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Oct. 18, 2018 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:24:10

Truth as the Antidote to Suffering (with Lewis Howes)

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	If you don't have a goal, you suffer, and then you get cruel and bitter and resentful, and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place.
	And so, because you can't suffer pointlessly without becoming bitter, and you can't become bitter without becoming cruel.
	So you need an aim, the question is, then the question of course is what you should aim at.
	A bitter aim.
	A better aim, that's for sure.
	So then the question is, what should your aim be?
	Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast.
	We've got the legendary Jordan Peterson in the house.
	Good to see you, sir.
	Good to see you.
	Very excited about this.
	You've got a book out called 12 Rules for Life.
	Make sure you guys check this out.
	You probably already got it, but if you don't, I'm telling you, go pick it up right now.
	An Antidote to Chaos.
	You've had so much attention over this last couple of years and I've been digging into the research and just been fascinated by everything that you've been up to.
	And I just love your stance on the vision you have for humanity in terms of how we can all live better lives.
	And I think you simplify a lot of things in this book.
	Which, some things, people don't like to simplify.
	They like to complicate.
	And I think that's what's gotten you a lot of attention, is that you try to really simplify a lot of these things.
	Well, I try to make everything concrete so that it's actually implementable.
	I mean, there's a lot of high-level abstractions in the book, because it ranges up into the theological and the philosophical, but it's always grounded in what you can actually do in your life, practically.
	You want to Bridge that gap from the highest abstraction down to the lowest level of behavior so that it becomes implementable.
	And that's how philosophical concepts take on their meaning, right?
	Because they have to have some impact on the way you see the world and the way you act in the world.
	Or they're not fully realized.
	They're not understood.
	Partly what we mean, I would say, when we say that we understand something.
	It's kind of a strange phrase, to understand something.
	But it means to be able to embody it in a shift of view and a shift of action.
	And then you've got it.
	It's graspable.
	It's in your hand.
	Embody something in a shift of view and a shift of action.
	Well, they're the same thing, because...
	Your perceptions are very tightly linked to your actions because, of course, when you're acting, you're aiming at something.
	You have to be devoted towards some aim, some target.
	We play that out in sports all the time.
	That's why sports are so entertaining for people.
	It's because they dramatize the idea of aim.
	And not only of aim, but of the pursuit of excellence in pursuit of that aim.
	That's the game.
	And the reason it's a spectacle and the reason that people participate in it is because it dramatizes something absolutely essential about life.
	And so you want to take philosophical abstractions and you want to use them to structure your aim and then your perceptions organize around that aim and then you act it out and then you've got it.
	Then it's become part of your life.
	It's not just a philosophical abstraction that floats free in space.
	Why is there so much conflict in the world?
	Is it because there's so many different perceptions that people have?
	What they think should be right?
	Sure.
	Well, part of it is, part of it, of course, there's conflict because we have real problems.
	And so life is actually difficult, independent of psychological foolishness, let's say.
	Independent of the obstacles that we put in our own path.
	It's already challenging.
	It's already fatally challenging.
	Life is the ultimate challenge.
	We will die.
	Yes, yes.
	So there is a challenge.
	Yes.
	Uncertainty, fear, pain, all those things.
	Yes, everything that goes along with suffering is a challenge and it's the full challenge because it takes everything you have.
	And so part of the reason we disagree is because there are complex problems to solve and then we also disagree because we're willfully blind and because we're more ignorant than we should be and we're not everything we should be and we tilt towards malevolence from time to time and we betray each other and ourselves and so we take a bad lot in many ways and make it worse.
	Now not always obviously and we don't have to but that's sort of the baseline that we're working against.
	I think people are most disappointed in life When they're disappointed in themselves, they see that they've made things worse than they had to be, even though the baseline can be pretty brutal.
	So the book and all my lectures, I suppose, are put forward in an attempt to take the high-level philosophical abstractions and to make them into something that's actionable.
	And to take the next best action in your life to improve your life, so we don't have to suffer as much.
	Well, and hopefully also so that people around you don't have to either.
	So one of the things I've been talking to my audiences about is the relationship between responsibility and meaning, which is, what would you say, it's a constant refrain in the book.
	It's one of its underlying messages, let's say, or...
	Themes is a better way of thinking about it.
	You know, if you start with the presumption that there's a baseline of suffering in life and that that can be exaggerated by, as a consequence of human failing, as a consequence of malevolence and betrayal and self-betrayal and deceit and all those things that we do to each other and ourselves that we know that aren't good, that amplifies the suffering.
	That's sort of the baseline against which you have to work.
	It's contemplation of that often that makes people hopeless and depressed and anxious and overwhelmed and all of that.
	And they have the reasons.
	But you need something to put up against that.
	And what you put up against that is meaning.
	Meaning is actually the instinct that helps you guide yourself through that catastrophe.
	And most of that meaning is to be found in the adoption of responsibility.
	So if you think, for example, if you think about the people that you admire, well, you think about when you have a clear conscience first, because that's a good thing to aim at, which is something different than happiness, right?
	A clear conscience is different than happiness.
	That's better.
	Yeah.
	That's better.
	You're not guilting yourself, you're not feeling bad about yourself.
	That's right.
	You feel that you've justified your existence, right?
	And so you're not waking up at 3 in the morning in a cold sweat thinking about all the terrible things that you've involved yourself in.
	What you said to someone that you shouldn't have said, or how you acted.
	What opportunity you lost, or the things that you've let go that you should have capitalized on, and all of that.
	And so, if you think about the times when you're at peace with yourself with regards to how you're conducting yourself in the world, it's almost always conditions under which you've adopted responsibility.
	At least, the most guilt, I think, that you can experience, perhaps, Is the sure knowledge that you're not even taking care of yourself.
	So that you're leaving that responsibility to other people.
	Because that's pretty pathetic.
	Unless you're psychopathic.
	And you're living a parasitical life.
	And that characterizes a very small minority of people.
	And an even smaller minority think that's justifiable.
	But most of the time you're in guilt and shame because you're not...
	Not only are you not taking care of yourself, let's say, so someone else has to, but you're not living up to your full potential and so there's an existential weight that goes along with that.
	So you suffer even more when you don't take care of yourself or take the best actions or do the work that you know you can do and you rely on someone else to Support you financially, emotionally, physically, home, whatever it may be.
	Yeah, well, because you're not only not being what you could be, you're interfering with someone else being what they could be, right?
	So you're not only a void, you're a drain.
	Jesus, that's a catastrophe.
	But we usually don't even know it when we're in that situation because we're in a depressed state or we're...
	Or we don't want to see it.
	You know, you wake up at 3 in the morning and you know.
	And so, and then you think of the people that you, so you admire yourself, or perhaps you can at least live with yourself when you're taking responsibility, at least for yourself.
	And so that settles your conscience.
	But then if you look at the people that you spontaneously admire, and so the act of spontaneously admiring someone is the manifestation of the instinct for meaning, right?
	So this is partly why people are so enamored of sports figures, because the sports figures are playing out the drama of attaining the goal, of attaining a certain kind of, let's say, psychological and physical perfection in pursuit of the goal.
	That's the drama.
	And to spontaneously admire that is to have that instinct for meaning latch onto something that can be used as a model.
	And then that model should be transcribed into something that's applicable in life.
	You know, and you really like to see in an athletic performance, you really like to see someone who's extremely disciplined and in shape do something physically remarkable and to stretch themselves even beyond their previous exploits because you really like to see a brilliant move in an athletic match.
	But you also like to see that person ensconced in a broader moral framework so that not only are they trying to win And disciplining themselves in pursuit of that victory and then stretching themselves so they're continually getting better.
	But they're doing it in a way that helps develop their whole team and that's good for the sport in general and that reflects well on the broader culture.
	They're a great leader in their team.
	They're positive.
	They're good sportsmen against their competitors.
	They're not negative towards the other people.
	They're lifting them up too.
	Like the ultimate That's right.
	So that they can work for their own improvement in a way that simultaneously works for the improvement of their team and for the sport.
	And then to the degree that that spills over into the broader culture, so much the better.
	So that's all being dramatized in an athletic event.
	And it's really, it's not philosophical, it's concrete.
	It's dramatized in the world.
	And that's what the games represent.
	And so, well, it's partly because, well, in some sense, life is a game.
	It is.
	In that you're always, the analogy is that in life, like in sports, you're setting forth a name and then arranging your perceptions and your actions in pursuit of that game.
	And that you also generally do it while cooperating and competing with other people.
	So that's also the game-like element as well.
	All of that's dramatized in athletics.
	That's like philosophy for people who aren't philosophical.
	And I'm not being smart about that.
	It's like it really is philosophy for people who aren't being philosophical because it's played out.
	And you can see it too.
	You can see the spontaneous appreciation for the human spirit manifest itself when you see people rise to their feet spontaneously in a sports arena when they see someone do something particularly remarkable.
	See an athlete who's extremely trained Stretch themselves beyond what you think is a normative human limit and everyone celebrates that spontaneously.
	So it's quite something to behold.
	So taking back to responsibility and meaning when we're watching sports or someone do this act, what does this do for us in terms of responsibility and meaning?
