

[1138] And the idea that you're going to move up in your hierarchy of production by exercising something like psychopathic power is...

[1139] I think that's insane to think that.

[1140] You know, and I think about plumbers, for example, sample.

[1141] I've used this joke before, but I like it, so I'm going to use it again.

[1142] It's like, you know, if the postmodernness were right, this is how you'd hire a plumber.

[1143] First of all, the plumbers would have all banded together, although they'd be fighting within themselves, because, of course, there's nothing but power.

[1144] But they would have all banded together, and they'd go from door to door, and they basically knock on your door and tell you that if you didn't hire them, there was going to be hell to pay.

[1145] It'd be like mafia plumbers.

[1146] And then you'd pick the roughest, toughest plumber who's best at exercising power to not fix your pipes, because why would he be interested in fixing your pipes?

[1147] He'd just be interested in pretending to fix your pipes and taking your money, which is how you'd expect a mafioso plumber to operate.

[1148] But that isn't how it works, right?

[1149] I mean, if you hire virtually anyone in your day -to -day life, you suss out their reputation, for their ability to provide the service that they promised to provide, which is predicated on their skill, their technical skill, their skill as workmen and craftsmen.

[1150] It also is predicated on their ability to generally work in some reasonably interactive way with their employees because otherwise they don't stay in business for that long, and also to treat their customers with a modicum of reciprocal respect or their reputation is savaged immediately and they fail.

[1151] And so this patriarchal structure that we hypothetically all occupy that's fundamentally predicated on oppression and power breaks apart into something approximating cooperative competence when you look at any of its sub -components.

[1152] You know, you don't have power -hungry massage things.

[1153] therapists, you know?

[1154] Well, I don't understand how the entire structure can be a power -dominated, oppressive patriarchy if none of the sub -components are.

[1155] It doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm not saying at all that within large hierarchies, there isn't room for relatively psychopathic people to now and then manage a certain amount of success.

[1156] You know, you know that as a hierarchical structure grows in size that pure power politic players have a higher probability of success.

[1157] But all that happens to large organizations when they get completely dominated by people who are using power and politics as a means to climb to the top is that they precipitously collapse because you end up with no one who can actually perform the function that the structure is supposed to perform and a whole plethora of people who are good at doing nothing but playing politics and then the company dies.

[1158] And the thing is companies die all the time.

[1159] The typical Fortune 500 company lasts 30 years.

[1160] And the reason for that often is that it's functional for a while and then it gets corrupted by internal politics or it gets blind or it can't keep up or whatever it is and that's the end of it.

[1161] It falls apart and, you know, breaks into its constituent elements and they reformulate.

[1162] Maybe there's some new companies that come out of it, but it's not a permanent structure by any stretch of the imagination.

[1163] And so, I don't think there's any reason whatsoever to assume, well, we can think this through.

[1164] Are our hierarchical structures based on power, or are they based on competence?

[1165] And look, the answer is, well, they're a bit based on power, you know?

[1166] Because you shouldn't be naive about this.

[1167] Hierarchical structures can, and do, become corrupt in some ways.

[1168] And we have to keep an eye on that all the time.

[1169] But my sense is that by and large, things work.

[1170] You know, I mean, here we are.

[1171] We're sitting in this hall, and there's 3 ,000 of us.

[1172] And you all got here, because your car's worked.

[1173] And the highways work, sort of.

[1174] I mean, I was in a traffic jam for like an hour and a half getting here.

[1175] But, you know, that's what happens when you drive somewhere at 5 o 'clock.

[1176] You know, you can predict that.

[1177] So they worked, and the lights are on, and they seem to work, and that's no trivial thing.

[1178] And it looks like the big TV screen is working.

[1179] And you're all sitting here peacefully, not engaging in an overt power struggle, as far as I can tell, even though there's a hierarchical arrangement of seats, right?

[1180] You accept that.

[1181] you know and you're all and you accept the fact that you know some of you paid a premium for sitting closer and that that seems to be a reasonable way of distributing somewhat scarce resources and you know everyone in here is behaving peacefully and like all this seems to work quite nicely and so since this all works it's very difficult for me to understand how it's not predicated at least in large part on competence and then of course there's the other evidence which is Well, you know, a lot of you are older than the average person would have been when he or she died throughout the history of the entire human race.

[1182] And so that seems to be working out pretty good for you.

[1183] And none of you are skinny.

[1184] Quite the contrary.

[1185] So there are more obese people in the world now than there are starving people by quite a substantial majority.

[1186] And I think that that's worth quite the celebration, even though it's perhaps.

[1187] perhaps not exactly optimized, but it's definitely better than the alternative.

[1188] And, you know, by and large, we're moderately healthy, and most women don't die in childbirth like they used to, and most children don't die within a year of being born, like they used to, not very long ago.

[1189] And so things seem to be working.

[1190] Not so bad, given what a bloody catastrophe.

[1191] life is and how difficult it is to get things to work and how fragile people are and how short -lived we are intrinsically and how vulnerable we are to suffering.

[1192] We're not doing so bad, you know?

[1193] We must be doing something right and the well this is the thing.

[1194] This is the thing that that I would say enrages me about let's call them universities and And it's the intellectual and moral laziness of the resentful, victimization, power, postmodern doctrine.

[1195] Because, look, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the history of humanity is a bloody nightmare.

[1196] And, you know, to lay that only at the feet of human beings, I think, is a mistake.

[1197] because life in the natural world is a bloody nightmare.

[1198] And so you can't just blame that on people.

[1199] You know, like you can blame it on people to some degree.

[1200] We take a bad thing, or we take a deadly thing, or a dangerous thing, and we can make it worse, and we definitely do that.

[1201] But it's not like the problem is simple to begin with, because it's clearly the case that at every moment, the planet is trying to kill you and eventually it will succeed and so that's a big problem and it's reasonable for us to group together and to try to stop that and while we're doing that we're cause we cause some trouble you know we pollute things and we break things and we don't play as good an iterating game as we might but you know for creatures that only last eight decades and have a lot of trouble during all eight of those we don't do that badly and we've got our reasons for being as perverse and useless as we are and all of that shouldn't be laid at our feet even though we need to take responsibility for it and so one of the things that i find extremely disturbing about the emergent hypothesis that our culture is nothing but an oppressive patriarchy is that it's ungrateful beyond comprehension and worse if you adopt that stance well it bestows a certain amount of benefit on you I mean first of all if you posit that there's nothing in your culture except what's corrupt then that immediately elevates you above all of it as that sort of critic, right?

[1202] It's like, well, I'm taking the high ground and I'm looking at the entire history of humanity and calling it unacceptable.

[1203] It's like, well, that's fine, I suppose, except it isn't necessarily obvious that you could do any better, and you probably haven't, you know, and maybe you could try, although then you might say, well, just trial that trying does is make it worse.

[1204] and participating in that terror, doing anything of any utility is just playing the power game and making it worse.

[1205] It's like, yeah, well, you know, pardon me for being a bit skeptical about your motivation.

[1206] I don't think that moral virtue is that easily come by.

[1207] And I think that there are difficult problems to solve and that you could contend with the world and try to solve them instead of complaining about the fact that they haven't been solved properly.

[1208] And that if you did manage to solve a problem or two, which you might, then maybe you'd have the right to stand up as a more global critic, but until then, well, what's rule six?

[1209] You should get your house in order before you criticize the world.

[1210] And that's no simple thing.

[1211] So the moral virtue thing, that's annoying, because I don't think that moral virtue should be unearned.

[1212] You know, this is why I'm an admirer of the doctrine of original sin.

