Nov. 1, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:56:36
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| All right, YouTube. | ||
| We are live with a man who I think, at this point, needs no introduction. | ||
| Jordan Peterson, welcome back. | ||
| This is number four. | ||
| If we count our live event at Clemson two weeks ago, this is your fourth appearance on The Rubin Report. | ||
| Amazing that we can think of anything to talk about for that much time. | ||
| You think we're going to figure out something? | ||
| Well, you were both pretty noisy, so I imagine we'll probably figure out something. | ||
| People say, you know, Peterson, he's talking a lot. | ||
| Could you think perhaps in the course of this hour, hour and a half, we could get you to the end? | ||
| You know, could you run out of words by the end of this thing? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know, man. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| I had a reputation when I was like four years old for never not talking, so I don't think it's going to go away. | ||
| That's like 51 years ago, so. | ||
| Well, it's funny because I just did a behind-the-scenes video that we put up for our patrons only. | ||
| Today's actually a very special day for me because November 1st, 2016 is the day that I moved into this house and started building this studio, which took a couple weeks, and you were actually my first guest. | ||
| Oh yeah, right! | ||
| While we were between studios. | ||
| I had to do it in the other room. | ||
| We did it on Google Hangouts. | ||
| There was crappy internet connection. | ||
| There was construction noise. | ||
| There was construction noise. | ||
| I could barely hear you at points. | ||
| I couldn't see you. | ||
| And it was really my intro to you. | ||
| I actually didn't know that much about you at the time. | ||
| You had just sort of come on the map in a newer way. | ||
| So we did that one. | ||
| Then we've done a live sit down here. | ||
| Then we did Clemson. | ||
| And here we are again two weeks later. | ||
| Yeah, well it's a good deal. | ||
| We got a lot to get to. | ||
| We do. | ||
| You're writing a new book coming out in January, am I right? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| End of January, I think. | ||
| The 23rd, I think, is when it comes out. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty happy about that. | ||
| So you sent me the advance copy PDF. | ||
| Is that the official advance copy? | ||
| There's a little bit of changes since then, but the actual galleys will be ready within a week. | ||
| I think it goes to print next week. | ||
| Just waiting on a few illustrations and then it's ready to go. | ||
| Yeah, so as an interviewer, you actually made my job really easy today, because your chapters, I told you before we started, your chapters are so perfect that each one I think we can lay into a question here, but I want to start with some other stuff first, because we just did Clemson about two weeks ago. | ||
| It was a great event, it was totally sold out, kids sitting in the stairwell trying, you know, because there was no more room in the chairs and all that. | ||
| Did you walk out of there feeling as positive about the college stuff as me? | ||
| Because we know about all the bad stuff. | ||
| We all read it all the time and we see all the terrible stuff on college campuses, but I really leave a lot of the events that I do feeling good. | ||
| Do you feel that? | ||
| Well, a lot of the stuff that's unsavory, let's say, is the work of a very small minority of students. | ||
| I mean, this is true particularly, perhaps not particularly, but it's certainly true of the University of Toronto, which is, I would say, like a center, conservative institution, as far as the students are concerned. | ||
| Most of them are children of first-generation immigrants. | ||
| Like, they've got their eye on the prize, you know? | ||
| They spend most of their time working. | ||
| It's not a party school. | ||
| It's not a radical school. | ||
| But there's a small percentage of radical people, including people who come in from outside the university to cause trouble, and a small number of radical disciplines, and it doesn't take that many people who are really Focused on activism to produce an effect that's far beyond their their numerical significance and so it and you know You don't want to give university kids a bad name because the vast majority of them I think are I don't think they're any less hard-working for example than the baby boomers Yeah, quite the contrary in my in my estimation So yeah, I usually go to the universities and come away with a positive feeling, you know So and Clemson was certainly an event like that | ||
| What do you make of the ability for that small minority to affect such a big amount of people? | ||
| You had a tweet about a shepherd. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't take very many dogs to shepherd a lot of sheep. | ||
| How is it that they've been able to do that? | ||
| Because when we go out there, I mean, look, we did that Q&A for an hour after. | ||
| We had to end it early because they literally needed the room. | ||
| They were kicking They're really good at it. | ||
| But there were still 50 people that wanted to ask us questions. | ||
| We waited, we stayed around for another hour and still they had to drag us out. | ||
| I mean, we could have done it all night long. | ||
| But what do you make of that little group that has somehow... | ||
| They're really good at it. | ||
| They've been, like, first of all, you know, the radical leftist position | ||
| that they put forward has been an activist movement since, let's say, before the Russian Revolution, right? | ||
| I mean, it's not like the ground hasn't been prepared for this sort of thing. | ||
| And the disciplines that are leading this, like women's studies, for example, | ||
| they're activist disciplines. | ||
| They train people to do this. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| It's pretty much all they do, except not educating them, propagandizing them, feeding them, you know, sets of lies, and oversimplifying the universe in a radical way. | ||
| So, that's the thing. | ||
| It doesn't take that many people who are committed to a cause to have an impact beyond their numbers. | ||
| And I think that might even be more true with the onset of social media. | ||
| So, do you think that's why what you're doing is sort of hitting it the way it is? | ||
| Because you're basically, I mean, obviously you can explain postmodernism and Marxism and all of that stuff, but really what you're telling people is to own their own life. | ||
| I mean, even from the amount of your book that I was able to read today, that to me seems to be the thrust of what you're doing. | ||
| You're saying, sort of, Get your shit together and then deal with all this other stuff. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, I don't really consider myself in some sense a political person. | ||
| And I mean that really in a very particular way. | ||
| I've thought about a political career many times during my life. | ||
| I worked for a political party when I was a kid, you know, like 14, and quite intently. | ||
| What party was it? | ||
| It was the Socialist Party in Canada, the NDP. | ||
| That was back in the New Democratic Party, which is part of the mainstream in Canadian politics. | ||
| That was back when, I would say, they were a valid voice for the working class. | ||
| I knew the leadership of the Provincial Party and the National Party to some degree. | ||
| I had some access because the person who was our representative was the leader of the Alberta NDP, and I knew him and his wife quite well. | ||
| And they were, at the upper echelons of the party, at least at that time, those people were actually concerned with giving the working class a voice. | ||
| Like, it was a genuine, it was a genuine, they were genuinely committed to that. | ||
| But I noticed that the lower-level party functionaries, you know, I didn't like them much, and I couldn't put my finger on it until I read George Orwell. | ||
| And, you know, Orwell said, he was criticizing British socialists, even though he was a socialist himself. | ||