	Well, it helps us figure out what we can imitate.
	It gives us a model.
	Yes, it's a model.
	It's a model of something that I respect.
	Well, even what philosophy is, or even theology for that matter, is an abstract model.
	Like, it's laid out in words.
	Now, the problem often is it becomes so abstract that people don't know how to bring it back down to embodiment.
	Yes.
	Whereas something like the drama of a sports event is sort of midway between philosophy and action, right?
	So it's not entirely abstracted because it's not only coded in words.
	It's acted out.
	Visual.
	You can see an example of what just happens and you can try to reverse engineer how they do that.
	Well, yes, exactly.
	Well, at least the fact that you admire the person means that you might start to try to act like them.
	Now it's not easy, and maybe that would mean that you start to discipline yourself with regards to a particular sport, but it might also be that you start to mimic or are at least affected in some way by their sportsman-like behavior, which is the ground of a certain kind of ethic, because if you can play well with others, which is sort of the hallmark of a good sport, Then that actually means that you're a reasonably sophisticated and civilized person.
	It's really important to learn to play well with others.
	That's the ground of ethics.
	And if you can do it there in that setting, then hopefully you can translate it into life setting.
	Well, right.
	That's exactly right.
	That's the goal.
	Well, that's what you hope for.
	Yeah, that's the goal of the...
	So if the goal of the game is to put the ball into the net, then the goal of having games is to produce people who can take proper aim no matter where they are.
	That's exactly what we're trying to do with athletics.
	So I've been talking to my audiences a lot about that.
	And there's more to it, too, because...
	If the background of life is, there's an ineradicable component of suffering, and that's complicated by, let's say, malevolence and the proclivity of people to betray themselves and others, which complicates it and makes it worse, then if you don't have a noble aim, and if that isn't imbuing your life with sustainable meaning, Then you fall prey to all the catastrophe, the pain and the anxiety and the anger that that suffering generates.
	And that makes you bitter.
	Because what I'm hearing you say is that...
	And correct me if I'm wrong, we must have an aim in our life no matter what stage of life we're in.
	And if we don't have some type of aim, even if we're a few months of an aim of going somewhere or direction, the suffering is going to be even more suffering.
	Pointless.
	Because we're already going to face the greatest challenges in life.
	That's right.
	You're stuck with it.
	We're already struggling.
	That's right.
	There's no way out of that.
	Adversity is coming no matter what.
	That's right.
	If we have big goals or small little goal or whatever it may be, But it's going to be less suffering if we have an aim.
	Yeah, well, it's worse than that even, because the suffering is pain.
	There's zero meaning.
	Well, the suffering is pain, and the suffering is anxiety and uncertainty, and the suffering is hopelessness.
	But the consequence of all that is that you get bitter.
	And when you get bitter, you get mean, and you get cruel, and you start to hurt yourself and other people.
	So it's not only that if you don't have a goal, you suffer, it's that if you don't have a goal, you suffer, and then you get cruel, and bitter, and resentful, and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place.
	Because you can't suffer pointlessly without becoming bitter, and you can't become bitter without becoming cruel.
	So you need an aim.
	Then the question of course is what you should aim.
	A better aim, that's for sure.
	So then the question is what should your aim be?
	Now we have a program.
	It's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today.
	I have this website called selfauthoring.com and that program helps people write about their life.
	And so there's a past authoring program.
	To establish your aim you have to know where you are.
	It's like you're trying to orient yourself on a map.
	You can't orient yourself on a map unless you know where you are.
	You also have to know where you're going, right?
	So those are the two relevant things.
	The past authoring program helps people write about their lives, so it's a guided autobiography.
	We ask people to break their life up into six epochs, six sections, and then to write about the emotionally important events in those epochs and to detail out Why the positive things happened and why more of that could conceivably happen in the future and to detail out why the negative things happened and to try to understand why with an aim to not replicating them in the future.
	Because the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past.
	The purpose of memory is so that you figure out what went wrong when something went wrong so you don't duplicate it in the future.
	So that's the purpose of memory.
	And the past authoring program can help people catch up.
	And you know you have to catch up if you have memories that are older than about a year and a half that still cause you emotional pain when you think about them.
	Or if you dwell on them, they come spontaneously back to mind.
	It means you haven't It means that there's part of your life that you haven't mapped out properly and it still has emotional valence that's gripping you.
	You're still holding on to that story.
	Or it's still holding on to you.
	Right.
	You haven't let it go.
	Yeah, well you haven't been able to navigate your way through it.
	There's a pitfall there that you fell in and you don't know how to avoid similar pitfalls in the future and that's why your brain won't let it go.
	Because it's saying that's what the anxiety systems do.
	It's like, this happened to you.
	It wasn't good.
	This happened to you.
	It wasn't good.
	This happened to you.
	It wasn't good.
	Fix it.
	Fix it.
	That will never go away unless you fix it.
	How do you fix it?
	Well, you have to figure out why it happened.
	Right?
	That's the first thing.
	It's like, how did you...
	How was it that that situation arose to pull you down?
	And that's not simple.
	That's why...
	Well, that's why we have the writing program.
	Because it's complicated to think it through.
	But if you face it, and you meditate on it, let's say...
	And you do this voluntarily, there's a pretty high probability that you'll be able to decrease the probability that will be repeated in the future.
	The second part of the program helps people do an analysis of their virtues and their faults.
	Same sort of idea.
	What's good about you that you could capitalize on?
	What's weak about you that you need to fix so that it doesn't bring you down?
	That's the present authoring, but the future authoring program is probably most relevant to you.
	You and your listeners because you're interested in helping people establish aims and so we already talked about the fact that you need a name in life or That's where you derive your meaning and without that things go to hell and And as literally as that can be taken and so but it's not easy to ask people to say Well, it's easy to ask them What do you want in your life?
	It's a very hard question to answer because it's too vague and grand.
	So we help in the future authoring program, we help people break that down.
	It's okay.
	So here's the situation.
	So you put yourself in the right frame of mind.
	So what's the right frame of mind?
	It's like rule two in this book.
	Treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping.
	You're someone that you are responsible for helping.
	So what that means is you have to start from the presupposition that despite all your flaws and insufficiencies, that it's worth having you around and that it would be okay if things were better for you.
	So you need to take care of yourself like you're taking care of someone you care for.
	So there's a bit of a detachment in that.
	And then the next thing is, okay, so now look three to five years down the road, okay?
	You get to have what you need and want, assuming you're being reasonable and that you actually want it, which means you're willing to make the sacrifices that would make it possible.
	What do you mean by reasonable?
	Well, that's the next thing.
	Well, within your grasp, That would be something.
	What if something is out of your grasp, but you still push hard enough to potentially get it?
	Well, then you need an incremental plan, right?
	You need to break that goal down into steps that you...
	Not some crazy goal within a year that's like, you haven't even done the work to master a skill yet.
	Yeah, well, that's it.
	And you can have a high-end goal and more power to you if you do, but you need it.
	Well, you need a pathway to it.
	You know, if it's 10 stories up above you, you need a staircase to get there, right?
	And so you have to build the staircase, too.
	And so...
	In the future authoring program, so you're asked, first of all, okay, you get to have what you want and need.
	That's the proposition.
	But you have to aim at it.
	You have to define it and aim at it.
	So then the first thing is, okay, if you could put your family together the way you wanted it to be, what would that look like?
	And so that might be your siblings and your parents, but that also might be your wife or your husband and your kids, assuming that you're at that point in your life.
	If you could have the family you wanted, what would that look like?
	Career, same thing.
	You get to have the career or the job that is within your grasp, necessary and suitable for you if you were taking care of yourself.
	How are you going to educate yourself?
	Because you're not as smart as you should be.
	There's a lot more things you need to know.
	So you've got to keep learning and moving forward.
	So you need to plan for that.
	How are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically?
	How are you going to avoid the catastrophic temptations, for example, of drugs and alcohol?
	Because that pulls a lot of people down.
	You need a plan for that.
	Are you going to be a social drinker?
	How much are you going to drink?
	How much is too much?
	What about your drug use?
	You've got to regulate that so it isn't a pitfall.
	How are you going to use your time meaningful and productively outside of work?
	Because you need a plan for that.
	So that's...
	There's one other that's slipped my mind at the moment.
	Yeah, I think there's seven initial questions, and I don't remember the last one.
	Oh, intimate relationship, of course.
	So do you want a long-term, stable, intimate relationship?
	And if you do, then how would you like that to lay itself out?
	You've got to have a vision for that, because if you don't have a vision, you're not going to aim at it.
	And if you don't aim at it, then you won't even see the opportunities when they arise.
	That's the thing that's so cool.
	I wrote about this in Chapter 10, which is...
	Be precise in your speech.
	It's a chapter about the fact that aims structure your perceptions.
	So, for example, once you aim at something, your brain, literally, the perceptual structures in your brain, in your visual cortex, reorient themselves to calculate a pathway to the aim.
	And then what they show you in the world is obstacles to that path and open pathways to the path.
	That's actually how the world reveals itself.