[1213] You know, I think you're stuck with some concept of original.

[1214] sin no matter how you think.

[1215] I mean, I see that in the atheistic environmentalist types, and I know all environmentalist types aren't atheistic, and I know that all environmentalist types aren't reprehensible either.

[1216] But there's a nice selection of atheist environmental types who are reprehensible.

[1217] And they're...

[1218] Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're usually the ones that say that the world would be better off if there were fewer people on it, which is not a sentiment that I find particularly attractive and it's also one if when I meet someone who utters that I always think two things one is well why are you still here then that's the first one and the second one is just exactly who it is who is it that you're planning on getting rid of and how exactly would you go about doing that if you had the opportunity so I don't find that I don't find that particularly admirable, and I don't think that there's any sympathy in it, you know, because I think that we should have some sympathy for ourselves.

[1219] That's rule two, is you should treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping, or rule three, which is you should make friends with people who want the best for you.

[1220] It's like, corrupt and useless as you are.

[1221] You do have a hard lot, you know, and so there's some reason.

[1222] for sympathy.

[1223] And to say that human beings are nothing but the spoilers of the planet is to miss half the story, which is as fast as we're trying to kill Mother Nature, she is returning the favor in spades.

[1224] So, that doesn't mean that we should be foolish about it, you know, and a certain balance has to be attained, but it's nice to look at both sides of the equation before you lay out too much judgment.

[1225] You know, back, In the late 1800s, Thomas Huxley, who was eldest Huxley's great -grandfather and also a great defender of Darwin, was commissioned by the British Parliament to do a study on oceanic resources, because there was some concern at that point that human beings might be overfishing.

[1226] And his conclusion was, the oceans were so bountiful and plentiful and human beings so comparatively small and number and powerless, that there was, There wasn't a hope in hell that we would ever be able to put a dent in the vast resources of the ocean.

[1227] That was only at the beginning of the 20th century.

[1228] You know, we didn't get to the point where we could harvest on an industrial scale until after World War II.

[1229] You know, that's only about 70 years ago.

[1230] And so it's only been 50 years, say, maybe a bit more, 60 years, maybe since 1960, that we woke up to the fact that some of our actions had now become powerful enough to be considered on a global scale.

[1231] And that's within the lifetime.

[1232] That's within my lifetime.

[1233] That's within the lifetime of a single person.

[1234] I don't think we've done such a bad job of waking up since then and starting to understand that, you know, maybe we have a larger scale moral obligation than we realized before that's proportionate to our technological power.

[1235] It's another place where a little bit of sympathy might be in order.

[1236] you know and I mean LA is a lot cleaner than it used to be in terms of its air quality and so is London and you know we've made a lot of progress I would say in a relatively short time trying to clean up the mess that we made when we were trying not to die painfully young you know so all right well back to this ethic so I'll tell you another study that I really like that's really cool so this is a study that was done by a guy named Yac Panksep And he did it with rats.

[1237] And now and then, I love reading animal experimental work.

[1238] If you want to study psychology, that's what you should read.

[1239] You should just read animal experimental work, because those people, it's not all good, but some of it's really good.

[1240] And some of the people who've done it, they were real scientists.

[1241] And this guy, Panksep, he's one of them.

[1242] Got another guy's named Jeffrey Gray, who wrote a book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, which takes you like eight months to read.

[1243] It's a really hard book, but it's brilliant.

[1244] Anyways, Panksep has done a really good job of laying out the fundamental motivational systems and their biology.

[1245] I'll just tell you a brief story about that.

[1246] The American Psychological Association just came out with its guidelines for the treatment of men and boys.

[1247] It's actually, it's like, they're not guidelines, they're not for treatment, and they're certainly not for the improvement of the health of men and boys.

[1248] It's an absolutely reprehensible ideological screed on how psychologists have to think politically, so they won't be punished by those who accredit them.

[1249] That's it fundamentally.

[1250] But one of the claims they made, they made two claims that are beyond comprehension to me. The first one was that aggression is socialized.

[1251] So that's the first claim.

[1252] And the second claim is that boys are socialized into aggression by men.

[1253] Okay, so let's look at those.

[1254] This relates to Pank Cep.

[1255] So Panksep outlined a bunch of biological circuits.

[1256] So human beings like mammals, but also like even more, what, archaic animals, speaking evolutionarily, have a variety of fundamental biological circuits.

[1257] So I can tell you some of them.

[1258] Some of them are obvious and some of them are somewhat surprising.

[1259] You have a circuit for pain.

[1260] Well, there's no surprise.

[1261] You have a circuit for anxiety.

[1262] That's circuit.

[1263] You know, it's a metaphor, obviously.

[1264] You have a biological system that mediates anxiety.

[1265] All of you have it.

[1266] Animals have it.

[1267] You have one for something called incentive reward, and that's what moves you towards valued goals.

[1268] That's basically associated with positive emotion.

[1269] You have one that satisfies you when you consume.

[1270] That's a consumatory reward system.

[1271] Lust, that's another one.

[1272] Thirst, hunger.

[1273] Play.

[1274] That's cool.

[1275] That's a fundamental circuit.

[1276] Pank's up discovered that.

[1277] There's a circuit for care.

[1278] That's another one.

[1279] And there's a circuit for rage.

[1280] That's not all of them, but that's a good start.

[1281] Rage.

[1282] It's there right from the beginning.

[1283] If you do facial expression coding analysis of infants, say an infant learns to recognize its mother.

[1284] And then that's around nine months often or even earlier than that.

[1285] a person comes into the baby's room and the baby starts to cry because that person isn't the mother and you think oh the baby's sad it's like no the baby isn't sad the baby is angry that's why it's turning red and if you do facial expression coding it's like the baby is actually the baby is cursing internally and you already know this because you know that like a two -year -old isn't much older than a baby and two -year -olds have temper tantrums And it's not because they're sad, as you can tell perfectly well, if you just watch a two -year -old have a temper tantrum.

[1286] It's clear that they're completely possessed by rage.

[1287] And that rage circuit, it's exactly right.

[1288] That rage circuit is active, even before the fear circuit is active.

[1289] It's activated very early.

[1290] And one of the things that's the case is that some children are much more aggressive than others, right from the beginning.

[1291] And most of those are boys.

[1292] And not all of them, but most of them.

[1293] And if you take two -year -olds and you group them together, you find if you take one -year -olds, two -year -olds, three -year -olds, four -year -olds, all the way up to 16, and you group them together, they don't know each other.

[1294] And then you count aggressive actions.

[1295] The two -year -olds are by far the most aggressive bunch.

[1296] They kick and hit and bite and steal.

[1297] Not all of them, but a good chunk of them.

[1298] And so, 16 -year -olds don't do that when you put them together.

[1299] And look, you're all here, and you're not 16, you're like 30, and you're not doing any.

[1300] of that.

[1301] And so two -year -olds, man, they're aggressive little monsters.

[1302] And it's okay because they're small and soft and what the hell can they do, you know?

[1303] So it's not like, you know, it's not it's not blood warfare among two -year -olds, but it's just because they don't have the sophistication and the weapons.

[1304] They've got, they've got the motivation.

[1305] And it's, it's really true, it's really true for a subset of them.

[1306] So about five percent of two -year -old boys are hyper -aggressive.

[1307] But what's cool is that almost all of them are socialized into civilized behavior by the time they're four.

[1308] And you can define civilized behavior actually quite nicely, using a Piagetian definition, is that other children will play with them.

[1309] And that's Rule 5, by the way.

[1310] Don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

[1311] What's your job if you're a parent?