| He said, well, Typical British middle-class socialist doesn't like the poor they just hate the rich It's like and that was that was exactly the feeling I got that this this so-called Sympathy empathy, let's say for the oppressed had a hell of a lot more to do with vengefulness and resentment with regards to the to anyone who was seen as having privilege and I certainly think that that's just a | ||
| And I was thinking about that the other day. | ||
| I just did a talk in DC, and I was thinking about, you know, the Marxist claims to sympathy with the working class. | ||
| Because you might say, well, they actually have sympathy for the working class? | ||
| Are they really trying to put their positions forward? | ||
| Their needs forward? | ||
| Or do they just hate the successful? | ||
| Depending on how that's divided up. | ||
| I thought, well, how do you make a judgment like that? | ||
| And I had this personal experience. | ||
| But then I thought, well, that's easy with Marxism. | ||
| It's like, You just look at all the murders, and then you know whether that was a movement that was genuinely motivated by empathy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A lot of people die in all of this leftist stuff. | ||
| Yeah, like an unbelievable number, and not just members of the oppressor class, let's say. | ||
| Like, everyone. | ||
| And it happens over and over, you know, and it's really worth thinking about because, well, when You might think, well, is that somehow embedded in the Marxist doctrine? | ||
| Is it an inevitable consequence of the unfolding of these ideas? | ||
| And someone like Ayn Rand, for example, would say, definitely. | ||
| And Solzhenitsyn made that case, too, in the Gulag Archipelago. | ||
| But it's not self-evident. | ||
| But I think there's a level underneath the ideas that you could go and say, well, what's motivating this? | ||
| Is it actually, like, saintly compassion for the downtrodden? | ||
| Or is it resentment about the fact that life is unfair and tragic, which it definitely | ||
| is? | ||
| Well, you know, by their fruits ye shall know them. | ||
| That's the answer to that question. | ||
| It's like, well, if 30, 40 million people die in the aftermath of the revolution, and | ||
| a tremendous number of them are ordinary people, and that happens repeatedly. | ||
| It's like, oh, well, I guess it must be resentment and hatred, because, like, how else do you account for all of that? | ||
| The proof is in the pudding, so to speak. | ||
| Well, if, you know, and if you're not willing to accept that sort of thing as proof, you've got to also ask, like, well, okay, what would you allow to falsify your theory? | ||
| Like, how many corpses have to stack up before you think... And the number is pretty high already, so... It's uncountable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, we don't know. | ||
| We don't know how many people died as a consequence of communist totalitarianism. | ||
| It could be 50 million. | ||
| It could be 150 million. | ||
| Those are big error bars. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, that's a big problem when you can't count in the tens of millions, when you can't get the damn estimate right. | ||
| And it happened in multiple cultures, right? | ||
| Because you might say, well, it was just specific to a time and place. | ||
| It wasn't intrinsic to this radical doctrine. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's not that much that's the same about the Soviet Union and all of its Countries, let's say broad range of cultures Maoist China | ||
| Cambodia You know places in Africa as well. These aren't the same | ||
| places But nonetheless you drop that poisonous seed in there and | ||
| it's like mayhem and no time flat and nothing works like it's so so I'm going for the | ||
| Don't be thinking that you're so saintly just because you claim to stand for the oppressed | ||
| It's like, examine your conscience. | ||
| But that thing, that thing, though, is a drug to people, right? | ||
| I mean, that, you know, what we refer to as virtue signaling and all of that, but that feeling that you're always looking out for everyone else, you'll always sacrifice yourself for anyone else, you'll always attack the privileged and supposed people above you. | ||
| Really, there's something in that that has like an addictive quality, right? | ||
| Well, the question is, what's the drug? | ||
| The drug might be, oh, I'm a good person, maybe. | ||
| But a more psychoanalytically minded person might say, no, that's not actually the drug. | ||
| The drug is the hatred, and the rationalization for the use of power, and the wish for totalitarian control, and tyrannical rule. | ||
| That the mask of virtue covers. | ||
| So the virtue signaling actually, that's not what's really providing the big kick. | ||
| You know, it's like I'm a good person. | ||
| It's like, no, it's even better than this. | ||
| It's like I've got a place to direct my worst impulses. | ||
| I don't even have to notice them myself because I've got this mask of virtue and so I can let the, let's call them, you know, the demonic forces that make up part of the human psyche. | ||
| I can let them have carte blanche and then also say that I'm virtuous. | ||
| You know, I would say that's a powerful combination. | ||
| Yeah, well, it looks like it's a powerful combination. | ||
| I mean, if you look at the way people behave, historically speaking, it looks I mean, it's often that great horrors are perpetrated by people who mask them in a utopian covering, right? | ||
| Because nobody comes out and says, hey, well, I'm Satan himself, you know? | ||
| It's like, I'm out here to do harm. | ||
| That isn't what people... but somehow harm gets done. | ||
| And so, you know, one of the things I really like about the American political system is that it's it's not predicated on a utopian ideal you know that the founders of the american system of course they were basically english but you know the founders the american system said okay well you know you can't trust people to do the right thing doesn't mean they're all bad but you can't assume that they're going to do the utopian thing that is what people are like and they tend to take care of themselves first and maybe that's okay maybe it's not but it has to be bounded given what we know about the | ||
| imperfection of individuals and societies. Let's try to build a system | ||
| that no idiot can screw up too badly. And I think that's so mature, man. | ||
| It's so psychologically informed and so wise. It's like, no, we're not | ||
| aiming for the utopia. We'll aim for not too murderous. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Right, and that's the thing, because humans are the flaw in the utopian system, right? | ||
| I mean, you can't create utopia because we're part of it, and we're not perfect. | ||
| So the idea of the perfect system created by an imperfect creature, us, it actually doesn't even stand to reason. | ||
| Yeah, well, and you can't also blame our imperfections on the imperfect social structure, which is, of course, what the Marxists tend to do, because it doesn't help. | ||
| It's like, okay, the social structure's imperfect. | ||
| Well, who produced that? | ||
| It just pushes the question back one step. | ||
| So, well, I said at the beginning of this that I'm not specifically political, and I haven't been addressing everything that's been going on, except when I drift, I would say. | ||
| Politically, I think instead, no, no, the right thing to do is, this is why I'm a psychologist, it's like, the right level of focus is the individual. | ||
| And what individuals can do, first, is like what a physician should do. | ||
| First, do no harm. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, assume that, you know, you're probably a force for mayhem and trouble, unless you've got yourself disciplined and aimed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, because you're complicated and troublesome. | ||
| And so, unless you've got your act together, you're trouble. | ||
| And everyone knows that. | ||
| And they know people like that. | ||
| So the first thing you do is constrain the amount of damage you're likely to do. | ||
| And you do that by disciplining yourself and by also admitting to yourself that you don't know what you're doing, that there's lots of things about you that need to be improved, which is actually, that's a beacon of hope, right? | ||