	Just like Just like when you're driving in a car and you have a map and you aim at a particular place, then all the things that are related to that place show up in the world.
	It's exactly the same thing.
	Because you are traveling through time and space, right?
	And you need a map.
	And so, so after you answer these seven questions, and you're encouraged to do it badly, because you don't have to get perfectionistic, just complete it, right, because a bad plan is better than no plan.
	It gives you something to improve.
	So even if your aim is vague, and even if it's off target, if you start aiming, and you see you're off target, then you can shift, and you can make it more precise.
	And start to recognize what you don't want.
	Yes, exactly.
	I thought I wanted this, but I don't.
	So let me re-navigate and figure out what I do want.
	And you might have to try a bunch of things.
	Well, you will have to.
	That's why you shouldn't get perfectionistic about it.
	You will absolutely be wrong, but you won't be as wrong as you would have been if you were aimless.
	No man's land is not good.
	No man's room is worse than a bad path.
	That's exactly right.
	That's a good one.
	And it's right.
	You don't want to be in no man's land.
	Why did you use that phrase?
	Because that's right.
	That's exactly right.
	For me, the idea of walking around aimlessly is like the worst idea in the world.
	It's like zero purpose, zero mission, zero certainty at all.
	It's like walking around in no man's land aimlessly.
	But it's funny too because in no man's land everybody's shooting at you.
	Because that's a military term.
	No man's land is the space between two enemy positions.
	You bet.
	So if you're aimless, you're also at a place where everything is shooting at you.
	So it's a very good metaphor that came to mind.
	That's why I remarked on it.
	That's very, very cool.
	So then we say to people, okay, look, now, Okay, now you've thought about this for a while.
	It's nice to do this over a couple of days, too, because then you get to sleep on it, and that helps reorient yourself.
	So then, okay, now you write for 20 minutes.
	Don't worry about grammar or spelling.
	This isn't a composition exercise, right?
	You get to have what you want three to five years down the road.
	What does your life look like, hypothetically?
	Write it out.
	Write it out.
	Okay, so then that's the first part.
	The second part of the exercise, so now you've got your thing to aim at.
	You think, well, I'm motivated because I got my thing to aim at.
	It's like you're not as motivated as you could be because you don't yet have your thing to run away from.
	Because if you really want to be motivated, you want to be going somewhere and you want to be not going somewhere else.
	Which typically is a pain, right?
	Yes, a pain or anxiety.
	Some domain of suffering and guilt, let's say.
	I don't want to feel this anymore.
	Yes, exactly, exactly.
	So the other thing we ask people is, okay, now take stock of your weaknesses and imagine that you let them multiply.
	You got hopeless and you augured in and things were as bad for you as they could be in three to five years.
	What are some examples of weaknesses that people might have?
	They lie.
	They procrastinate.
	They avoid.
	They're grandiose.
	They're narcissistic.
	They're undisciplined.
	They're nihilistic.
	They're aimless.
	All of those things.
	Victim mentality.
	Victim mentality.
	They take the quick way out.
	They pursue impulsive pleasures.
	They sacrifice meaning for expediency.
	They don't take care of their basic responsibilities.
	They fight stupidly with their parents.
	They don't negotiate properly with their spouse.
	They're bitter at work because they haven't said what they have to say.
	They haven't thought through what they're doing tomorrow.
	They drink too much.
	They smoke too much.
	They take too many drugs.
	They don't regulate their...
	Don't work out yet.
	Yeah.
	And everyone knows, man.
	Everyone knows.
	And everyone's got a set of weaknesses that they know about.
	And so we say, all right.
	What are some of your weaknesses, like three weaknesses that you know right now you can still work on and then three things that you think are really...
	Well, a lot of things are things that I've taken care of in my life.
	Like I used to smoke when I was a kid.
	I smoked a pack a day.
	I used to drink a lot.
	I didn't work out.
	I wasn't nearly as disciplined as I should have been.
	I wasn't as careful with what I was saying.
	Like...
	And I suppose my most likely negative outcome probably would have been, I really like to drink.
	Like, alcohol is a really good drug for me.
	Is that why you did your thesis on that?
	Well, partly.
	It was mostly because the opportunity came up for me to investigate drug and alcohol use.
	But I came from a little town in northern Alberta.
	It was a heavy drinking town.
	And that could have been a real trap for me.
	You know, and...
	So anyway, so we have these people who say, okay, now you know your weaknesses and you know what particular hell you would descend to if you allowed yourself to descend into it because you've probably had a taste of it.
	It's like you really let that go and you're in a terrible place in three to five years because you haven't done what you should do.
	What does that look like?
	Everybody writes that down.
	Write it down, so you know.
	Because one of the things you want to have behind you, let's say you have to do something difficult, like go confront your boss.
	It's like, well maybe hope isn't enough to encourage you to do that.
	You think, well no, if I don't encourage, if I don't go confront my boss, carefully, intelligently, Then I'm gonna hate my job, and then I'm gonna drink more, then I'm gonna end up in that little hell place that I designed for myself.
	It's like, oh, I'm not going there.
	Well, I don't want to talk to my boss, or I don't want to confront my wife, or my husband, whatever it is, or my father, or my children for that matter.
	But if I don't, Then I'll resent myself or I'll resent the situation.
	I'm going to end up going down this terrible pathway.
	Because sometimes when you're moving forward, you have to do something difficult.
	You might think, well, why bother?
	And the answer is, well, so I don't end up in hell.
	How about that?
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah, there's that.
	If you don't experience the pain now or the difficulty now, you're going to have a deeper pain later.
	Yeah, yeah, that's life.
	Much deeper pain later.
	And that's why I think you mentioned at one point is like, Putting ourselves in structured pain, like structured sense of feeling pain throughout the day, whether it be the tough conversation.
	I don't want to do that.
	It's painful, but I'm going to because I know afterwards it's going to probably feel better.
	It's a bit of a sacrifice, right?
	So you sacrifice stability in the present for a gain in the future.
	That's the big discovery of human beings.
	Sacrifice works.
	Exactly.
	And were you a big athlete growing up?
	No.
	Well I was a small kid and I skipped a grade.
	Although I skied and I went cross-country skiing.
	It's individual sports things mostly with my dad.
	You'll understand that in order to improve as an athlete or in any sport you have to put yourself through daily pain.
	If you want to achieve that model of excellence that you watch someone playing basketball as a child and you see someone living this model It's gonna be 15 years of deliberate pain.
	Yeah, that's a discipline.
	That's it.
	Yeah, well I worked out for a long time with weights, you know.
	So you know, you felt it every day.
	You didn't want to push through the pain, but you knew that it would get you a greater result.
	Yeah, well it's easier not to do it than to do it, but not in the long run.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You know, I've really seen the benefits, for example, for weightlifting, because I've watched people, because I'm 58, 50, how old am I? 56.
	You look great.
	As soon as I'm getting older, and I've really noticed the difference between people and when they age, between people who laid down a good physiological platform when they were young, and those who didn't, because if you haven't, Worked out.
	Weights, particularly, I would say.
	You start to get pretty soft in your 30s and your cardiovascular system starts to go, and really early.
	The other thing, too, is the best thing you can do to maintain cognitive ability isn't to do exercises like lumosity.
	It's not brain exercises that keep you sharp.
	It's exercise.
	So if you're 50, both cardiovascular and weight lifting, if you're 50 you can restore your cognitive function to the level of a 30 year old through exercise.
	Your mental function through physical activity.
	Yeah, well your brain is a very demanding organ and if your cardiovascular system is compromised then you get stupid.
	So the less you move and the bigger you get, the more stupid you become.
	Well you compromise, you compromise its function.
	Because the brain is the organ that uses more, it's very metabolically demanding.
	And so if you're not in good physical shape, then one of the things that suffers most greatly is your cognitive function.
	And so that's quite an interesting thing to see how tight that linkage is.
	So in the next part of the program we have people, now it's okay, now you've got your vision.
	Yeah.
	Even if it's a bad one, it's still okay.
	That's right.
	Well, it's better than no vision at all, right?
	It's something that you can improve.
	Well, think.
	You're trying to get through a territory you don't understand.
	And here's your option.
	No map.
	A map that's not so good, but has some things about it, or a great map.
	Well, obviously the great map is the thing you want, but the map that's something is way better than the map that's nothing.
	Plus, as you explore, because of your map, you can start to fill in the details.
	And you start to learn, and you start to overcome stuff, and you start to master skills on your journey, right?
	Yeah, well that's the other thing too.
	It's like, let's say you aim at something and you develop some skills along the way and then you get like a third of the way there and you think, oh, that's not for me.
	It's like, well, yeah, fair enough, but now you've still got the skills you developed.
	You know exactly why it's not for you now instead of vaguely...
	So you don't have to keep going after that.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Well, and you have a rationale.
	And then you can bring that wisdom back, even though it's not perfect, you can bring it back to your next plan.
	And take responsibility for the next steps.
	Yes, yes.
	And so as you plan, you get better at planning, which is the crucial thing.
	So then we say to people, take your positive vision and make it into eight statable goals.
	And then rank them in a hierarchy because you need to know what...