[1312] Your job as a parent is to socialize your children so that by the age of three other children will play with them.

[1313] Because that means they've learned how to engage in reciprocal social interactions, and that'll start to spiral upward.

[1314] So if your child is acceptable as a playmate by the age of three, age of four is the limit, by the way, so you better have it together by then.

[1315] Otherwise, they get alienated and isolated, and they don't make friends, and then they never recover from that.

[1316] It's not good.

[1317] It's not good.

[1318] So most kids are socialized, even the hyper -aggressive ones, are socialized into acceptable playmates by the age of four.

[1319] And it's men, in large part, that do that.

[1320] Now, what's the evidence for that?

[1321] Well, there's lots of evidence for it.

[1322] The evidence among mammals is the use of rough and tumble play, for example, among males and their offspring in order to socialize and civilize them.

[1323] But the evidence among human beings is that where do you get aggressive teenagers?

[1324] What sort of families produce aggressive teenagers?

[1325] fatherless families.

[1326] Right, so let's think about that with regards to what the APA said.

[1327] Okay, because what they said was the opposite of the truth.

[1328] Wasn't even a lie, wasn't even wrong.

[1329] It was, they took the truth and then they claimed the opposite.

[1330] On two dimensions.

[1331] Number one, aggression isn't socialized.

[1332] Civilization is socialized.

[1333] Number two, if men were responsible for the creation, of aggression among boys, then fatherless families would produce boys that were more peaceful, and they don't.

[1334] So what the hell, fundamentally?

[1335] All right, so you have the behavioral pattern that characterizes civilized behavior among wolves or civilized behavior among chimpanzees or civilized behavior among rats.

[1336] I'll tell you the rest of the rats story.

[1337] So rats like to engage in rough and tumble play, especially juveniles, especially juvenile males.

[1338] And we know they like it because they'll work to do it.

[1339] So if they know that if a rat has been somewhere and he got to play, and then you put him back there, and you make him press a bar to open the door so we can go into where he played, he'll press that bar like mad.

[1340] And so that's how you infer motivation among rats.

[1341] Will the rat work to play?

[1342] You will, right?

[1343] Which is why you'll pay for tickets to a basketball game.

[1344] Hell, you'll work to watch people play.

[1345] Right.

[1346] That's very interesting.

[1347] It's absolutely, like, that's so important.

[1348] It's almost unbelievable that you will do that.

[1349] I mean, because the question is, well, why?

[1350] That's the first question.

[1351] Well, seriously, it's like, what the hell?

[1352] What are you watching a bunch of pituitary cases go, you know, bang a ball so that they can throw it through a hoop?

[1353] And like, you'll pay outrageous sums of money to do that.

[1354] It's like, you're not even throwing the damn ball.

[1355] You're just like watching.

[1356] them do it.

[1357] Can I have the ball?

[1358] No. Well, I paid $200 for this ticket.

[1359] They don't get the ball.

[1360] It's like, you don't get to play.

[1361] Okay, well, I'll just watch.

[1362] It's like, so that's how important it is.

[1363] That's how important play is that you'll work to make money to buy tickets to watch people play.

[1364] Right.

[1365] Man, that's crazy.

[1366] So, but it's fundamental.

[1367] And you think about how much of our entertainment is associated with exactly that.

[1368] Think, well, we're just doing something random, or is there something important going on there?

[1369] I mean, it doesn't look that important.

[1370] You know, in some sense, it's easy to be cynical about it, but it's foolish because it's crucially important, the fact that we're so wired up to admire fair play, that we'll pay for it, will pay for the right just to watch it vicariously.

[1371] That's a testament to the degree to which we're civilized and social, because a game is something that's civilized and social.

[1372] Back to Pige, Pige believed that most socialization occurred as a consequence of integrating these underlying motivational systems into iterable games, and that's what you're doing with your kids, right?

[1373] When you socialize your kids, when you teach them how to take turns, when you teach them how to play a game, then what you're doing is that you're socializing them into iterated reciprocal interactions with other people.

[1374] And that's the fundamental.

[1375] That's the fundamental.

[1376] aspect of ethic, of the ethic.

[1377] That's how an ethic emerges from the bottom up.

[1378] It emerges in games.

[1379] That was Piaget's fundamental observation.

[1380] Much better than the Freudian hypothesis.

[1381] The Freudian hypothesis was basically that human beings learn to inhibit their aggression.

[1382] That's not Piage's model.

[1383] PSHA's model is no, no, no. You integrate the aggression into a higher order game.

[1384] And you know this because you want an athlete, a good athlete is someone who's got that aggression.

[1385] But it's directed, right?

[1386] It's not random.

[1387] In fact, if you see an athlete manifest random aggression, you're not happy about that, right?

[1388] Maybe you admire them because they're really competitive, highly skilled, really competitive, they're goal -driven, they want to win.

[1389] But it's all focused on the goal.

[1390] And, you know, they're cooperating with their teammates.

[1391] And they're not hogging the ball.

[1392] They're also facilitating the development of their teammates.

[1393] And they don't cheat.

[1394] They don't break the rules.

[1395] So they're cooperating even with their adversaries.

[1396] Because they're all playing basketball, and they're all playing by the rules.

[1397] It's all cooperative.

[1398] that's an ethic.

[1399] It's an emergent ethic.

[1400] And, you know, the things that we do, what we do in our lives outside of the game is very game -like.

[1401] We engage in a cooperative and competitive ethic.

[1402] And we know the good players.

[1403] We know the good sports.

[1404] And that's the bottom -up emergence of an ethic.

[1405] And it's also the solution to the post -modern conundrum, as far as I'm concerned, are part of the solution.

[1406] Because the post -modernists claim that there's an infinite one.

[1407] way of looking at the world, and there is, and that no way of looking at the world is better than any other way, which is wrong.

[1408] The first part's right, because the world's very complicated, the second part's wrong.

[1409] There aren't that many ways of playing a game properly.

[1410] And you can tell that too, because even if you watch kids play, if you go out and you watch your kids play, you can tell which kids are good sports and which ones aren't, right?

[1411] That's easy.

[1412] And the kids can tell, too.

[1413] And so you can tell when it doesn't matter what the game is.

[1414] And If you're a good sport, it's the same across games, which is really another indication of the emergence of a transcendent ethic, right?

[1415] The concept, good sportsman, is independent of the game, right?

[1416] And it's very much what it is that you want.

[1417] It's the dawning of the behaviors that you want from someone who's sophisticated and reciprocal in their day -to -day life.

[1418] And it's by no means arbitrary.

[1419] It's in fact very tightly constrained.

[1420] Back to the rats, so rats like to wrestle.

[1421] And so you can get them to work to wrestle.

[1422] And so they work, and then the door opens, and out they go.

[1423] And there's rat A and rat B, and rat A is 10 % bigger than rat B. And so they have a little wrestling match, and rat A, who's the bigger rat, the more powerful rat, pins rat B. And then the postmodern social scientists observing derive their conclusion.

[1424] power produces dominance, and they publish it, but they're stupid.

[1425] And so, so then you have a smart scientist, and he thinks, wait a second, you don't just wrestle once if you're a rat, you wrestle a bunch of times.

[1426] And so what happens if you get the rats to wrestle more than once?

[1427] Because that's the issue, unless, see, and this is the difference between a psychopath and someone who's not psychopathic.

[1428] So the thing about being a psychopath is that it's all for you.

[1429] and none for someone else.

[1430] But that only works once or twice, you know, depending on the naivity of your target.

[1431] And if you're a psychopath, you have to move from place to place.