| It's like, well, my life is miserable. | ||
| Yeah, but you're doing a bunch of things wrong. | ||
| It's like, oh, good! | ||
| Because if I'm doing a bunch of things wrong, then maybe if I fix them, my life won't be so horrible. | ||
| Well, that's good. | ||
| And everyone knows about the fact that they're not doing things right, fundamentally. | ||
| You know, they don't have to examine their conscience that much to figure that out. | ||
| And then you can start aiming for something. | ||
| Something good. | ||
| Start not lying any more than you have to, or maybe not at all if you can train yourself. | ||
| Then you start to discern truth from falsehood, and then you can find out empirically. | ||
| Does your life get better or worse? | ||
| Well, you know, I've got hundreds of letters now, maybe thousands of letters. | ||
| from people who have been trying that, you know, and they say, well, you know, I'm way better, | ||
| I'm doing way better than, you know, I went into a, than I thought that I was before. I went into | ||
| a restaurant the other day in Toronto and this kid came up and he shook my hand and he said, | ||
| I just want you to know that since I've been listening to you, I've got three | ||
| promotions at this restaurant. And I said, well, you know, good work, man. Like, | ||
| Way to be! And he said, yeah, well I started coming in on time and I'm working really hard and I'm | ||
| trying to figure out how I can do a good job here instead of being above the job, you know. I'll | ||
| take this until I get something better. It's sort of beneath me. It's like, no, probably not actually. | ||
| It's not that easy to do most jobs. | ||
| It's actually hard to do most jobs, especially to do them well. | ||
| And it turns out that the world is constituted, if society is set up well, that if you do a good job, invisible doors open in front of you. | ||
| Because people, and I know this, I've had lots of contact with businesses and academic institutions, and like, the people who run things competently, are often, but not always, interested, very interested in | ||
| finding young people that they can mentor and move forward. It's actually one of the pleasures | ||
| of being competent at something. | ||
| And so if they see someone who's like going that extra mile, you know, | ||
| busy people have lots of opportunities around them. | ||
| And they think, oh, I've got that opportunity. | ||
| I can't really do it, but I can funnel it over to this kid here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, let's see how he or she does it. | ||
| You know, and so you say, yeah, you want to try this? | ||
| And the person says, well, I don't have time. | ||
| It's like, well. | ||
| OK, but the smart kid says, yeah, yes, yes, I'll do that. | ||
| And then the person with opportunities watches and thinks, OK, well, let's back up a bit, see if the person does it. | ||
| And if they do it, it's like, hey, here's four more opportunities that I don't have time for. | ||
| Bang! | ||
| I would venture to say that every single person listening to this live right now knows that's the truth. | ||
| Because I can think of so many examples in my life, especially when I started doing stand-up, the crazy odd jobs that I did, every little thing that I could do to make a dime just so I could keep the dream coming, and then that eventually, it opens doors, it closes doors, you get trap doors, but you just keep moving. | ||
| So in an odd way, this post-modernism stuff, the idea that the system's rigged against you, They're really actually stealing something from young people, right? | ||
| They're stealing... They're stealing their future. | ||
| But they're also stealing, like, their intestinal fortitude. | ||
| You're stealing their ability to go, I've got to make something in this world. | ||
| Yeah, well, and their optimism. | ||
| It's like, no, look, the system is rigged against you, okay? | ||
| You're gonna die. | ||
| You're going to be ill. | ||
| Like, it's rough, man. | ||
| Now, you don't want to lay that at the feet of the social structure, because the social structure, at least in part, is trying to have you not die. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, that's why we have walls and electricity and all of that. | ||
| It works pretty damn well. | ||
| You know, you're probably going to live till you're 80. | ||
| And the only reason you're not going to live longer is because we can't figure out how to get you to live longer. | ||
| That's why. | ||
| You're not going to starve to death. | ||
| Wild animals aren't going to tear you in pieces. | ||
| Tyrants aren't going to rip you from limb to limb. | ||
| It's like, these are good things. | ||
| Now, you've still got a big problem because the cosmic system is rigged against you, in a sense. | ||
| But, okay, so fine. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Well, you know, you're vulnerable and you can be broken, and you will be in many ways. | ||
| But you can't blame someone for that. | ||
| It's just, that's the structure of reality. | ||
| Okay, so what do you do about that? | ||
| Well, as far as I can tell, and I've always looked as a psychologist for optimistic ideas, and I'm not It's not I'm not an easy sell with regards to optimistic ideas, especially because of my basic Belief in the idea that you know, the most profound truth is that life is suffering. | ||
| It's okay fine life is suffering You can't blame that on anyone. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So what do you do about it? | ||
| Well, maybe nothing Maybe nothing maybe the jigs up. | ||
| It's hopeless, you know, but maybe that's not right Maybe here's something What do you have against the suffering and the malevolence? | ||
| Let's say you have possibility, you have potential in front of you, inside of you even, whatever that means. | ||
| So here's the question. | ||
| What would your life be like if you made use of all the potential that you were offered? | ||
| That's the optimistic question, because you can test it out. | ||
| Say, OK, well, I'll just try that for a year. | ||
| I'm going to do the best I can at everything that offers itself to me, just as an experiment. | ||
| And then I'm going to see, well, is my life better or is my life worse? | ||
| It's like you try it for a year. | ||
| You think, huh, it's actually better. | ||
| My friendships are better. | ||
| My family's better. | ||
| I'm less anxious. | ||
| I'm more positively oriented. | ||
| I'm less resentful and bitter and jealous and angry. | ||
| You know, I'm more physically healthy. | ||
| It's like, hey, Great! | ||
| And still you're not that good at it. | ||
| It's like, what happens if you did that for five years? | ||
| Yeah, that's a good addiction. | ||
| That's an addiction! | ||
| Yeah, it's an addiction to possibility. | ||
| And then it's also an exponential thing. | ||
| And this is actually technically true. | ||
| We know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. | ||
| There's this principle that economists talk about. | ||
| They often call it the Matthew principle, which is based on a statement in the New Testament from those who have everything No, yeah. | ||
| To those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. | ||
| It's really a vicious statement. | ||
| But what it means is, as you go downhill, you go downhill faster and faster. | ||
| And people know that. | ||
| It's like, it isn't linear, man. | ||
| It's exponential. | ||
| You do one thing, stupid, then two stupid things happen, then four stupid things happen, and, you know, before you know it, you're done. | ||
| But the reverse of that is also true. | ||
| You do one good thing, and then, you know, you get two opportunities, and you fix them up, and you get four. | ||
| And this is how the world works. | ||
| It's a fundamental economic principle. | ||
| And you see, because of that, that a small proportion of people have most of the gains accrue to them. | ||
| And they're the ones, they're healthy. | ||
| That's luck, often, you know. | ||
| They didn't get run over by a bus, like there's lots of arbitrary things about life that have to go right. | ||
| But after that, it's like, those are also people who are capitalizing on what they're being offered without bitterness or resentment. | ||
| And then, maybe it won't work for you, but you don't have a better plan than that. | ||