	Like a top goal and then incremental goals.
	Well, that's the other thing.
	Break the goals into incremental goals so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding.
	This is also what you want to do with a kid.
	You don't tell your kid, here's an impossible thing, why don't you go out and fail?
	You say, here's something worth going after.
	Here's a step you could take that would push you beyond where you are, but that you also have a reasonably high probability of succeeding at.
	They call that...
	Within a time frame.
	Within some time frame.
	That's the other thing.
	You have to parameterize it with regards to time frame.
	That's right.
	And that puts you in the zone of proximal development.
	And that's a concept that was generated by a guy named Vygotsky.
	He was a Russian developmental psychologist and a smart one.
	It's where the idea of the zone comes from, to be in the zone.
	And when you're in the zone, you're expanding your skills in a manner that's intrinsically rewarding because you're succeeding.
	And so you want to set, if you're good to yourself, you think, okay, I need to set a goal.
	But I need to set a goal that someone as stupid and useless as me could probably attain if they put some effort into it.
	Then you've got it perfectly because it's not so high that it's grandiose or impossible that you fail necessarily and then justify your bitterness.
	It's like, well, I could do, well, because that happens to people.
	Happens all the time.
	Yeah, it's like, yes, exactly.
	Well, I set a goal and I didn't attain it, so I'm not going to set any more goals.
	It's like, no, you set a goal that was inappropriate.
	For the time frame.
	That's right.
	You didn't calibrate it properly.
	And you're playing a trick on yourself because you wanted to fail so that you could justify not having to try.
	And being a victim.
	Which isn't helpful.
	You're still going to be a victim.
	There's no way out of that, man.
	Because life is a challenge that, in some sense, can't be surmounted.
	So there's no way out of your problem.
	But there are certainly proper ways of dealing with it.
	You've got those eight steps.
	Lay them out, and then the next thing is, okay, you need a rationale for them.
	Because you're going to have doubts, and other people are going to put up obstacles.
	Is that a meaning you mean?
	Is that a meaning?
	A rationale means a meaning?
	Yeah, a justification.
	It's like, okay, so what sort of justification is a good justification for your goals?
	It's easy.
	Why would it be good for you?
	Why would it be good for your family if you attain that goal?
	Why would it be good for the broader community?
	Because if it's a good goal, it should be good for you.
	That's fine.
	But if it's a really good goal, it should be good for you in a way that's good for other people.
	Win-win-win.
	Yes, exactly.
	And if you're going to decide what your goals are, why not set up the ones that benefit the largest number of people simultaneously?
	Yes.
	If you can do that, you should start with your own concerns because you have to take care of yourself.
	Basic needs first.
	Yes.
	Put your own oxygen mask on, then put your child's oxygen mask on.
	Community.
	Right.
	And then you can, as you build up the basis of competence locally, you might develop enough skills so that you can expand that outward.
	And it also gives your goal a certain amount of nobility.
	So if someone challenges you and says, well, why are you doing that?
	That seems stupid.
	You could say, I'm doing that because it helps me take care of myself, but it benefits my family, and here's the reasons why.
	And this is the repercussions out into the broader community.
	And people who are putting up objections and doubts aren't Aren't armed to deal with that kind of response.
	And then when you have those doubts in your mind that plague you, which they...
	You go back to your reasons.
	You go back to your reasons.
	Your why.
	That's right.
	Say, why am I doing this?
	Oh, yeah, it's because, well, I have to take care of myself, because otherwise I'm pathetic and useless and bitter and cruel, and I'm going somewhere terrible, so that's a bad idea, and here's how it would help my family, and here's how it would help the community, and that's a good enough set of reasons, unless I can think of better ones.
	Right.
	Without better ones, that's good enough.
	Because I think the question comes back to, after, you know, someone could go down the rabbit hole and say, why, why am I doing this?
	And why is this, you know, meaningful for me?
	And I think a lot of people go back to, well, why am I here in the first place?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Why am I here?
	What is the meaning of my life?
	And is this real or is this just some dream world?
	Well, and then people do go back to that.
	And then they get stuck on that.
	Yeah.
	But none of this even matters because why am I even here?
	Well, the thing is, is that that's a self-defeating set of propositions in some sense because the consequence of being stuck there, the reason you're stuck there to begin with is because you're not very happy about the fact that life is intrinsically tied up with suffering because you wouldn't be asking that question to begin with.
	Okay, so if you let that pull you in and take you down, all it does is make the suffering worse.
	It's not helpful.
	And then the cascade that we talked about happens.
	You suffer stupidly and pointlessly.
	You get bitter.
	You get cruel.
	You make everything worse.
	It's like, that's your answer, is it?
	You're gonna make everything worse.
	It's bad enough.
	You're gonna make it worse.
	Mostly people won't do that consciously.
	So you think, well, what's the alternative?
	Well, here's one.
	If you have a sufficiently noble purpose, the suffering will justify itself.
	And I think that's empirically testable.
	And I do believe it's the case, because I've watched people do very difficult things, like people who work in palliative care wards.
	So all they're ever dealing with is pain and death.
	And they can do it.
	They get up in the morning, they go to work, and they take care of those people.
	They lose people on a weekly basis, and yet they can do it.
	And what that shows is that if you turn around and you confront the suffering voluntarily, you find out that you are way tougher than you think.
	It's not that life is better than you think.
	Life is as harsh as you think.
	It might even be worse.
	But you are way tougher than you think if you turn around and confront it.
	And so then what you discover is that there's a spirit within you that can pursue something meaningful, that has the resilience and the strength to contend properly with the catastrophe of existence without becoming bitter.
	That's actually the central...
	And I would say that's one of the central themes of 12 Rules for Life, is that make no mistake about it.
	The first noble truth of Buddhism, life is suffering.
	This is true.
	And it's worse than that because it's suffering contaminated by malevolence.
	That's the baseline.
	And so that's very pessimistic.
	But the optimistic part is that you are so damn tough, you can actually not only deal with that, you can improve it.
	It's like, hmm, oh, well, that's a horrible situation.
	But it turns out that I'm armed for the task.
	Well, that's a great thing for people to know.
	And I do believe, I think the fact that we're armed for the task is even more true than the fact that life is catastrophe, contaminated by malevolence.
	We're stronger than things are terrible.
	And things are pretty terrible!
	So that means we're pretty damn strong!
	Yes, it's a very good thing to know.
	And it's not naive optimism.
	It's a very different thing.
	It's like, no, things are terrible.
	They're brutal.
	And you are so damn tough, you can't believe it.
	Wow.
	What's been the biggest challenge in your life that you've had to overcome?
	or the biggest suffering that took you the longest to get beyond to improve.
	Having them bring you down is not helping the person who has the problem.
	It's the same with my daughter.
	It's like, had my wife and I deteriorated as a consequence of her condition, A, that would have been horrible for her, because then she would have had to bear the weight of watching her illness destroy her family, right?
	And have that guilt.
	Oh, Christ, yes.
	I mean, that's one of the terrible things about having a very bad illness, is that not only does it do you in, but you can see it taking its toll on the people around you.
	you.
	I think that might even be worse.
	Welcome, everyone, back to the School of Greatness podcast.
	We've got the legendary Jordan Peterson in the house.
	Good to see you, sir.
	Good to see you.
	Very excited about this.
	You've got a book out called 12 Rules for Life.
	Make sure you guys check this out.
	You probably already got it, but if you don't, I'm telling you, go pick it up right now.
	An antidote to chaos.
	What's been the biggest challenge in your life that you've had to overcome, or the biggest suffering that took you the longest to get beyond to improve?
	Oh, I think that was probably, and I wrote about this in the last chapter of my book, which is called Pet a Cat When You Encounter One in the Street, and it's about dealing with, you know, you think, what's the worst thing that can happen to you?
	Well, I think the worst thing is that you do something really horrible and you screw up your life and everyone's life around you.
	That's bad.
	You have to live with it.
	Yes, yes.
	And you have to live with knowing you did it.
	It's like, that's rough, man.
	That's sin, so to speak.
	It's worse than dying.
	Yes.
	Because then you don't remember it.
	Right, right.
	There are worse things than dying.
	Yeah, there are.
	Yes, there are.
	No, no, no.
	That's a bad thing, man.
	But I think the hardest existential situation that I've been in is the situation with my daughter because she was very, very ill.
	She had rheumatoid arthritis.
	She had arthritis, it wasn't rheumatoid type, and she had 40 affected joints.
	That started to bother her when she was 2, but it really manifested itself fully when she was 6.
	And some of the medical treatment helped, but when she was 15, 14, 14 through 16, First her hip disintegrated and then her and so she had that replaced after walking around on it for like a good year and then her ankle disintegrated on her other foot and she had to have it replaced and so there were two years of absolutely brutal pain for her like brutal daily excruciating pain and and we were really running around trying to figure out what to do about it because the
	hip wasn't too hard to replace you know Because surgeons are actually pretty good at hip replacements.
	But ankles are still touch and go.
	And just watching that and watching what it was doing to her because she was in enough pain.
	At one point it just about broke her.
	I mean, you've probably been in a situation where you were in pain for a night and couldn't sleep.