[1432] Because people catch on to your lack of ability to play fair, and they don't get fooled again.

[1433] And so psychopaths drift from place to place, and they can find their mark and their victim, but they can't do it in any stable manner.

[1434] It's not a good solution.

[1435] Because people track reputation, and we're really good at that.

[1436] In fact, there are evolutionary psychologists who believe that we have a module for tracking reputation, a cheating detection module, and that you don't have to activate that very often before people will remember forever that you did.

[1437] So, you got the big rat and the little rat.

[1438] Now, the little rat's lost.

[1439] Now you separate them, and then you let them come back and play another day.

[1440] And they still want to, even the little rat wants to.

[1441] And so then the little rat goes out in the play field, and the big rat's there.

[1442] And the little rat has to ask the big rat to play.

[1443] And you think, well, how does a rat do that?

[1444] It's like, well, you've been in dog parks, and you see what dogs do.

[1445] Maybe you've had dogs.

[1446] You know how dogs act when they want to play.

[1447] They sort of bounce around.

[1448] They kind of look at you, you know, and they bounce.

[1449] And if you have any sense, you all laugh because you recognize that.

[1450] There's something playful about that.

[1451] It's like, I'm looking at you, signaling intent, and this is sort of like a little dance.

[1452] And the idea is why don't you come and do this with me?

[1453] And if you have any sense, it's a big dog, and if you have any sense, the dog does that, and you kind of whack it on the side of the head, and it's not really that you hit it, and the dog knows.

[1454] And it sort of bites you, but not really, because, you know, the dog knows how to play.

[1455] If it had owners that, I could say that weren't psychologists, because the worst dog I ever met was the dog that a psychologist owned.

[1456] And it couldn't play at all.

[1457] It was just, it would just bite you.

[1458] It's like, What?

[1459] This is your dog?

[1460] You're going to have clients?

[1461] Not good.

[1462] So anyways, the little rat has to ask the big rat to play, because the big rat's cool, because he won once, so he gets to sit there and look cynical and pretend that he's ignoring the little rat, but he wants to play too.

[1463] So little rat bounces around, and the big rat thinks he tosses away his cigarette butt and gets off the street corner and plays.

[1464] And because he's 10 % bigger, he could pin the little rat.

[1465] Maybe he does that.

[1466] But if you pair them repeatedly, and the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30 % of the time, the little rat stops asking him to play.

[1467] And that is so cool.

[1468] I read that.

[1469] It just, it just blew me away.

[1470] I thought, really?

[1471] You're kidding.

[1472] You're kidding.

[1473] There's an emergent ethic of fair play in wrestling rats.

[1474] That's how fundamental that ethic is.

[1475] I mean, they're rats for Christ's sake.

[1476] It's not like they're the world's most ethical animal, right?

[1477] They're rats, and still, they have to play fair.

[1478] So, what was I doing in Maps of Meaning and in 12 Rules for Life?

[1479] Well, we're motivated creatures.

[1480] Each of those motivations has to pursue its own goal, because otherwise we die.

[1481] But then those motivations have to get integrated.

[1482] They You'd have to get integrated within you.

[1483] You kind of got that more or less under control by the time you're about two.

[1484] You start to become something approximating the integration of your motivations.

[1485] But that hasn't happened socially yet.

[1486] That happens between two and four.

[1487] You have to integrate that integrated structure with everyone else doing the same thing.

[1488] And how do you do that?

[1489] Well, you do that by learning how to play.

[1490] How to play fair?

[1491] And there's a reciprocity that goes along with that.

[1492] I'll give you another example.

[1493] So here's a game that behavioral economists have been playing with people.

[1494] So here's the game.

[1495] So you take person A and you take person B and you say to person A, look, I'm going to give you $100 and you have to share it with the person next to you.

[1496] And you can offer them a fraction of it, whatever fraction you want.

[1497] And if they take it, you get the $100 and you split it with them.

[1498] But if they refuse it, you guys get nothing.

[1499] So you say, okay, well, here's a hundred dollars.

[1500] How much are you going to offer the person next to you?

[1501] Now, a classical economist would say, well, you offer them a buck.

[1502] Well, why?

[1503] Well, because you're trying to maximize your own self -interest.

[1504] Because that's what you are.

[1505] You're going to maximize your own self -interest.

[1506] And why would they say no?

[1507] It's like they get a buck, and that's better than nothing.

[1508] Why would they say no?

[1509] So you say, well, will you take a dollar?

[1510] And the person next to you says, well, they think things they won't say.

[1511] But what they say is no. But what happens is if you do this experiment, is that isn't what people do.

[1512] They offer 50%.

[1513] Cross -culturally, it's somewhere between 40 and 60%.

[1514] But it's basically 50, 50, 50.

[1515] and then the other person accepts it and you might think well that's because you don't need the money it's like let's say you're starving and you have the hundred dollars and you offer your compatriot here a dollar and like he needs something to eat so it's like yeah I'll take the dollar it's like no the poor people are more likely to tell you to go to hell because along with having no money they'd like not to have no pride right you got to hang on to something and so you can at least still tell someone to go to hell when they deserve it.

[1516] And that's something.

[1517] And so, even in the simple behavioral economist games, you get emergent evidence for automatic reciprocity.

[1518] Well, and why would you offer 50 % to the stranger?

[1519] And the answer is, well, because it's a good rule of thumb.

[1520] You know, if you want people to play with you across time, if you want to engage in as many games as possible, and you want to participate in the ethic properly, then what you're aiming at is something approximating reciprocity, the rules that I outlined, you know, in 12 rules for life.

[1521] That's what they're based on.

[1522] They're based on this observation.

[1523] So this is how it works, is that we have these motivational systems, and we get them together, maybe around the age of two, and then we integrate them with the motivational systems of others.

[1524] We do that by producing games.

[1525] And the games get more and more sophisticated, more multiplicitous, but there's a game ethic that emerges out of that.

[1526] And it governs reciprocity.

[1527] And the game ethic is something like, well, we're all equally valuable players and everybody deserves a fair shot.

[1528] And you've got to bring your best skills to the table, but you have to play fair and you have to play reciprocally.

[1529] And that works across time.

[1530] And then you get an archetype that emerges out of that, which is something like the fair player.

[1531] It's a variant of the archetype of the hero.

[1532] And that's the thing that people are driven to imitate and admire.

[1533] And this is hardly a mystery.

[1534] I mean, look at, you think, why do we pay professional athletes the inordinate sums that we pay them?

[1535] Well, it's possible, it's because they're modeling something of crucial importance in a dramatic manner.

[1536] You know, like a basketball game, a professional basketball game, is a very complex drama.

[1537] And the drama is skill, but also the ethic of fair play.

[1538] And we're all observing that because we bloody well need to understand it.

[1539] And then you see that echoed.

[1540] So you get the emergent ethic, and that's the pattern of behavior.

[1541] And then you get representations of that.

[1542] You get abstract representations of it.

[1543] That's what we're doing when we play these abstract games.

[1544] It's also what we do when we tell stories, and we make movies, and we present plays, and we do everything that's dramatic, is that we take a look at that behavioral pattern that's emerged.

[1545] that works and then we try to represent it because we need to understand it.

[1546] It's like, well, what are you like if you're the hero of a story?

[1547] And what are you like if you're the anti -hero?

[1548] You're the cheat, you're the crook, you're the deceiver, you're the liar, you're the poor sport, you know, you're the person who fixes the game, and we abstract out those patterns, and then we try to imitate them.

[1549] And all of that drives our...

[1550] That's what drives our knowledge of the ethic of behavior.