| It's interesting because as you're saying this, I'm just reminded of a line that my grandma said to me once in her later years when she was in her mid-80s. | ||
| Health was failing, she had cancer and heart disease and several other things. | ||
| And I saw her, she was trying to get up from the couch and she was struggling to get up and I tried to help her. | ||
| She didn't want help and she said God helps those who help themselves She wasn't a particularly religious person in any way or even spiritual that I that I knew of in any particular way She was traditional but not particularly religious, but I thought that it made at first it didn't make sense to me Why wouldn't you want your grandson's help to get up if you're struggling? | ||
| But then it did make sense to me. | ||
| I think maybe years later I finally understood it and I think it sort of fits well with what you're saying here that Putting the God part of it aside, she knew she had to help herself, that you have to help yourself, because otherwise you'll become dependent either on your grandchild helping you up, or the entire system propping you up, or whatever it is. | ||
| Well, that's the Freudian eatable nightmare, really. | ||
| It's like, hey, Mom does everything for me. | ||
| It's like, oh, really? | ||
| You know, that's not so good, because that means you can't do anything for yourself. | ||
| You know, and so there's a rule for working with old people in old age homes, and the rule is, don't do anything for the residents that they can do themselves. | ||
| You think, well that's pretty harsh. | ||
| It's like, no it isn't! | ||
| You're helping them retain their independence and their strength, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're not stealing their strength. | ||
| And it's the same with little kids. | ||
| Like, little kids should be doing whatever they can that's productive and useful as young as they can. | ||
| Like, if you have a two-year-old who's just toddling around, you know, you can get that two-year-old to set the table. | ||
| We used to have our kids do that. | ||
| It's really funny to watch, because the table's like a foot and a half above their heads, you know? | ||
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Right. | |
| So, you know, you give the two-year-old a knife, not a sharp one. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| That's a different psychological game. | ||
| You can save that for next time, Peterson. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You know, and you say, okay, go put this on the table. | ||
| No, they can't exactly put it beside the plate because they can't see the damn plate. | ||
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Right. | |
| But the kids are actually, if you're careful with them and you adjust your expectations to their level of developing expertise, that's called the zone of proximal development, by the way, they're more than happy to To comply, because it helps them develop and move forward, and they have a really powerful instinct for that. | ||
| You know, and with kids, it's also interesting if you watch them very carefully, you can see when they're ready for the next task, you know? | ||
| And then also, the kids, you know, people talk a lot about self-esteem, which is a... It's very badly conceptualized, self-esteem, because it's come to mean you should feel good about yourself, which I don't believe. | ||
| I think you should feel good about who you could be if you got your act together. | ||
| And you shouldn't be feeling so good about who you are now in your sorry state. | ||
| It's like, what the hell, man? | ||
| You're 17. | ||
| Don't be feeling too good about yourself. | ||
| Get your act together. | ||
| And see what you could be. | ||
| And feel good about your trajectory. | ||
| That's way different. | ||
| But also your competence. | ||
| Even with little kids, they know they're being taken care of. | ||
| They have an existential debt to their parents. | ||
| It's like if you allow them to be useful and encourage them to do things, then they get to pay off that existential debt. | ||
| And then they can see that they're contributing members of even this small society. | ||
| And it's no lie! | ||
| It's like, hey, you know, when our daughter was, when my son was born, my daughter was about a year and a half old. | ||
| And you can get pretty intense sibling rivalry if kids aren't separated by three years. | ||
| Doesn't mean you should separate them by three years, but because the older kid is still pretty dependent, so you've got to watch that. | ||
| So the first thing we did was we talked to her about the new baby that was coming, and we told her that that was going to be her baby, you know, as well as our baby. | ||
| That's your baby. | ||
| And then we taught her to get a hug, and we had her act that out. | ||
| It's like, okay, when the new baby comes, There's going to be times when your mom is preoccupied. | ||
| You've got to say it in a way a three-year-old or one-and-a-half-year-old, something like that, who's one-and-a-half, can understand. | ||
| And that means acting it out and playing, right? | ||
| Like pretend play. | ||
| But the message was, there'll be times when you're going to feel lonesome and you have to come and get a hug. | ||
| Well, so then we'd have her practice. | ||
| It's like, let's play a game. | ||
| Pretend you're lonesome. | ||
| It's like, OK. | ||
| Now come and get a hug. | ||
| It's like, OK, she'll get a hug. | ||
| This is better than the knife game, I think. | ||
| It's better. | ||
| It's better. | ||
| It's better than the knife game. | ||
| Well and so okay so fine then we had our new our son and we helped Michaela my daughter figure out how to take care of him and you know when one and a half year old can actually take care of a baby they can watch the baby and and if the baby cries they can come and tug on you you know and say the baby needs you know whatever the baby needs and so then Well, then the older child also gets a set of privileges because of that. | ||
| It's like, well, you're older. | ||
| You don't get to be an infant anymore. | ||
| That kind of sucks, because mom's with you all the time. | ||
| It's like, what do you get in exchange? | ||
| You get some more freedom. | ||
| You get some more status. | ||
| You get some more power. | ||
| It's like, it's a good trade-off. | ||
| That's why you want to grow. | ||
| That's why you want to become an adult. | ||
| You don't want to steal that from people. | ||
| You steal their... | ||
| That's the witch in Hansel and Gretel who fattens up the kids and eats them. | ||
| It's like, come here to my lair, little one. | ||
| You know, it's gingerbread and candy. | ||
| You won't have to do anything. | ||
| I'll take care of you. | ||
| It's like, yeah, run away from that person. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of what you're talking about sounds like Montessori-type teaching to me. | ||
| I have a niece who's about two and a half. | ||
| Very much, you know, you have to, whatever you take out of the box in the classroom, you have to put away the exact way you got it, and then you can keep learning. | ||
| You know, it's just sort of a very, it's progressive in the good sense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Progressive, which has become a dirty word to me. | ||
| Developmentally progressive. | ||
| It's developmentally progressive. | ||
| Yeah, well, when you're, like, I have a chapter in this book called, uh, don't allow your children to do anything that makes you dislike them. | ||
| Don't go too far into that yet, because I want to get to all 12 of these. | ||
| Do you think that there's a right number of children to have, as you're saying? | ||
| That popped in my head. | ||
| I come from three young elders. | ||
| I don't think one is a good number. | ||
| And the reason for that... Now, if you have one child, it's like I'm not saying, well, that's terrible, man! | ||
| Like, what the hell is wrong with you? | ||
| That's hard to have one child. | ||
| Because children, first of all, socialize each other, and they amuse each other. | ||
| And so we found, so we had two kids, and then my wife also took care of a couple of neighbor kids. | ||