	It's like, yeah, fine.
	So multiply that by five and extend it over two years.
	That's tough.
	Jesus Christ, yeah.
	And she was on huge doses of opiates, and so that was sedating her, and so that made her look drunk in public.
	She could only stay awake for about six hours a day, and she had to take Ritalin to stay awake, because otherwise she was just sleeping all the time.
	And it was a very bad autoimmune condition, and so it wasn't only manifest in the joint deterioration and the pain, because arthritis is also very painful, and 40 joints happens to be quite a lot.
	Just one joint?
	Yeah, right!
	No, it was absolutely brutal beyond belief.
	As a father or parent, how do you navigate that emotionally yourself?
	Yeah, well that's what that chapter's about.
	I mean, so what do you do when things are too much?
	Well, One of the answers is you narrow your time frame and the other answer is you look for occasions of grace and beauty where you can get them.
	So when she had a dog, that really helped.
	Yeah.
	You know, so that was something that was with her all the time.
	And we tried to put things in her life that she could care for.
	She had a whole raft of pets, although she was allergic to almost everything.
	So most of them were lizards.
	Oh, yeah, I know.
	You'd get her a guinea pig.
	Here's a guinea pig.
	It's like, oh, I love this guinea pig.
	I'm in pain.
	And then, you know, three hours later, she'd have a big rash.
	Oh, no.
	And we'd have to take the guinea pig back to the pet store.
	You'd be like a hairless dog or something.
	Jesus Christ.
	So the dog, luckily the dog she could tolerate, and so we had the dog for her.
	But one of the things you do when you're in a situation like that, and it's just a bloody ongoing nightmare, is that you shrink your time frame.
	It's like, well, what are we going to do in a year?
	It's like, oh God, we can't even think about that.
	Think about tomorrow.
	Six months, no, treatment.
	Yeah, a week, tomorrow, today, the next hour.
	Yeah, so that's what you have to do.
	Really shrink your time.
	You shrink your time frame until you can tolerate it.
	So you're not planning out years because then you'll go crazy.
	Yeah, it's too much uncertainty.
	You think, okay, how can I make the next hour the least amount of awful possible?
	That's what you do at someone's deathbed.
	You know, you shrink your time frame and that's what you have to do.
	How does that play into the self-authoring program?
	If you have this vision for yourself and you're mapping out a year, two, three, five years ahead...
	Yeah, well, sometimes, you know...
	You have to re-navigate.
	Yeah, that's right.
	You have to re-navigate.
	You have to say no.
	Yeah, because even the best laid plans of mice and men go astray.
	You know, I mean, that's part of being alive.
	And so you have your map.
	But, you know, if you get a flat tire along the way, you still have to stop and fix your car.
	Maybe the bloody thing bursts into flames and you have to get a new car.
	You know, so, I mean...
	Your ascent towards your goals can be punctuated by unexpected catastrophe, and then hopefully you've made yourself into a resilient person at that point, and the catastrophe is no worse than it has to be, and you're not making it worse.
	I mean, one of the things we were fortunate about is that by the time she got really ill, My relationship with my wife was pretty well put together.
	And my relationship with my son, who's younger than her, was also well put together.
	And so he was an absolute trooper, man.
	Because for a lot of his teenage life in particular, there was a huge amount of focus on the suffering of his sister.
	And we were right up to here with that.
	It was enough.
	And he conducted himself admirably.
	If he caused trouble, we didn't know about it.
	He kept it to himself, you know, and I don't mean he was hiding.
	I mean he dealt with it, and he spent a lot of time at home, and he didn't do any unnecessarily stupid things, and he put up with his sister and his parents who were on edge a lot without adding additional catastrophe and misery and grief to it.
	And when she was a little bit crazy and was leaning on him too hard or bothering him, he was there to support her, and it was massively helpful.
	And, you know, I wasn't any more, my wife and I weren't any more crazy towards each other than we had to be.
	And so, there wasn't, like, any additional stress during those periods of time would have sunk us.
	Any extra would have been like, I'm done, I quit.
	That's right, that's right.
	How were you able to compartmentalize or just focus on your career at that time?
	You know, lecturing or writing or whatever it may be at that time?
	Well, that's also part of the vision of hell.
	It's like, well, what's the alternative?
	You let things go and you make them worse.
	Not showing up?
	No, no, there's no excuse for that.
	So how did you say, was it a compartmentalizing of like, okay, it's 9 o'clock or 8 o'clock in the morning, I'm going to work.
	Yeah, well we made rules and we talked about some of them.
	Like some of the rules were, we didn't talk about my daughter's illness after 8 o'clock at night.
	That was the rule.
	For your sanity.
	Well, it's a war.
	You wear yourself out in a week, you're dead, and everyone suffers a lot.
	So you've got to keep going through however long this is going to be.
	And so what do you have to do?
	Well, you have to sleep.
	You have to sleep or things are going to go bad.
	You have to stop talking and sleep.
	Yeah, that's right.
	It's time to stop talking and go to sleep.
	So you had a time cut off.
	Yeah, well, and I had learned some of that because I've been a clinical psychologist for a long time.
	And so I've been dealing with people's problems and you learn how to...
	You know, you think, well, how can you go home when you have all those problems to contend with?
	It's like, well, A, they're not your problems.
	They're not going away right now.
	No, and they're not going away.
	And having them bring you down is not helping the person who has the problem.
	It's the same with my daughter.
	It's like, had my wife and I deteriorated as a consequence of her condition, A, that would have been horrible for her because then she would have had to bear the weight of watching her illness destroy her family, right?
	And have that guilt.
	Oh, Christ, yes.
	I mean, that's one of the terrible things about having a very bad illness, is that not only does it do you in, but you can see it taking its toll on the people around you.
	I think that might even be worse.
	I mean, this is gradations of hell, but still, so you also can't allow that to happen.
	If you have a loved person around you and they're ill, you have a moral obligation not to let it tear you down, because then it's on them.
	That's no good.
	And you think, well, how can you remain healthy and strong in the face of the terrible suffering of someone who's close to you?
	It's like, well...
	Well, you want us both to suffer?
	Well, that's it.
	The alternative is worse.
	You want me to get sick and get overweight and not be able to take care of you or me?
	Right, and then we both drown faster.
	Right.
	Not helpful.
	What about, did she ever go through a place where, I guess some people do this where, you know, kids who have some type of autoimmune or some type of disease or whatever it may be, they didn't necessarily, you know, they were born with it or it happened somehow.
	It's not like they ate something themselves.
	They weren't necessarily responsible, I should say, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Was she responsible for causing all these, you know, all the pain in her body?
	Or was it just something that happened?
	Well, that's what we told her.
	It's just, well, it's life, kid.
	It's not you.
	We also told her very, very many, many times.
	And we were very careful about this.
	Do not use your illness as an excuse.
	As soon as you do that, you can't tell the difference between the illness and your character.
	So don't let it turn you into a victim.
	Even though, obviously, it's a catastrophe.
	We were very clear about that, and that wasn't her fault.
	But that she still had to bear up under it as well as possible, and to do everything she could, and not use it as an excuse.
	And we talk to her about that a lot, and we're clear about it.
	And I've seen this.
	It's one of the things I really dislike about what the universities are doing with disability.
	It's like, everybody gets a disability.
	It's like, well, no wonder, because people have hard lives.
	It's very rare to find someone who isn't suffering under an undue load of some sort.
	There's something wrong with them.
	Pressure and anxiety, whatever.
	Or there's something wrong in their family that's serious, or they have terrible economic pressure.
	There's something wrong.
	It's like, okay, we should make allowances for you.
	It's like, oh yeah?
	What allowances?
	What exactly does that entitle me to?
	Well, I tell you, man, that's a murky place you do not want to go because then you don't know anymore.
	It's like, well, what's my responsibility?
	I mean, I have this undue burden to bear.
	Well, how does that mitigate my responsibility?
	Well, the answer is as little as possible.
	You don't go there because you get confused.
	And as soon as you get confused, well, then the illness has not only got you physiologically, it's got you psychologically.
	And then you're in deep trouble.
	To her great credit, as far as I can tell, I wouldn't say she never used her illness as an excuse, because never is a lot, or never is an extreme, but she certainly withstood the temptation to do it habitually and to warp her character as a consequence.
	She did figure out what was wrong with her.
	Fixed it and so now she doesn't have any of these.
	She's healthy now while she still has some residual damage from from everything that happened like I just found out yesterday She went to Chicago to have her ankle checked out because it isn't working very well And they told her that she had to have the old replacement taken out and a new one put in So but but in her realm of catastrophe that actually constitutes News that's not as bad as it could be, so strangely enough.
	So it's not like she's out of the woods, but...
	So you taught her from an early age, though, and I'm sorry to cut you off.
	No, no, no problem.
	That even though she had a, you know, let's just, for the state of the conversation, a physical disability, right?
	She wasn't as able-bodied physically as a majority of people.
	Is that clear to say?
	That you told her, like, never allow that to give you special privileges.
	Well, never allow that to be...
	No, it wasn't that exactly.