[1551] We elaborate that up.

[1552] We elaborate that up into drama, and we elaborated into ritual, and we elaborated into religious representations.

[1553] We have stories that emerge of people who play properly and people who play improperly, and then you abstract out the essence of that.

[1554] You say, well, what's it like to play properly?

[1555] If you were doing it perfectly, what would you be like?

[1556] Well, you'd be a target for emulation and imitation rather than a target for rejection.

[1557] You get the archetype of the hero and the adversary.

[1558] Come out of that.

[1559] It's a completely different way of constructing a knowledge.

[1560] system.

[1561] And I think that what I've been trying to do in maps of meaning and trying to do in 12 rules for life is to lay that out.

[1562] Say, look, there is a system of knowledge that underlies the ethic that we need to adopt to conduct ourselves properly in life.

[1563] And I'll close with this.

[1564] Here's one way of conceptualizing it, I think.

[1565] And this has to do with rule seven.

[1566] Do what is Not what is expedient.

[1567] It also has to do with rule 8, which is tell the truth or at least don't lie Well, it's not so easy to tell the truth, but you can tell when you're lying and you can stop doing that and then maybe you approximate the truth across time by doing that You need to do You need to take care of yourself, but then you think well, what does that mean exactly?

[1568] It's not a nine -ran sort of individualism And the reason for that is what self do you mean?

[1569] There isn't just you.

[1570] There's you now and you tomorrow and you next week, you next month, and you next year, and you in a decade, and you when you're old, you're a community, and you're a creature, unlike other creatures, in that you're aware of your own duration.

[1571] And so if you're going to treat yourself properly, you're already playing a game.

[1572] It's a game you play with yourself across time.

[1573] It's an iterated game, and you better play fair, because otherwise the you that is to come is going to suffer for it.

[1574] And so there's no individual you outside of the community because just because of the way you are, you're already a community.

[1575] And so you have to take that into account.

[1576] When you tell your child to play fair and be a good sport, you know, you're doing that partly because then they're better for their teammates, but you're doing it mostly because then they're better for themselves across time, right?

[1577] And you have an intimation of that.

[1578] So you've got to treat yourself fairly.

[1579] So the game's on with you.

[1580] But then, you know, you, the self, well, what is that?

[1581] You think, what are you more important than your family?

[1582] That isn't how people act.

[1583] You know, if you take the typical parent, you say, well, look, I'm going to shoot you or I'm going to shoot your son.

[1584] Well, the typical parent is going to say, well, take me. When you think, well, which is you then exactly?

[1585] Is it, you know, if what's you is what's most dear to you, what you identify with more, well, then you identify more with your kids and a tremendous amount with your parents.

[1586] and your siblings.

[1587] It's like you're extended.

[1588] You've got the community of yourself across time, but then you've got your family, and then you've got your family across time, right?

[1589] And then, well, there's that, but then your family's nested inside a community, and you've got the same issue there.

[1590] You've got the community now, all those other people, and the community across time.

[1591] So what's the ethic of fair play?

[1592] It's like, do what's good for you in a way that's good for the future you, in a way that's good for your family and your future family, in a way that's good for the community and the future community.

[1593] All of that, that unbelievably complex sequence of nested games, that's what you have to play properly.

[1594] And you admire people who do play it properly, and you can see it, even though you might not be able to articulate it.

[1595] It's too complicated.

[1596] I would say it's a matter of balancing out things properly.

[1597] And then to close, I would say, this is something to think about too.

[1598] We have an instinct for meaning.

[1599] You know, you can get meaningfully engaged in You might get meaningfully engaged in a basketball game, for example.

[1600] You might ask yourself, why, and I shed some light on that, until you're watching play progress properly, right?

[1601] Maybe you follow the team across an entire championship, because you don't give a damn about one basket, one basket successfully managed, and you don't give a damn about one game successfully won.

[1602] You want the sequence of games to be won successfully, so the championship manifests itself, and you're deeply embedded in that.

[1603] You might track all the statistics because you care who wins the game that's iterated across time and you're dramatizing that.

[1604] You're playing that out even though you can't articulate it.

[1605] You don't really understand it.

[1606] It still grips you like it should because that is what should grip you.

[1607] Say it grips you and it's engaging and it's meaningful and the reason for that.

[1608] Okay, imagine this.

[1609] This is the final part of this.

[1610] Well, let's say you managed to take care of yourself and your family.

[1611] and your community all at the same time.

[1612] Let's say that you imagine you're successful as a consequence of that.

[1613] Like in the broad sense, right?

[1614] You've got what it takes to live a rich life.

[1615] Well, what's that going to do to you, biologically?

[1616] It's like, well, isn't that going to make you an attractive partner?

[1617] Isn't that make you an attractive mate?

[1618] And isn't the case that if you're an attractive mate because you act out that partner that you're more likely to succeed from an evolutionary perspective, you're more likely to reproduce your child.

[1619] children are more likely to live.

[1620] And so what that implies across time is that not only does that ethic exist, and not only do we recognize it, but that the degree to which you're able to manifest that self in your life is associated directly with your long -term success on a biological, speaking in the biological time frame.

[1621] Okay, so imagine that.

[1622] Then imagine this, imagine that you have instincts that guide you towards that pattern.

[1623] I can tell you two of those.

[1624] One is your conscience.

[1625] And it says, you've fallen off the path.

[1626] What's the path?

[1627] Well, the path is that balanced harmony, and you've deviated from it.

[1628] You've betrayed yourself.

[1629] You've cheated yourself.

[1630] You're not playing the game properly with yourself.

[1631] And something responds.

[1632] And so that's the punishing end of it.

[1633] And the positive end is, well, if you've got the pattern right, then it's deeply and meaningfully engaged.

[1634] And that's not an illusion.

[1635] You know, one of the problems that modern people have is that we think that the sense of meaning is an illusion because we think it's arbitrary or constructed.

[1636] But there's no evidence for that.

[1637] The evidence is quite the contrary that that sense of deep, meaningful engagement isn't rational at all.

[1638] It's way deeper than that.

[1639] And it signifies that you're where you should be doing what you should be doing.

[1640] You know, with a bit of a whack from time to time from your conscience.

[1641] says, well, walk the straight and narrow path, right?

[1642] The line between chaos and order.

[1643] And get everything balanced harmoniously around you, because that's where you should be, and that's what you should be doing.

[1644] I think that's portrayed in music.

[1645] You know, music lays out patterns, layers of patterns, and they're all interacting harmoniously, and you can put yourself in sync with that, you know, physically even, because you tend to dance to it.

[1646] And you dance to that, And that's meaningful, and it's because you've allied yourself properly with all that multitudinous pattern.

[1647] And it's a symbolic manner of, what would you say, acting out being positioned properly in the midst of all that complexity.

[1648] And that's signified by that sense of meaning.

[1649] Well, so that's a much better story than a moral relativist story, or a nihilist story, a hopeless story.

[1650] It's like you have a sense of, you have an instinct for meaning.

[1651] guided by conscience, that puts you in the proper orientation to yourself extended across time, to your family extended across time, and to your community extended across time.

[1652] And if you attend to that, then you act out things properly.

[1653] And then not only do you feel better, psychologically, you're facing the obstacles you need to face, you're playing the game properly.

[1654] That's great, psychologically, gives your life some purpose and some higher meaning and protects you from anxiety and pain.

[1655] Wonderful.

[1656] But it's not just psychological.

[1657] Because if you do that, you're also actually useful, right?

[1658] You're taking care of yourself, so you won't die.