| That actually, in some ways, made things easier, because the kids will just run off and amuse themselves, and then what you have to be is around when they have a problem. | ||
| But they don't want you around, and you don't necessarily want them around. | ||
| You have adult things to do, right? | ||
| With one child, you've got the problem of having to amuse the child all the time. | ||
| And the child has the problem of not having siblings to hash things out at, at a peer-to-peer level. | ||
| And I think that maybe that one of the reasons the overprotected child, you know, going-to-university phenomena has emerged is because Children are now mostly produced by older couples So who are more intent on doing everything right for them, but they also don't have enough siblings So they're not getting sort of you know, they're like puppies that haven't had enough | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| rough-and-tumble play with other puppies. And they really like that. And that's not | ||
| good. We know from the animal developmental studies, even with rats, social animals don't | ||
| do that well unless they have peers to get into it with. | ||
| And a lot of socialization takes place between peers. So I would say two kids minimum, | ||
| because then you have kids, and they can amuse each other and maybe three is nice and you know | ||
| but one is I do not believe that one is easier than two. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| We talked a little bit about this over a drink we had a couple weeks ago, but what about the couples that have no kids? | ||
| Couples that just say, you know, we're more interested in our intellectual pursuits or traveling or something. | ||
| You think they're really missing sort of like a key component of what life is, right? | ||
| I do. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| I mean, I think they don't... I think that kids have a bad rap. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| That's also why I wrote this chapter, in part, because, you know, you see this too, a lot of Hollywood depictions of children. | ||
| It's very rare that you see children Portrayed nobly in a in a in a Hollywood film you kind of saw it with Harry Potter I like that and that's partly why that was so popular I mean those kids had some you know There were bad kids and there were good kids and there were heroic kids like they were treated pretty in some sense Realistically given that it was such a magical, you know enterprise and and but they had some courage and they had some heart and they had some Rebelliousness and so so I liked that but the thing that you have to understand about kids is they're unbelievably good company | ||
| You know, and so they pay you back for your care of them, and by being ridiculously amusing. | ||
| They're little clowns, and they're doing crazy little stunts all the time, and they have a sense of humor that kicks in, like, I have a grandchild now that's two and a half months old, and that child can already smile, and has the beginnings of a sense of humor. | ||
| And that's, to me, that's a miracle! | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty neat. | ||
| It is! | ||
| And so, They're very funny. | ||
| They're really playful. | ||
| They really, really like you. | ||
| And you can have the kind of relationship with them that you set out to have. | ||
| And so that's very, very interesting. | ||
| Now, you can also, like, once I had little kids, I spent a lot more time with them than I did with my friends, say. | ||
| And the reason for that was that... | ||
| I actually found it more enjoyable to do things with little kids than with the adults. | ||
| And the reason for that is, like, by the time you're 30, say, you've seen so much of the world that you actually don't see the world anymore. | ||
| And this is technically true. | ||
| Like, I'm old. | ||
| I'm 55. | ||
| When I walk down the street, there's houses. | ||
| I don't look at them. | ||
| I have house icons in my memory, and I just see the house icons. | ||
| And so, the older you get, in some sense, the more what you see of the world is your memory. | ||
| And that's kind of... it's efficient, but it's sort of dead, you know? | ||
| Artists help break through that they show you something as if it's new again, you know And and so that's why van Gogh's irises, you know sell for 160 million dollars It's like you haven't looked at flowers since you were three. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So the thing that's cool about having a little kid is everywhere you go because we're so good at in putting ourselves in other people's bodies and The kid revitalizes the world, and the kid's like, oh... I mean, that's what a two-year-old looks like all the time, right? | ||
| They're just completely awestruck by everything, and you can see that again, and that's really interesting. | ||
| Man, I know you know about my love of Star Wars, but I watched Empire Strikes Back with my five-year-old-at-the-time nephew, and at the moment when Darth Vader told Luke he was his father, I was staring at him, and he loves Star Wars, and I was looking at him, and the way his eyes opened, I was like, wow! | ||
| Like what that that thing like that's what it's all about right. | ||
| That's what it's all like as an adult How could I have as a 41 year old have that? | ||
| Experience again, and that's what you're talking about about and a movie is art. | ||
| Oh, yeah, absolutely well I took my daughter to see the mask with Jim Carrey when she was like a little bit young for that yeah and And I held her on my lap during, I think she was probably only about five, maybe something like that. | ||
| But I took her out one night and we went and saw the mask and it's pretty intense! | ||
| And it was like holding a, what would you call, a bundle of electrically charged barbed wire for an hour and a half. | ||
| She was just like that. | ||
| And like I said, it was perhaps a bit much for her. | ||
| And then had the knife. | ||
| It was a whole thing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But I mean, you forget how much impact the world has. | ||
| And you know, if you bring little kids around old people, you can really see this. | ||
| Because old people will sit around, like when we first had my daughter. | ||
| She was the first grandchild on my side. | ||
| We take her up to this lake that I go to see my parents at way the hell up in northern Alberta and She was like a little fire. | ||
| You know how people sit around a fire and look at it. | ||
| They can't look away It's because we're all the descendants of the first crazy chimpanzee who couldn't keep his goddamn mitts off the fire, you know And that's what little kids are like. | ||
| And the old people just watch them non-stop. | ||
| And it's partly because they're participating in that renewal of the world, you know? | ||
| Which is like a reintroduction to the unsullied paradise of being. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| But it only works if you like your kids. | ||
| And so there's a disciplinary element that's really important too. | ||
| One of the things that modern parents don't understand, and I think this is because of the exceptionally permissive ethos of the 1960s, when we developed this idea that everything that society does to children is bad, and so don't damage your children, like by putting restrictions on them. | ||
| It's like, that's just, that's so wrong that it's almost impossible. | ||
| It's why people shy away from kids, because they don't understand that You don't have to put up with any unpleasant, you don't have to put up with any unnecessary, unpleasant nonsense from children. | ||
| It's not necessary. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| So you could almost argue that the 60s led to exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| These kids who then were taught to be afraid of everything, they become a mess. | ||
| They're the parents of now, and that's probably in part why they're having less children, or at least talking about family and children in a different way. | ||
| Well, and there's also less trust in the structure of the family because the divorce rate has proliferated. | ||
| And it's hard. | ||
| Like, there's a woman in our department, in the psychology department, who's Ellison. | ||
| What's Ellison's last name? | ||
| She's going to hate me if she ever watches this. | ||