	It was never use that as an excuse to not do something you could do.
	That's the thing.
	Yes, because there's a deception element there.
	It's like, well, I don't want to do that.
	And I have this illness and that gives me a convenience.
	That's right.
	Don't use your illness as a means of getting away with something because you'll blur the line.
	Because then you'll constantly use that for the rest of your life.
	Right.
	And if you do that a hundred times, you'll be so confused about what's illness and what's not that you'll not know.
	You won't know anymore.
	And maybe you won't be able to figure it out again.
	And then you're in a very bad place.
	You know, there were some things that she had to have done that were allowances.
	Like when she was doing exams, she had to type.
	Because she couldn't write.
	And she couldn't sit on the floor cross-legged, so she had to sit in a chair.
	Like things that she actually couldn't do.
	But she still did the work.
	Yes, she did everything she could.
	She still did the work and said, I can't take the test.
	I can't do the exam at all.
	But she was able to do it with different circumstances.
	Yes, right.
	And the consequence of that was that once she figured out that most of what was causing her What was bothering her, all of it by the looks of it, was a consequence of a set of extreme sensitivities to almost every sort of food.
	So she hardly eats anything now.
	The only thing she eats is beef.
	That's it.
	Beef, salt, water.
	That's it.
	Nothing else.
	That's it.
	Yeah, that's it.
	And she's been eating that way for...
	Well, mostly for about three years, but almost completely for a year.
	And she feels fine?
	She's 100%.
	She has no symptoms.
	No vegetables, no supplements?
	No, that's it.
	Beef, salt.
	I'm serious.
	She never cheats.
	Wow.
	Never.
	Because she doesn't want to feel pain and suffering.
	Yes.
	Well, if she eats the wrong thing, she has a catastrophic emotional and physical reaction for a month.
	Wow.
	Did she essentially eliminate all food and try one thing at a time until, okay, that didn't work, let's try this.
	Yes, and it took about three years to figure it out.
	So yes, wow is right.
	It's absolutely beyond comprehension.
	It's a diet that I follow almost entirely now.
	Just beef, salt and water.
	Yes.
	I've been eating that way for about three months and I've been on an extremely low carb diet for about two, two and a half years, something like that.
	Both my wife and I have autoimmune symptoms and she got all of them.
	Your daughter, yeah.
	So she got all of them.
	That's right.
	Magnified by a thousand or something else.
	Yes, that's right.
	But when she sorted out what was wrong, she convinced me to also try what she was doing, and it's been extraordinarily helpful for me too.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Wow.
	So, you know, who would have guessed it?
	So anyway, so what you do when things are too much for you is you narrow your time frame.
	Mm-hmm.
	Also, in Rule, in Chapter 12, there's a fair bit of discussion in there about fragility and vulnerability, which is really what you confront when you have a sick kid.
	It's like, oh my God, how can the world be constituted so that a child can unfairly suffer in this manner?
	It's like, okay, here's a way of thinking about it.
	All right, take away everything from your child that makes them vulnerable.
	Well, let's say you have a three-year-old.
	It's like, well, three-year-olds, they're kind of cute.
	They run around, they're little, and they're vulnerable, obviously.
	But that makes them cute and attractive and lovable.
	All of the vulnerability that's built into that.
	So you think, well, you remove that one by one.
	Well, they're eight foot tall now, and they're made out of steel.
	And their parts are replaceable, and they have an artificially intelligent brain.
	Like, you replace them, obviously, this is hypothetical, with a superhuman robot that doesn't die.
	It's like, fine, but where's the three-year-old?
	Right.
	So one of the things I thought about when I was writing this was, you know, when you love someone, especially, well, when you love someone, you love them not only despite their fragility, but also because of it.
	And so then that's the price you pay for it.
	It's like, well, they wouldn't be who they were if they weren't They wouldn't be who they were if they weren't fragile and limited in their particular way.
	And the fact you like to have them around, you think, oh, well, I mean, I guess you think that that fragility and vulnerability is justifiable.
	It's like, well, then you can't allow its existence to make you bitter, because you can't have it both ways.
	You can't have them being vulnerable and cute and interesting and small and And needing care but striving to develop and grow.
	You can't have that without them also being prone to pain and destruction and vulnerability.
	Take your choice.
	And then what do you do?
	Teach them to be strong.
	That's what you do.
	You don't get rid of the vulnerability.
	You teach them to be strong.
	And that's also a theme that runs through the book in many, many ways.
	You don't protect your children.
	In fact, you do the opposite.
	You expose them to the world as much as you possibly can, and you make them strong.
	That's the best antidote to their vulnerability.
	Not to protect them.
	There's no protecting people.
	We already established that.
	Life's a fatal game.
	There's no protecting people.
	But you can definitely make them strong, and maybe you can make them strong enough to transcend that.
	That's the goal, man.
	Is there anything that you wish you would have done differently with your daughter or your son that you didn't do?
	Not of any great significance.
	I mean, I have I have wishes, I suppose, from time to time that things could have been different.
	I spent less time on the positive aspects of my son and my daughter because we were contending with catastrophe so frequently.
	And so, you know, both my kids have a variety of interesting talents and it would have been better, perhaps, to have had the time to develop those more thoroughly.
	But, you know, and my son...
	Well, he...
	I wouldn't say he didn't get as much attention as he needed.
	He didn't get as much attention as I would have liked to have paid him.
	But by the same token, it isn't obvious that it's been bad for him because it required him from a very early age to grow the hell up.
	And we relied on him right from the time he was a young kid to make intelligent decisions.
	We assumed he would make intelligent decisions.
	He was consulted with regards to decisions.
	And so...
	And it also made him into someone who is very self-sufficient and capable of taking care of himself.
	So it might have been nicer for me, I suppose, to have spent more time with him.
	But he lives down the street from me now and I spend time with him and we have a great relationship.
	And he has a very good relationship with his sister.
	So it turned out as well as it could have.
	So, but that didn't mean that those years in there, they were brutal.
	There were some brutal times, man.
	One night in particular, like she was in absolute agony, and I couldn't get it under control.
	And I could see, well, because I am a clinician, I could see.
	I thought, God damn it, I'm going to end up taking her to CAMH. That's the psychiatric hospital, because it looks like it's going to break her.
	Wow, really?
	God damn it.
	I couldn't see a way to resolve it.
	But...
	It pushed her right to the brink, but not over.
	And there was another episode after she had her hip replaced.
	She was put in a rehab hospital for a while.
	And she was the youngest person in it by like 60 years.
	And they treated her terribly.
	It was a terrible place.
	Mean, mean, blind nurses.
	And very, very badly run.
	And they traumatized her.
	The hospital was a worse experience than the damn surgery.
	And so that took her quite a while to recover from, but she did recover from it.
	Do you ever think now, you know, since you're a clinical psychologist and you've done all this research and work and studies, do you believe that your daughter was meant to experience this for you to kind of test your ability to be with her?
	And do you think she would have been able to grow in the way she is now with someone who didn't have the practice that you had?
	Well I think it was fortunate for all of us that, well my wife too, like my wife had worked in palliative care as a volunteer and she was a massage therapist for a long time.
	She's very good at, and my wife has a real, she's a really tough person and if you don't need help and you want it, she'll cut you into ribbons.
	But if you need help, She will really help you.
	So she's really good at differentiating between people who actually need help, in which case she is right there, and people who could stand up on their own.
	And if you can't stand up on your own, and you could, if you could stand up on your own and you aren't, You don't want to be around her because she will put you in your place.
	And it was so funny because our kids used to bring their friends over all the time when they were teenagers, which we actually quite liked.
	But we had a rule for the teenagers, which was, we're really happy you're here, but if you do something stupid and you never get to come back, that's actually okay with us.
	Right.
	And so they knew that and it was no joke because we were happy they were there and they were welcome.
	But we were perfectly happy to dispense with them if they misbehaved.
	Forever.
	But what was really funny was that the kids would come over, the teenagers would come over, and they were pretty afraid of me to begin with.
	But after being around for a couple of weeks, they were way more afraid of my wife.
	So yes, that was very funny.
	Yeah, because she's you know, she's quite a pleasant person and she's she's not a She's only five foot two so she's but although she's you know, she's imposing enough because she's also in good physical shape But it was because I'm actually kind of soft-hearted and she's not soft-hearted although she can really take care of people who need to be taken care of so No,
	so I think you know Michaela had a fortunate fortunate circumstance in that sense because both of us had a lot of experience dealing with catastrophe and so when it came along We weren't we were overwhelmed by it what but it wasn't because we didn't know what we were doing we knew what we were doing it was just even Though we did know what we were doing as much as might be possible that doesn't mean that we can deal with it because it was well it took us it took us what must have been Seven or eight months
	to arrange the ankle surgery and there was a waiting list in Canada at that point of I think three years.
	Actually, they wanted to fuse her foot which is a really bad thing for someone young.
	And so we looked in India, we looked in, oh Christ, we looked all over the world for ankle surgery, like really everywhere.
	And finally, the government in Canada was actually quite helpful.
	We found a private clinic in Vancouver that did the surgery and the Ministry of Health in Ontario was quite helpful to us at that point.