[1659] You're taking care of your family, so they don't suffer unduly.

[1660] And you're doing that in a manner that actually strengthens the community.

[1661] Right?

[1662] You're taking on your role as a sovereign and responsible citizen.

[1663] And that helps actually, it sets the world right psychologically, but it also sets the world right.

[1664] So what's so arbitrary about that?

[1665] I don't see anything arbitrary about that.

[1666] I think it's long past time that we stopped regarding any of that as arbitrary.

[1667] It's self -evident.

[1668] Play the game properly.

[1669] Right?

[1670] It's important.

[1671] Everyone knows it.

[1672] You do it.

[1673] Your life is meaningful and worthwhile.

[1674] You've got something to wake up for.

[1675] You've got some anxiety set at bay.

[1676] At least you've got something worthwhile to do in the face of what you're terrified of.

[1677] That's something.

[1678] And then there's important problems to solve and you're solving them.

[1679] It's like, well, that's separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

[1680] I say, well, there's something to our civilized society that's integral and valuable and that we need to protect and identify and then act out and support and manifest more and not criticize to death and leave nothing at all in the ashes.

[1681] Well, and that's why I was working on maps of meeting, and 12 rules for life.

[1682] Thank you very much.

[1683] These are the most comfortable chairs we've had.

[1684] Yeah, geez, wow.

[1685] Maybe we'll just stay here.

[1686] Yeah, this is nice.

[1687] It's good to be back, brother, right?

[1688] Yeah, it's good to be back.

[1689] You feeling good?

[1690] Yeah, it's good to be here.

[1691] Thank you all for coming.

[1692] It's much appreciated.

[1693] All right, we've got a ton of questions because this is a tech town, and they actually know how to use NAP.

[1694] They know how to use Slydo.

[1695] That's good.

[1696] Yeah, it's impressive.

[1697] I like this first one.

[1698] Now that you've destroyed Patreon, will the two of you save the Internet?

[1699] No, no, definitely not.

[1700] There's no saving the Internet.

[1701] I don't know even if we'll save Patreon, you know, because this is part of the not taking the moral high ground too easily.

[1702] You know, Dave and I and Harris as well, Dave talked to Sam in particular, But Dave and I talked about what had happened after Patreon banned Carl Benjamin Sargon of Akad.

[1703] And we thought, well, that's just not acceptable.

[1704] And so we decided to stop using the platform.

[1705] And I'd been working on a program that had some parallel functions to Patreon that we were producing for a slightly different reason.

[1706] And we started talking about the possibility that could be repurposed as a Patreon.

[1707] alternative, which is something that we're working diligently on, and which will happen.

[1708] But I would never claim that the solution to the problem is going to be straightforward.

[1709] So we'll see what we can manage.

[1710] I think Dave and I will start using the platform in about a month and a half, something like that.

[1711] But we don't know.

[1712] Maybe Patreon's time has come and gone already, because there's already way.

[1713] of supporting individual contributors.

[1714] Maybe it's not possible to aggregate a tremendous number of creative people together in a single platform without attracting undue negative attention and the immediate probability of this kind of sensorial action.

[1715] We don't know, right, because these technologies are all so new.

[1716] You know, it looks like YouTube and Facebook are wrestling now and Twitter as well, wrestling now with the conundrum that they've been presented with, which is, well, there's a billion opinions and some of them are rough.

[1717] What do we do about the rough opinions?

[1718] And the answer might be like in the frontier heyday of YouTube when it wasn't run by a giant and increasingly rigid corporation, then anything went.

[1719] But as soon as it's corporatized and systematized, then that can no longer work.

[1720] I mean, you think, you really think the internet could have ever started if it would have been regulated to begin with?

[1721] I mean, just think about it.

[1722] What drove the internet?

[1723] Porn.

[1724] No, but I'm dead serious, right?

[1725] That's, that's what happened, is that the internet exploded over its first, say, 10 years of development, of public development, because it was just it was like, what was the percentage of porn on the internet for the first 10 years?

[1726] It was some ridiculous amount.

[1727] I didn't know that there was porn on the interview.

[1728] Oh, yeah.

[1729] See, everyone learned something at a Jordan Peterson event.

[1730] You see what I'm saying?

[1731] Yeah.

[1732] So I don't know if it's a solvable problem, but we're going to try.

[1733] I think at least we're going to try to build a platform where if you're on it, we're not going to kick you off arbitrarily.

[1734] I think we can promise that.

[1735] See, let me just say one more thing about that So I went and talked to one of the guys Who runs one of these big social Communication systems You know, social networks And they'd faced a lot of pressure Because ISIS was using the platform to recruit Okay, so you got to ask yourself If you're a free speech absolutist You're going to let If you're in a war, you're going to let the enemies of your state recruit with your platform?

[1736] And if the answer is no, which seems like a reasonable answer, well then you've already opened the door, right?

[1737] Say there are things that should, could be censored.

[1738] Then the question is, as soon as you open that door, like it's Pandora's box, it's like, okay, well, what about what's right next to that?

[1739] Maybe that would be like certain forms of communication about radical religious fundamentalism, because that's right next door.

[1740] And then there's something right next door to that.

[1741] It's like, those lines are really hard to draw.

[1742] So it isn't obvious to me how large -scale social networks are going to solve this problem.

[1743] And we're wrestling with that, trying to come up with a solution that's reasonable.

[1744] So far, it's something like, you'll be able to stay on the platform unless you break an American law, an actual law, right?

[1745] And I don't even know if that's a good enough guideline, but, well, it might have to be.

[1746] But we'll see.

[1747] And as for fixing the net, well, that's a no -go that is.

[1748] So we offer whatever content we can manage, and people seem to enjoy it.

[1749] And that's working pretty well, but that's about all we can manage.

[1750] And maybe that's all that's all that's manageable.

[1751] And there's porn out there, so who knew?

[1752] The APA recently defined traditional masculinity as toxic, conflating virtuous and harmful aspects.

[1753] How can we reverse this dangerous ideological progression?

[1754] Oh, the purpose was to conflate the virtuous and the harmful.

[1755] That's the purpose of the document, is to blur the distinction between the two.

[1756] And I think the real reason, I'm writing an article about this right now, I think the actual reason was to damage the virtuous, because that's the best way of doing it, right?

[1757] if you want to damage the virtuous, what you do is you conflate it with the harmful.

[1758] It doesn't hurt the harmful any to have it conflated with the virtuous.

[1759] So let's say your real motivation is like a seriously deep resentment and spite.

[1760] And that the best way to manifest that is to take the virtuous and conflate it with the pathological and to take down the virtuous.

[1761] And maybe that's because you can't bloody manage it on your own.

[1762] That's what it looks like to me. So, I think it's an, I mean, I was, you know, the American Psychological Association put out a variety of very solid scientific journals for a very long period of time, and a couple of my friends sent me some of the articles that are going to be published in the next couple of months in some of the flagship journals like American psychologist, and they're social justice -oriented right to the damn core.

[1763] And so that organization has become thoroughly, corrupt.

[1764] And it's really an appalling thing to see because I liked being a clinical psychologist and like the training I had at McGill was top rate, man. It was very stringently, stringently scientific.

[1765] I mean, clinical psychology isn't exactly a science, any more than medicine is or any more than engineering is because there's practical engineering in it, right?

[1766] I mean, if you're a clinical psychologist, you're helping, you're trying to help people have better lives.

[1767] You're not exactly trying to make them more mentally healthy.

[1768] And even mental health is a very tricky thing to define because you can't tell if it's normative or ideal.

[1769] Like it's a weird mixture of normative and ideal.