| If you can't think of it, we'll post it. | ||
| We'll post it because you're going to get it the second we get on. | ||
| I hope that's right. | ||
| It's probably not. | ||
| Anyways, she showed that if you interfere with the maternal relationship between rats and their pups, because rat children are called pups, That you can see the detrimental effects of that disruption three generations later. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| So, you know, you disrupt those early bonds, you disrupt the familial structure, that echoes. | ||
| It takes a... It's like an oral tradition in some sense, you know? | ||
| Because being a good mother is not just something that you're taught, it's something that you kind of have in your bones if you were mothered properly. | ||
| Like my father was an excellent father, especially when I was a little kid. | ||
| He really spent a lot of time with me. | ||
| And I used to love it when he came home. | ||
| And I have a natural affinity for little kids. | ||
| And I do believe it's, in large part, that's why. | ||
| It's because I just know how to react with them. | ||
| And I do believe it's because of the way that I was treated when I was a little kid. | ||
| You disrupt that. | ||
| It's like lots of people don't trust themselves as parents, eh? | ||
| Because they were hurt, or they didn't have good role models, or they don't trust the familial structure. | ||
| So, you know, that all makes people afraid. | ||
| Yeah, alright, so I only want to throw one more piece into this and then I want to focus on the book because we could do this for five hours. | ||
| Where do you think social media and just the phone and the distraction, more than anything else, just the endless distractions we have now, where do you think that that factors in to all of this? | ||
| That we're constantly split a thousand times over, that the family meal, My parents always made sure, I mean, basically five nights a week, but at least four nights a week, we sat down at the dinner table for a meal. | ||
| Sometimes we'd be fighting the whole time, sometimes it would be great, whatever it was, but we did it. | ||
| You know, it was an important, but now everyone, you go out, you know, we're going out tonight for dinner. | ||
| The amount of people that we're gonna watch sit at a restaurant and stare at their phone the whole time while kids are right there, or they give the kid an iPad and then, you know. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think, first of all, I think that, like, human beings are social eaters. | ||
| And it's a species characteristic. | ||
| And that's not... that's really weird. | ||
| Social eating is really weird. | ||
| Animals don't share food, like mother birds will feed their chicks, you know. | ||
| But animals, as a rule, don't share food. | ||
| Like if you're in a wolf pack and you bring down a moose, it's like the most dominant wolves eat their fill, | ||
| and then, you know, the less dominant wolves get to go in there and pick up the scraps. | ||
| Human beings aren't like that. | ||
| Like, we have this... Like, people who are alone don't eat well, generally speaking. | ||
| They're not even hungry. | ||
| We have this unbelievably deep need to eat communally, and it's a huge part of socialization, because, well, you've got to think that the regulation of eating is, in some sense, The only thing that could compare with that would be the regulation of anger and the regulation of sex. | ||
| It's fundamental to culture. | ||
| Sit like a civilized human being. | ||
| Share the food properly. | ||
| Be good company. | ||
| Pay attention. | ||
| Learn to converse. | ||
| Be grateful for what you have to eat. | ||
| Those are basic, basic... They're not even rules. | ||
| They're deeper than rules. | ||
| They're patterns of behavior. | ||
| And you need that. | ||
| So not having that shared meal, that's a real catastrophe. | ||
| I think a third of British families now don't even have a dining room table. | ||
| It's really not good. | ||
| And then with regards to the electronics, I don't think it's the content of the electronics that's the problem. | ||
| I think it's the fact of the electronics. | ||
| And I think the danger to kids is they don't engage in pretend play. | ||
| Rough and tumble and pretend play. | ||
| So even when I had kids, which is quite a while ago now, you know, the electronic media wasn't so, | ||
| we didn't have phones, cell phones. | ||
| So, but I'd often take my kids to other couples who had kids and they'd put all the kids | ||
| in front of the TV and have them watch a movie. | ||
| It's like, fair enough, it was a Disney movie, maybe it was a good movie. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with the movie, but there is something wrong with the fact | ||
| that the kids aren't wrestling, that they're not using their imagination | ||
| to figure out how to turn some weird object into a doll or a fire truck, or making a blanket fort | ||
| and playing out the roles of the family. | ||
| Those things are crucially important. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| The rough and tumble element, which is one of the things that fathers do with their kids. | ||
| It's really useful to play physically with your kids, because that's how they learn what doesn't hurt and what does hurt. | ||
| You know, because I've played with little boys who haven't had a father, and they're often awkward in their play. | ||
| They don't know how to react to me first, so they're intimidated. | ||
| You know, like not a well-socialized dog. | ||
| My friend has these Ridgebacks. | ||
| Two of them. | ||
| And they're really playful, and he wrestles with them all the time. | ||
| One of them came up to me today, and I whacked him on the side of the head. | ||
| In a playful way. | ||
| And immediately, with that hint, he went over and started gnawing on his partner's head, and they had a big play-bout. | ||
| It just took that little hint, even for a dog to get it. | ||
| And so, one of the things you do with a father is, like, you stretch your kid out and you, you know, you tap them and poke them so that they know what play is and they know what hurts and what doesn't, and you let them hit and wrestle with you so they can figure out that they shouldn't put their thumb in your eye. | ||
| It's kind of how they learn to dance, too, and to get coordinated. | ||
| Fathers really like to play with their children and mothers are often somewhat apprehensive about that because the guys generally will play rougher with the kids than the women will. | ||
| That's a generalization for all of you who think I'm being sexist, but the behavioral data is pretty clear. | ||
| But it puts the kid in their body and gives them a kind of confidence and then When they're out on the playground and they've got that play circuit already activated, a new kid will come up who's like that, and they can just make a gesture at each other and bang, they're off playing. | ||
| But the kids who don't have that, it's like other kids will come up, make a play gesture or two, nothing happens, they leave and go find a different kid. | ||
| Or they probably get the crap kicked out of them. | ||
| Well, if they're really awkward, you know. | ||
| Or they end up being the one that does the kicking, right? | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| So here's an example. | ||
| Imagine there's three or four kids in a playground together. | ||
| It's recess. | ||
| And they're all zooming their erasers around. | ||
| They're helicopters. | ||
| The three of them have already figured out they're playing helicopter. | ||
| And an unpopular kid comes up and whines a bit and says he wants to play something else. | ||
| It's like, that ain't happening. | ||
| That kid's annoying. | ||
| He's an outcast. | ||
| And that's permanent. | ||
| Like, if you haven't got that figured out by the time you're four, it's like, good luck to you. | ||
| You're in trouble. | ||
| Even the popular kids have trouble with that, once the little playgroup is formed. | ||
| So what a popular kid will come and do is, he'll, like, sidle up to the playgroup, then he'll watch what's going on, you know, calmly and patiently, and see, oh, I see, they're in helicopter universe, right? | ||
| They got this whole pretend thing going. | ||