	But we were scrambling to, well, what should we do?
	Should we have her ankle replaced?
	Well, what sort of replacement?
	Who do we talk to?
	Well, what about this waiting list?
	Three years?
	Like, no.
	She can't live, man.
	She can't live for three years like this.
	Oh, yeah.
	Your time frame is a week.
	Oh, yeah.
	Three years.
	That was just beyond.
	Did you ever doubt yourself in terms of your ability and your research and your studies?
	Did you ever say to yourself, like, man, if I can't...
	You know, figure this out, then all of my work is for nothing.
	Well, no, I never thought it was for nothing, but I certainly doubted whether or not we were going to be able to figure this out.
	And at that time, you were extremely...
	Educated, researched, you know, you'd seen a lot.
	Did that give you a fear of like, well, if I can't figure this out, then no one can?
	Of course.
	Of course.
	Well, her prognosis was multiple early joint replacements.
	And that was like, that was the good news because the bad news is, well, how many?
	And how many can you stand?
	And when does that kill you?
	Like, you know, so her real prognosis was plenty of pain with an early death, you know, because well, even now even now, you know, like the surgeon who talked to her yesterday said, well Because he talked to her about the risk of amputation in the future.
	It's like, well, this is the second joint revision.
	It's like, maybe this will last 15 years.
	We don't know what the hell's going to happen then.
	Well, so our response to that is, that's 15 years from now.
	It's like, who knows?
	Well, things are better now.
	For how people understand how to replace an ankle than they were, I think it was 10 years ago that she had this one replaced.
	And it helped.
	It wasn't perfect.
	Her hip is perfect.
	The ankle has always been trouble, but way less trouble than it was.
	And so, well, you struggle forward the best you can.
	And so I suppose she could adapt to an amputation if that was necessary, but at the moment it isn't necessary.
	But multiple amputations is not something to really be looking forward to when you're 16.
	You know, and they were going to put her on corticosteroids to control her inflammation and that would have produced Cushing's disease and so that makes your face all puffy and it makes you gain weight and so it's very physically disfiguring.
	So we decided not to go down that route.
	Yeah, well, but, you know, it's worked out.
	Thank God.
	It's quite the miracle.
	And she had a baby a year ago, and we were never sure that was going to happen.
	Congrats.
	Thank you.
	Congrats to you.
	Yes, that's for sure.
	So now we have this respite where she's healthy.
	And the last time I saw her, she was looking great.
	Like, she's just glowing.
	She's so healthy.
	I can't believe it.
	It's just beyond belief.
	Congrats on all the hard work you've done to make it a possibility.
	We avoided the worst excesses of hell during the catastrophe, so that's something.
	And it did allow her the space to figure out.
	And my wife had always thought that diet had a relationship to it, and we investigated that.
	There's a good literature that shows if you have arthritic symptoms and you stop eating, if you fast, they go away.
	So that's interesting.
	It's like, well, food must be causing it.
	Yeah, but once you start to eat again, no matter what you eat, it comes back.
	It turns out, no, no matter what.
	Almost no matter what.
	Because she's sensitive to virtually everything.
	But she isn't sensitive to meat.
	And so it turns out that if you eat meat, you can live.
	So that's a big difference between being sensitive to everything and not being sensitive to one thing.
	And so...
	So it's a harsh diet.
	It's made traveling difficult, although I can eat in restaurants because most restaurants can cook a steak with nothing on it, and that's made things much easier while I'm traveling.
	But whatever, whatever, it's working.
	And so thank God for that.
	Amazing.
	Do you believe, do you think, hypothetically, if your daughter was healthy and never had any of these complications, that you would be the man you are impacting people, the success, the attention you'd be getting?
	Do you think you'd have as much...
	Well, I wouldn't have written the 12th chapter, that's for sure.
	Do you think in general you would still be able to have the ideals, the belief, the fortitude that you have to reach people and really impact people?
	Yeah, I think so.
	But I know what you're saying.
	You know, your question is, well, to what degree is adversity character building?
	And the answer to that is plenty.
	But I was already, like I said, and it was the same with my wife.
	We weren't naive people, you know.
	Because I had an extensive clinical practice.
	I was dealing with heavy level adversity, always.
	25 hours a week.
	It wasn't your daughter.
	No, no.
	But there were other problems in my family and so forth that I dealt with as well.
	And so we were already, we'd already, I think, Garnered most of what we could from confronting adverse situations.
	You know now did that add a different level to it?
	It probably Probably fire tested our relationship our familial relationship It probably brought our family closer together, all things considered.
	I saw the same thing happen when my wife's mother died.
	She died of prefrontal dementia, and she developed it quite young.
	It started to really manifest itself in her early 50s, and she died when she was 70.
	She fell apart over 18 years, and she was very physically healthy.
	And her husband who was quite the man about town when he was a young guy, real extrovert, he was a real character in our hometown, he took care of her so well it was absolutely jaw-dropping.
	Every time she slipped he'd step up to the plate and he he took care of her until he couldn't lift her out of her chair anymore and he was getting old too and so she wasn't in an old age home for very long and then we were around when she died you know over the couple of days just before her death and her family Her sister is a palliative care nurse.
	Her other sister is a pharmacist and Tammy's had the experiences that I already described.
	And then her father really stepped up to the plate.
	So the whole family gathered around for that and They acted impeccably throughout it, I would say.
	They took care of their mother very carefully while she was dying, and they pulled together.
	And one of the consequences of that, which was so interesting, is that although their mother died and that was a terrible loss, their bonds that connected them, all of them, strengthened to the point where I would say that was almost compensation for the loss of their mother.
	So that was really interesting to see what happens even in a dire circumstance if people do Do what they can.
	Now, I'm not saying that that's going to work for every situation because I know people get cut off at the knees and sometimes you hit a tragedy that, well, it's fatal, you know, that you cannot rectify.
	It's a real catastrophe.
	But it was very interesting watching that because they were alert and awake around the deathbed and they weren't fighting with each other at all.
	There was no familial squabbling because you can imagine that that would happen because everyone's stressed.
	And then you can just imagine how terrible that would make something that's already awful.
	There was none of that.
	They focused their attention on her, you know, they gave her water when she needed it, and they watched her, and they made this terrible thing the least amount of awful it could be.
	And it definitely pulled them together.
	Like, that whole family, including me, is closer because of what they went through and also how they went through it.
	And it's probably the case Well, I would say it definitely advanced the maturity of my son because he was cold and I told him, look kid, you can't add anything to this.
	We're up to here.
	You have to conduct yourself properly because otherwise everything's going to shake and fall.
	We can't have more of this.
	You can't bring anything unnecessary into this.
	He was an all-star.
	It was a remarkable man.
	Champion.
	And he was only in grade 10 when most of this happened.
	And your friends are pretty damn important when you're in grade 10.
	And he stuck around a lot to be helpful.
	So yeah, it was really...
	Good for him, man.
	He's a good character.
	He's quite something.
	And he was very helpful.
	He was very helpful to his sister.
	They had their fights, obviously, while she was often unreasonable and no bloody wonder.
	Well, when you're strung out and...
	You can't feel anything but pain.
	God, she went through so much.
	Even watching her withdraw from the opiates, because she was on them for about a year and a half.
	She just quit.
	As soon as she was done her surgery, she was like, I'm not taking these anymore.
	And she had...
	Formication, which is the sensation of ants crawling under your skin.
	She had that for like a month.
	God, unbelievable.
	She just sailed through it.
	It's like, I'm done with these.
	Wow.
	You guys have been through a lot.
	Yeah, it was a lot, man.
	What's your biggest fear now, moving forward, in your own life?
	Making a mistake at the moment because I've been the subject of so much public attention in the last two years and I've been in a situation where even things I didn't say have also almost been fatal because people take them out of context.
	But my biggest fear has been that I do something careless and that there are Serious, cascading consequences.
	Do you feel like you've done something careless?
	Well, everyone's done something careless.
	But I've been pretty careful.
	I mean, I was fortunate.
	So when this political scandal blew up around me in Canada, when I opposed some legislation that I thought was reprehensibly constructed, the radicals on the left in particular came after me hard.
	But I was fortunate because They called me every name under the book and went after my character.
	I suppose there was some degree of That was understandable to some degree, because if you stand up against something, if you stand up against the radical right, well maybe you're a communist.
	Probably not, because you don't have to be a communist to not like the radical right, but if you stand up against the radical left, well maybe you're a Nazi.
	Well probably not, but you might be, and so it's certainly in the interest of the people who are proponents of the philosophy of the radical left to assume that you're a Nazi, because then they don't have to deal with you.
	And so that's what happens.
	You throw yourself into the fray.
	People try to localize you and they do that by saying, well, maybe you're this, maybe you're this, maybe you're this, maybe you're this.
	It's like, well, yeah, maybe not too.
	But I already had 250 hours of lectures up on YouTube at that point so people could actually go and see what I had said because virtually every word I'd ever said to students in a professional capacity, not every word because I didn't tape every lecture, but I taped Multiple years of lectures and so people went over those with a fine-tooth comb trying to find out if there's anything I'd ever said that was and they couldn't find anything and that was because I've been very careful with what I say ever since I was
	about 25 I started paying attention to what I was saying and trying very hard not to say things that I would Trying very hard not to say things that something in me objected to.