[1770] But despite all that, you know, the clinical psychology programs, for a long time, they were very rigorous.

[1771] They're hard to get into, and they were rigorous.

[1772] And if you came out of them, you came out of them better than you were when you went in.

[1773] You came out of them more knowledgeable, and you came out of them tougher and more resilient because you had to learn how to cope with people's problems and not take them home and to be mature enough to handle it.

[1774] And it was really good.

[1775] And for a long time, you know, when anybody ever asked me how to find a psychologist, I would say, well, find an American Psychological Association accredited clinical research program graduate because you can be virtually certain that they will be trained enough and smart enough to at least be competent.

[1776] You know, you've got a good crack at it, and they're just throwing that all away.

[1777] It's really despicable in my estimation, and it makes me ashamed of my profession, and it's really too bad.

[1778] This got the third highest upvotes.

[1779] Do you season your beef, and if so, what do you use?

[1780] I have such a stupid life.

[1781] You know?

[1782] salt and and for those of you that care my daughter who invented this appalling diet doesn't even use salt so it's pretty bare bones man so that's that but you know we've discovered that there are there's what would you call it there's variety in water you can have Here, here's the variety.

[1783] You can have hot water.

[1784] That's sort of like tea.

[1785] Without the tea.

[1786] You can have cold water.

[1787] That's a different kind.

[1788] And you can have sparkling water.

[1789] That's three kinds of water.

[1790] And beef.

[1791] And salt, in my case.

[1792] So...

[1793] Live in the dream, man. Actually, the best thing that I saw all year was the night that we had that dinner that I'm sure many you saw the picture of where it was Sam and Joe and Shapiro and all of us.

[1794] And watching you and Rogan sit.

[1795] across from each other, each one of you eating like a 50 ounce tomahawk, like Fred Flintstone style.

[1796] I was like, I am going to remember this.

[1797] All right, we got a couple along this line.

[1798] It's sort of a theme here.

[1799] As a leader of a tech company, how can you break out of the SJW mood of expected values without risking your whole company?

[1800] Fire all your HR people.

[1801] Well, the first, that was a really nasty thing to say, which that I just said.

[1802] But true.

[1803] Well, the first thing is you have to decide if that's what you want to do.

[1804] Like, you have to actually make that decision.

[1805] And then you have to act it out in all the small ways.

[1806] You know, you're just not going to go there.

[1807] You're going to decide not to go there and take your, fight your battles along the way.

[1808] You know, and so there'll be no talk about diversity and there'll be no talk about inclusion.

[1809] And there'll be to talk about equity and there'll be no talk about white privilege And what else?

[1810] There'll be no talk about microaggressions all of that stuff and I can tell you the tech people in here If you think you can let any of that Dogma into your company without letting all of it in you are naive beyond belief and if you think that what happened to the universities Won't happen to your company then you have the same problem because it will because this like this set of ideas is not trivial.

[1811] And you let any of it in.

[1812] There isn't letting some of it in, you know?

[1813] That isn't how it works.

[1814] And if you think you'll curry favor with the public by playing that game, you will in the short run with some people, but you'll risk your company.

[1815] And if it's not something that you agree with, then you'll risk yourself too, because eventually you'll either come up against it and kowtow, or you'll come up against it and lose so the first thing you have to do is decide that you're not going to do that and then you have to make sure that you don't do it at all because there's no doing it a little bit so you know I'm worried too that in the US that this has gone far enough so that the stem fields themselves are going to be at risk over the next 10 years I mean you know already in California if you are a faculty member in one of the STEM fields before you get hired at a California university you have to write and sign a diversity document and that's the same for promotion and what the hell that has to do with the STEM fields is beyond me except you know I think that part of what's driving all of this like what drove the APA statement is an absolute hatred for competence itself And the stem types, you can, that's why it's all power.

[1816] You know, that's why the discussion is all about power.

[1817] Well, you occupy a high -level position in your hierarchy.

[1818] Why?

[1819] Power.

[1820] Well, what else could it be?

[1821] Could be competence.

[1822] Well, God, no, not that, not competence.

[1823] We can't admit that there's such a thing as competence because it also means we'd have to admit that there's such a thing as incompetence, and maybe that characterizes like, Me, for example.

[1824] So we're going to, instead of me dealing with my own pathetic incompetence, I'm just going to attack the notion of competence itself, and I'm going to do that by conflating it with power.

[1825] And so, you know, that's great, except when you need to build a bridge that stands up, because bridges don't stand up because power hungry madmen built them.

[1826] They stand up because competent people built them.

[1827] You know, if you build bridges, if you're a power -hungry madman, then when you build, when you make concrete, you put too much sand in it because sand is cheap.

[1828] That's what happened, that's what happened in the Soviet Union in many cases, what happens in all sorts of countries where corruption is the norm.

[1829] It's like, that's fine, your building will stand up till there's an earthquake, and then it'll fall down.

[1830] It's like, well, that's what happens when you have engineers that run off power.

[1831] If you have engineers that run off competence, then things stand up.

[1832] And that's how you can tell they're competent.

[1833] And that's why the politically correct people hate engineers.

[1834] It's because you can tell when an engineer's competent because they build something that works.

[1835] And that's really annoying because it's evidence that there's competence.

[1836] And that's annoying because that means there's evidence that there's incompetence.

[1837] And your existence is the evidence.

[1838] And so instead of rectifying your incompetence, you'll just get rid of the idea of competence.

[1839] And then everything will fall down around you, but, well, then you'll all be equal in the rubbish, so that'll be fine.

[1840] You can accomplish your equity goal that way, too.

[1841] What kind of music do you listen to?

[1842] I was really trying to work a segue on that one.

[1843] There was nothing there.

[1844] I listened to all sorts of music.

[1845] I mean, I don't remember, there was a famous jazz musician who said there was only, I don't think, was it Miles Davis?

[1846] I don't remember.

[1847] There's only two kinds of music, bad music and good music.

[1848] And so that sort of runs across the genres.

[1849] You know, and I listen to all sorts of music.

[1850] I listen to swing and jazz and old country from the 1950s and country swing from the 1930s and modern rock and roll.

[1851] And like, I even listen to a little bit of hip -hop.

[1852] It's not really my genre, but not much, you know.

[1853] I don't understand the genre very well.

[1854] but it wasn't a northern Albertan thing man so in classical music and I like a lot I like a very diverse range of music and I listen to it very loud especially when I'm driving around which I really need to do much more of so yeah was mainstream media always this bad or are we just seeing it more now it's way worse Yeah, it's way worse If you, all you have to do is go to the library And pick up a Time magazine from like 1973 Like, it's a miracle You can't even believe the bloody thing existed It was like 100 pages long and it was thick You know, it's like it's three -eighths of an inch thick And when you open it, it doesn't look at all like People magazine There's no photographs, it's all text And the text is small And the words mean things And they were written by journalists who were paid and they were fact -checked and like yeah no it's way worse than it was but i i think a lot of that is a technological it's a it's a side effect of technological revolution you know rather than pointing fingers at journalists or even at at networks let's say you know that all of the mainstream media is completely done in by the new media right so the print journalists what are you going to put your print online and compete head -to -head against 150 ,000 blogs, that's not going to work.

[1855] And your television network, you're going to compete against online, on -demand video?

[1856] No. And your radio is going to compete against podcasts?

[1857] No. So what I think what we're seeing is that old media is being done in by the new media forms, and as it's done in, it's quality.

[1858] is deteriorating and its proclivity to exaggerate the polarization increases because it's the only way of gaining attention in a declining market.