| So then maybe he'll watch and he'll take out his eraser or maybe a pencil and watch the pattern and then he'll say, you know, Chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga, something like that. | ||
| And if he does it just right, then the play group will open up and he gets to come in. | ||
| And I've done that sort of thing, not with helicopters and erasers, in grocery stores. | ||
| Like, you know, sometimes I'll see a mother with a little child and I'll start to play with the child. | ||
| Which is a, you know, touchy thing to do in today's society. | ||
| But if you watch really carefully, you can see an opening. | ||
| You know, and if you know how to play, then you can take that opening and everybody smiles | ||
| and, you know, the kid has fun. | ||
| But even that, though, that we've become so suspicious of each other, | ||
| I know that's a little bit of a sidebar there. | ||
| Someone like you, who's so in it all the time and that you care about these things and put them into practice, it must drive you crazy. | ||
| Well, you know, I went to Mexico a few years ago and I had a really shocking experience down there. | ||
| We went to this little resort that was mostly Mexicans. | ||
| It wasn't a high-end resort. | ||
| I don't really like those sorts of places. | ||
| So it was a place where Mexicans took their families for a vacation. | ||
| And so, then we're in the swimming pool and It's a sunny afternoon and all these kids get in, you know, and the next thing I know they're all over there playing with me. | ||
| And the mothers, I'm looking at the mothers thinking, well, you know, how's this going to go? | ||
| And they could have cared less. | ||
| For them that was just, well, of course the kids are playing in the pool and, you know, maybe they glance at me and see I'm throwing them up in the air or whatever. | ||
| They didn't care, but that would just... | ||
| That's a no-go thing in our society. | ||
| It's really not good. | ||
| Well, it goes to a certain distrust that we have for almost everything right now, doesn't it? | ||
| We have a distrust of our political system, for sure. | ||
| Regardless of where you fall politically, there's a major distrust in that. | ||
| There's a distrust now in Hollywood, which I think is fine. | ||
| There's even a distrust related to sports because they've become so politicized. | ||
| Everything is becoming sort of distrusted. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| I don't believe in the idea of natural resources. | ||
| Air. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Water. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| After that, because it takes human effort, the idea of a natural resource gets pretty screwy. | ||
| Trust. | ||
| That's a resource. | ||
| That's the fundamental thing that makes cultures wealthy. | ||
| It's trust. | ||
| And you know, You've got to distinguish between kinds of trust. | ||
| There's naïve trust. | ||
| That's the trust you have when you're naïve, surprisingly, when you don't think that anyone is ever out to hurt you. | ||
| And if you're naïve and you get hurt, then you get traumatized in proportion to the hurt and the naïveté. | ||
| Not advisable. | ||
| You don't raise your children to be naive. | ||
| In Sleeping Beauty, in the Disney film, the king and queen, they're older, they've been trying to have a child, they finally have one, Aurora, like she's everything to them. | ||
| They have a christening party for her. | ||
| They don't invite the evil queen. | ||
| You think, well of course they don't. | ||
| Who invites the evil queen to the birthday party? | ||
| It's like, You gotta invite the evil queen to your kid's life, because otherwise they don't know that life is hard, and they don't know that they can prevail through that. | ||
| And so what happens to Sleeping Beauty is, the first time she's disappointed, as soon as she grows up, as soon as she hits 16, pricks her finger, little bit of blood, she wants to be unconscious. | ||
| Because she can't tolerate it. | ||
| She's been so protected, she can't tolerate life. | ||
| It's like, so, well, so... | ||
| You wanna make sure that your kids are exposed to experiences that push them and stretch them as much as you possibly can. | ||
| I guess that's part of the competence thing we were talking about, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You love the Disney metaphor, don't you? | ||
| That's a big one with you. | ||
| I mean, I think I know why you like just sort of movie metaphors in general, but I know your Pinocchio story, of course. | ||
| Some of those Disney movies, man, they really nailed it, like I would say. | ||
| Beauty and the Beast mm-hmm They nailed that like they got the archetypal structure dead on like that's the fundamental hero myth for women is like find a monster Who wants to be a good man and Help them be a good man. | ||
| Don't find the you know half-developed harmless thing find the the guy that's He's a monster. | ||
| He's been through it. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You know, and form a relationship with him. | ||
| Okay, so fine, and that's a scary thing to do, right? | ||
| And a woman who hasn't had good experiences with men will prefer a man who's, well, the psychoanalytic idea would be castrated, essentially, but rendered harmless. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, he won't hurt me, he's harmless. | ||
| It's like, harmless is not virtuous. | ||
| Harmless is dangerous. | ||
| Because harmless people have no force in the world, and so they can't move forward properly, and so then they get resentful and bitter and passive-aggressive, and they take things out on their subordinates, and, you know, that's a bad thing. | ||
| So for the woman, it's like, you can step on him for a while in his harmlessness, but actually, that's truly corrosive for both of you, really. | ||
| Oh, it's terrible! | ||
| And you know, a woman who's afraid of men can't distinguish competence from tyranny. | ||
| And so she sees a competent man, she thinks he's a tyrant. | ||
| She hasn't separated those two things out, you know, so... | ||
| It's like the guy who marries someone and then turns her into his mother, you know, because he can't tolerate the idea that his wife could also be sexual, you know, so he desexualizes her over time and then wonders why he's unhappy sexually when he's 40. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, because he can't bridge the gap between mother and mistress, something like that. | ||
| So yeah, the Disney movies, Beauty and the Beast, nailed it. | ||
| Little Mermaid, dead on. | ||
| Sleeping Beauty, dead on. | ||
| The Lion King, I've done a lot of analysis of it. | ||
| It's a little more on the edge because some of the archetypal themes in it were put in consciously, and so they're not as... They're more propagandistic in some sense. | ||
| So it wasn't pure storytelling in your argument? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| There was a goal. | ||
| There was a goal. | ||
| It wasn't pure storytelling. | ||
| That's interesting because everything's sort of a goal now, right? | ||
| Everything that seems to come out of Hollywood is kind of... It's a goal first before the story. | ||
| Yeah, well, and that just doesn't work over time. | ||
| I mean, story's everything. | ||
| And a story is something that you can't contrive it. | ||
| It has to manifest itself in some sense. | ||
| You know, a story has an internal logic and its own arc, and if you're aiming it at a moral I didn't see it. | ||
| and it's not art, it's propaganda. | ||
| And it'll fall flat. | ||
| Frozen was a good example. | ||
| That was propagandistic right from the end to the beginning as far as I was concerned. | ||
| And it was the right propaganda for the time, but no one will watch it. | ||
| I know my niece loves it, but I didn't see it. | ||
| No one will watch it in 20 years, I don't think. | ||
| Whereas they'll be watching, well, the Little Mermaid, for example, | ||
| or Beauty and the Beast forever, because they're perfect. | ||
| Pinocchio's pretty much perfect. | ||
| It gets a little moralistic from time to time. | ||
| You know, it was done in the 30s. | ||
| It's like, give them a break, you know? | ||