	Well, that seems to have provided me with a buffer.
	And so people came to my website because they were interested in...
	Well, before the political stuff blew up, I had a million views on YouTube, which is nothing.
	A million of anything is a lot.
	But then when the political scandal started to break, yeah, then people came for them, but stayed for the content, and so, and that's been really useful.
	Yeah, well, it's been, well, and it's not that surprising.
	Well, you know, because of what you do, it's like, there's a great hunger for information that is practical and useful, and that helps people find meaning in their lives and orient themselves.
	There's a great hunger for that, and most of my lectures were derived from Solid psychology, some of it experimental, some of it biological, some of it from the domains of neuroscience, a lot of it from great clinicians.
	It's not surprising that people find it helpful because, well, great clinicians were great because they were really helpful, and so to Distill that and to offer it to people in a digestible form to have that have a good effect on them Well, that's that's what you'd expect.
	That's what the whole discipline is about and so that's been that's been great these these public lectures that I've been doing so I think I've done 50 of them in about 45 different cities now in about three months and The average theater size is between 2,500 and 3,000 people and they're unbelievably positive events because people come there and we talk mostly about The political spectrum and why there's room for voices on the left and why there's room for voices on the right and where the parameters of
	that should be because both of those can descend into extremism and that's not good and the role of individual responsibility and individual sovereignty and the necessity for people to develop a vision the sorts of things that we already talked about and Virtually everyone that's coming there, they're not coming for political reasons, even though that's the story you hear from the more ideologically possessed journalist types because they see the world that way.
	They can't imagine anything else could possibly be happening.
	But the people who are coming to these lectures are coming because they are doing everything they possibly can to make their lives better.
	And it's lovely to talk to people like that.
	It's amazing.
	It is.
	It's great.
	It's literally great.
	School of greatness, baby.
	Right, exactly.
	I've got six minutes to be mindful of your time and your schedule and I want to ask you three final questions if that's okay.
	Yeah, you bet.
	So as much as I would love for you to go on for another few hours on these answers so I can get to the last question.
	I'll do my best to be brief.
	I wish I could go on longer, so we'll have to have you come back next time you're in LA. The first one is, what is your purpose now moving forward?
	Through everything you've had in your life, what's your purpose moving forward?
	Well, I have specific...
	I'm...
	I'm...
	What's my purpose?
	What am I aiming at?
	Well, I did a series of biblical lectures last year.
	I did 15 lectures on Genesis.
	I'm going to continue doing that.
	So in November, I'm going to start with the Exodus stories.
	And what I'd like to do over the next 15 years is make my way through the whole corpus of biblical writings.
	So that's one major goal.
	I want to write another book.
	I've written half of it already, which will be a follow-up to 12 Rules for Life, because I actually had laid out on a site called Quora 40 Rules, And so I'll do that and write another couple of books I suspect over the next few years.
	The touring I'm going to continue.
	I have 10 cities coming up in Canada and another 20 in the US and then 12 in Europe and I'm going to go to Australia in February and then back to Europe I think in April.
	So there's lots of touring on the horizon and it's for the reasons I already described.
	I'm having, I don't, the lectures differ every night although there are themes that constantly emerge and I'm using those as an opportunity to have a detailed and engaged discussion With the audience about how we might proceed forward individually and collectively so that we can make things consciously better and why that's associated with necessary meaning and why that's a moral obligation.
	So it's a dialogue about responsibilities and not rights, even though rights are only important insofar as they Set up the space for you to shoulder your proper responsibility.
	And as a sovereign citizen, you have the responsibility for the integrity of the state resting on your shoulders.
	And it's something that if you don't take seriously, then the state shakes.
	And that's not good.
	And so I'm trying to convey that to people.
	It's like you have...
	There's actually something that you need to do.
	You need to take care of yourself.
	You need to take care of your family.
	You need to take care of your community.
	And if you don't do that, then they'll be hell to pay.
	And it's on you, right?
	Each of us.
	And it's hard for people to grasp that.
	Well, they don't want to, first of all, maybe because they don't want the responsibility.
	But then they don't get any meaning.
	Then they suffer.
	Then they get bitter.
	That's not good.
	So it's like, which of these are you going to pick?
	But it's also salutary to people because...
	It's useful for everyone to know that if you don't live up to your potential, that you leave a hole in the fabric of being.
	And it's filled by something approximating hell.
	And unless that's what you want, then you shouldn't be doing that.
	And it's perfectly possible to have a serious discussion with 3,000 people about this, and they're right on board with it all the way.
	And so that's really something amazing to behold.
	And one of the things I've realized is...
	Well, these new technologies, the technologies you're using, enable these long-form discussions.
	Turns out that people are smarter than we thought.
	Right.
	TV narrowed it, right?
	It's like 30 seconds.
	Say your complicated thing in 30 seconds.
	Like, can't.
	And so, we were viewing the population through this narrow window, and everyone looked kind of stupid.
	It's like, now the window's fully open.
	It's like, oh...
	Look at that.
	You people like 40-hour Netflix specials that are incredibly complex, right?
	And you like three-hour Joe Rogan discussions that are complicated.
	You'll follow the whole thing.
	It's like, oh good, we're smarter than we thought.
	Thank God for that, because we better be.
	So that's where I made me into the future.
	That's your purpose.
	Got it.
	Love it.
	Okay, question number two.
	This is called, you've got the 12 rules for life.
	Make sure you guys, again, go pick it up.
	Get it right now.
	What's the link as well?
	Oh, selfauthoring.com.
	And I put up a code, which is GREATNESS. You get 20% off the full suite.
	Two for one.
	So you can give the suite to your friends too.
	Selfauthoring.com.
	Not slash greatness, just the code is greatness.
	Just the code is greatness.
	Yeah, and I would say to everyone, if you're going to try this exercise, which I would recommend, do it over a few days, and don't do it perfectly.
	Just do it.
	Get it done.
	Do a bad first draft, which is an important principle in life.
	A bad first draft is a great thing to have.
	That's good.
	You're also on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
	So we'll link all that stuff up as well.
	And your website.
	What's your main website?
	JordanBPeterson.com Perfect.
	So make sure you guys get the book.
	Subscribe to everything.
	Get the self-authoring.
	The future authoring for you university students out there.
	The future authoring program Decreases your probability of dropout if you're in a college program, university program, by somewhere between 25 and 50%, especially if you're kind of aimless.
	It works better.
	If you already got a plan and you're implementing it, you've got a good direction, then it's not as helpful because you're already halfway there.
	But if you're kind of lost and you do this, it'll help you not only establish your goals, but stick to them.
	It really helps.
	We've done three very detailed, published, peer-reviewed studies showing that this really works.
	Powerful.
	And it doesn't hurt you either.
	That's the other thing.
	That's great.
	You've got the 12 rules for life.
	I've got something called the three truths.
	It's a question I ask everyone at the end.
	So we're going to try to boil this down for three truths for you.
	Imagine this is your last day.
	You get to choose the day for you when you die.
	As many years away as I want it to be.
	And you've achieved your purpose.
	Everything you set out, you aim for, you hit the target.
	And then you pass away.
	It's the last day.
	Everyone's there.
	It's a celebration.
	But for whatever reason, there's no more videos of you up online.
	There's no more lectures, no more podcasts, no more books.
	For whatever reason, you have to take them with you.
	So no one has access to your information.
	But you get to a piece of paper and you get to write down three things you know to be true about your life that you would pass on.
	I like to call it the three truths.
	Don't say things that make you weak.
	Number one.
	Hmm.
	Hmm.
	Lift your eyes above the horizon and aim at the highest star that you can contemplate.
	What's the third one?
	Put your family in order.
	Powerful.
	Before I ask the final question, I want to acknowledge you for a moment, Jordan, for your incredible wisdom and vulnerability with me.
	We just met, but I feel very connected to you and your mission and your purpose, and I just appreciate everything you've been through as a father and as a husband.
	For your daughter, for your son, for your wife to continue to move on in your own dreams in pursuit of bettering humanity while going through all that you've gone through.
	So I really acknowledge everything you've been doing and what you stand for.
	And your ability to use your words carefully to make sure to try to make the best impact on people who are listening.
	So I want to acknowledge you for all that.
	I hope we get to have you come back sometime when you're in LA, because I think we can go for another hour or two.
	And the final question is, what's your definition of greatness?
	Well, greatness is what reveals itself when you attempt to formulate, when you attempt to carefully articulate and live out what you when you attempt to carefully articulate and live out what you believe to be It just happens.
	Because there isn't anything more powerful than truth.
	Right?
	That's the antidote to suffering.
	Truth.
	Right?
	So, it's a strange thing because you think, well, yeah, it produces a lot of suffering too.
	It's like, yeah, in the short term.
	So, yeah.
	Awesome.
	Thanks, sir.
	You bet.
	Thanks for the invitation and the opportunity.
	Very nice to meet you.

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