[1859] So rather than, you know, a set of moral failings, which it also is to some degree, I think it's just the inevitable consequence of an unbelievable technological revolution.

[1860] And YouTube's a great example, right?

[1861] Because think what is it YouTube has everything a network has but a network doesn't have many of the things that YouTube has so bandwidth is expensive for a network and it's free for YouTube and you need a huge organization to manage a network show and you need like three people to manage a YouTube show and YouTube has two billion potential viewers and so how in the world can a television network compete with that?

[1862] It can And podcasts are the same thing.

[1863] So, yes, the media is way worse than it used to be, but it's not surprising.

[1864] I mean, Time Magazine doesn't even pay its journalists anymore.

[1865] So in all, even the big newspapers have lost most of their good journalists.

[1866] They've lost all their fact checkers.

[1867] They're dying for lack of money.

[1868] They can't monetize anything because Google is eaten up all the advertising revenue.

[1869] So I think that quality degeneration is a consequence of just, this insane technological revolution that's progressing.

[1870] And, you know, who knows what's going to happen as a consequence of that.

[1871] One of the things that I've seen that's been really strange is that it isn't so much that everybody is in their own bubble.

[1872] It's that, sorry, it's not like that we've grouped together in bubbles.

[1873] It's like each of us has a bubble now.

[1874] And I watch people use the million channels of YouTube, and it's like everybody has their own news reality, right?

[1875] And that's a strange thing, too.

[1876] One of the things we didn't understand, I think, about the classical media, say the TV stations of the 1970s and 1980s, 1970s in particular, when there was only really three TV stations, is we had no idea how uniting that was, because we were all doing the same thing, at least from time to time.

[1877] We all watched the same news.

[1878] We are all kind of viewed the culture at least more or less through the same lens, and it was mediated by people who were reasonably respectable and competent.

[1879] And that's just blown apart.

[1880] And so there seems to be a real loss in that.

[1881] And it's so strange that as the number of ways of communicating easily have multiplied, the possibility of communicating with everyone at once has disappeared.

[1882] So, it's so strange to see that, that blowing apart of a limitation actually eradicated something of tremendous utility.

[1883] Because you could, there were times, this was true continually in the 60s and the 70s, where one event could grip the whole nation, you know.

[1884] And that was actually one of the ways of defining a nation.

[1885] And that's disappearing incredibly quickly.

[1886] and it's not clear that we can handle the fragmenting consequences of that.

[1887] We got work to do with this platform, huh?

[1888] What inspires you?

[1889] This.

[1890] This is good.

[1891] Yeah, so Dave mentioned that, so I think this is the 116th city that I've been in since last, since a year.

[1892] My book came out a year ago, so it's basically a year anniversary, I think to the day, actually.

[1893] I mean, so what's inspiring?

[1894] Well, first of all, you know, I discovered this year that there's a huge market for discourse at the highest level that I can manage.

[1895] You know, that doesn't necessarily mean it's high -level discourse, but it's the best that I can manage.

[1896] There's a market for that.

[1897] That's really interesting.

[1898] One of the things Dave and I have talked about this, you know, this group of our us has been given this nomenclature, the intellectual dark web, and that happened accidentally, and we'd been trying to puzzle through what caused that grouping.

[1899] And one of the things that characterizes everybody who's in that category is that each of us has an independent media platform and isn't beholden to anyone for it.

[1900] So there's an independence there, financial and practical.

[1901] But then there's another issue too, which is that there isn't a single person in that group who thinks their audience is stupid.

[1902] And that's also, I think, at least in part, a consequence of the new technology.

[1903] Because if you run a television station, the technology makes your audience feel stupid to you.

[1904] And there's a bunch of reasons for that that are worth thinking through.

[1905] So the first reason is you can't produce a show and assume that your audience has seen any other show that you've ever produced.

[1906] So you have to assume that you're talking to someone who has no memory, right?

[1907] And then you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

[1908] And then the bandwidth is extraordinarily expensive, so you can't explain anything in detail.

[1909] So basically, if you run a television station, you're talking to someone who has attention deficit disorder and Alzheimer's.

[1910] Right, right.

[1911] And so you can't help but think of your audience as not very bright when you're looking at them through an aperture that's only this wide.

[1912] And then with the new technology, with YouTube and with podcasts, it's like, well, the doors are open, man. And so Rogan starts to experiment with three -hour podcasts.

[1913] Who the hell would have ever thought that was a good idea?

[1914] You know, right.

[1915] So you all think it's a good idea.

[1916] You know, and it's the same thing happened with entertainment.

[1917] It's like the rule on network TV for a long time was, you can't expect an audience to have more than a 90 minute attention span.

[1918] A movie, that's as long as they can ever manage.

[1919] And that's like, you know, Game of Thrones comes out.

[1920] It's like 200 hours long.

[1921] And, and, and, and, you know, there's 50 plot lines or 60 plot lines, and people have absolutely no problem whatsoever following it.

[1922] And so it turns out that we're way smarter than we thought we were.

[1923] And one of the things that inspires, that's inspired me over the last year or a half, let's say, or so is the realization of that.

[1924] And then, you know, this, so I've talked to about 250 ,000 people now in this way.

[1925] And it's amazing that people will come out.

[1926] Like, is it Saturday?

[1927] What, what day is it?

[1928] I think today is Wednesday?

[1929] I've been busy too.

[1930] Oh, I have no idea what day it was.

[1931] I mean, I'm not even sure what time it is.

[1932] Do not put that on Twitter, please.

[1933] Anyways, look, it's remarkable that three thousand people will come out to have a discussion like this and I was rereading 12 rules for life today and because I was trying to update my memory again and you know it's a way easier book than Maps of Meaning was and but it's still a hard book and I didn't think that when I was writing it but when I reread it tonight I thought oh this book is a lot harder than I thought it was and yet it's sold it's sold three million copies now and so so that's inspiring it's inspiring it's inspired to see how much of a market there is for a serious discussion about how we could get our individual lives together and make things like solidly better.

[1934] That's really inspiring and it's really real as far as I can tell and so I can't imagine anything better than that and which is why keep keep doing this.

[1935] I mean it's it's a ridiculously exciting to do it but it's also remarkable I can't believe it, that it keeps rolling along and that I can have these sorts of discussions with a very large number of people and millions of people online.

[1936] So, you know, because I've always talked about the most serious things that I could formulate in my classes.

[1937] And then, you know, that worked on YouTube, which was quite the damn shock.

[1938] And it's worked in podcasts.

[1939] And then it works in this format.

[1940] It's, that's really something.

[1941] So, yeah.

[1942] Well, it's inspiring for me to be back at it.

[1943] with you.

[1944] So on that note, I'm going to get out of the way and make some noise for Jordan Peterson, everybody.

[1945] Thank you, Mr. Reuben.

[1946] Thank you, everyone.

[1947] It was very nice talking with you, and thanks for coming.

[1948] Good night.

[1949] 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.

[1950] Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1951] See Jordan B. Peterson .com for audio, e -book, and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

[1952] And check out Jordan B. Peterson .com slash personality for information on his new course.

[1953] I really hope you enjoyed this podcast.

[1954] If you did, please leave a rating at Apple Podcasts, a comment, a review, or share this episode with a friend.

[1955] Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next week.

[1956] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter at Jordan B. Peterson.

[1957] on Facebook at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and at Instagram at jordan .b. Peterson.

[1958] Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books, can be found on my website, jordanb peterson .com.

[1959] My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future, can be found at self -authoring .com.

[1960] That's self -authoring .com.

[1961] From the Westwood One podcast network.