| Isn't that, though, it's the greatest thing, sort of, when you get that piece of art that, you know, you talked about the art before, but a movie, whatever it is, when you get that thing that you're so in, that wherever it ends, you're okay with. | ||
| Did you happen to see the last Wolverine movie? | ||
| The one called Logan? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, I loved it. | ||
| I just thought it was great. | ||
| It was gritty and dark and painful and so different than all these superhero movies. | ||
| And in those last five minutes when you knew it was coming to an end, I thought, however they end this, I can accept it. | ||
| Because I thought that's how good it was. | ||
| It was giving me everything I needed out of this. | ||
| Like I was having an actual emotional thing. | ||
| I thought, that's art right there. | ||
| They're not trying to browbeat me with social justice or browbeat me with anything else, but they're giving me something there. | ||
| It was just a nice feeling. | ||
| You get so little of that in pop culture these days. | ||
| The artist shouldn't be able exactly to say what he or she is doing. | ||
| If you can say what you're doing, you're not producing art. | ||
| Well, you could say art bears the same relationship to culture that the dream does to mental stability. | ||
| You know, your dream doesn't say what it's about. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| You can interpret it, and that's helpful sometimes, just like movie criticism is helpful. | ||
| But the dream is something that extends you beyond where you already are. | ||
| That's why it isn't verbal thought. | ||
| It's something else. | ||
| It's like a pseudopod that's going out into the unknown. | ||
| That's what art is. | ||
| And the artist who subsumes the artistic vision to the ideological framework It's putting the cart before the horse. | ||
| It's actually a sin, I would say. | ||
| It's like the ultimate and creative sins to do that, because you're harnessing the greater to the lesser. | ||
| It's like, yeah, you understand things, and you could tell a story about what you understand. | ||
| It's like, no, no. | ||
| You tell a story about what you don't understand, and then you pull everyone into the story. | ||
| The story's an exploration in that way. | ||
| And so, you know, that's why I don't really think that Ayn Rand qualifies as literature. | ||
| I liked her books. | ||
| I got into them, you know. | ||
| But... | ||
| But she knew what she was saying. | ||
| And you can tell, because all of her good characters are the same character. | ||
| They have different bodies, but they're the same people. | ||
| And all the bad people are the same people. | ||
| And they're all voices for a political viewpoint. | ||
| And, you know, she does weave into that heroic plot. | ||
| And that redeems it to some degree. | ||
| But she's not Dostoevsky. | ||
| Because what Dostoevsky did... | ||
| And he was the greatest novelist that ever lived, as far as I'm concerned. | ||
| Head and shoulders above anyone else I can think of. | ||
| He didn't know the answer when he started writing. | ||
| And so he'd have one character stand for one set of principles and ideas, and another character stand for another, and he would develop those to the fullest extent, and put them in a battlefield, where he made both characters as powerful, Representatives of those positions as he possibly could and then he'd watch the outcome, you know So and you're any and you're taken along with that It's amazing. | ||
| And that's what a good piece of art does a good story good movie a good painting for that matter It's more complex with paintings, but you know, the artist pulls you past where you are even where he is Yeah artists can't tell you what the hell they're up to, you know They don't know They can maybe guess, but actually what they're doing when they produce a piece of art is figuring out what they're up to, you know? | ||
| And that's when you know that they're actually artists. | ||
| They're moving beyond themselves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, somehow we just did an hour, but now we have to do at least another hour on this, and then we're gonna still do some stuff. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But since I know you've lasted with Rogan for a couple times, what, at least three hours, right? | ||
| Yeah, the guy's a madman. | ||
| It's like going to be interviewed by a vacuum cleaner. | ||
| How would you describe this if he's a vacuum cleaner? | ||
| This is good. | ||
| You want the conversation to be intense. | ||
| You know, that's also a good sign. | ||
| You're a gin guy, by the way. | ||
| There is gin behind you. | ||
| There is. | ||
| If it gets to that point. | ||
| We'll see. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's a thought. | ||
| That may be for the patrons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There you go. | ||
| Alright, I really want to get to your book, though. | ||
| Okay, let's do it. | ||
| Because you've made my job so... | ||
| You sent me the PDF yesterday. | ||
| I read as much as I could in the last couple hours. | ||
| But I thought the simplicity with which you laid this out was really kind of brilliant. | ||
| Because basically, as I said at the top, you're giving people 12 sort of ways to stop being pathetic. | ||
| I mean, that's what it really struck me as. | ||
| So I just wanna, we can hit each one. | ||
| Yes, written from the point of someone who tried to stop being pathetic. | ||
| Because I'm not saying, look, you're pathetic and I got the answers. | ||
| It's like, no, no, no. | ||
| It's like, I got plenty of work to do on myself. | ||
| Yeah, that's a key piece of this though, right? | ||
| For you personally, that you're not walking around going, I'm perfect. | ||
| Just two weeks ago, we spent a couple hours and we were talking about our own shortcomings and what we're struggling with and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| But you're open about it. | ||
| So few people are open about it. | ||
| Yeah, well, I live in some terror of making a mistake, knowing full well that I'm perfectly capable of making that sort of mistake. | ||
| And I'm not saying that I'm not saying or trying to act out the idea that I've got, what would you say, that I'm without error. | ||
| That's just, no, we just won't go there. | ||
| We won't go there. | ||
| That's for sure. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| So this first one, and again, there was a simplicity to this that I loved. | ||
| So the first one, rule number one, stand up straight with your shoulders back. | ||
| I love that one as the first one because when I first started doing stand up, I used to see a lot of guys hunched over the mic. | ||
| Yeah, really bad posture well-known comics, and I always remember thinking you got to stand up straight. Yeah, well | ||
|
unidentified
|
you've got good posture I just know I guess I guess something happened. Yeah. Yeah, | |
| yeah, you do so so you know my wife is a massage therapist and she's very | ||
| Physiologically aware and so she's also helped me with this sort of thing | ||
| But we watch people on the streets all the time people in general now have very poor posture. Yeah, very bad for them | ||
| That's gotta be phone related too, right? | ||
| Well, yeah, I think that's part of it But I also think it's something our culture doesn't attend to like you kind of have to remind your kids to stand up You know, it takes a certain amount of conscious effort. | ||
| But yeah in that chapter I talk a lot about lobsters, which I'm kind of I kind of have an affinity for lobsters and because they Well, the short story is that when a lobster loses a fight, because they're fighting all the time for dominance, let's say, in their hierarchies, he kind of crunches down, so he looks smaller. | ||
| When he wins a fight, he stretches out, looks bigger. | ||
| And so he's signaling to other lobsters the tally of his victories, let's say. | ||
| So if a lobster has won a fight, he's more likely to win the next fight than you would calculate from having a tally of all his previous defeats and victories. | ||
| And if he loses a fight, then he's more likely to lose the next fight. | ||
| So that's that Matthew principle at work. | ||
| Okay, so you think, well, so what? | ||
| So what does that have to do with anything? | ||
| It's like, okay, part of the kicker is while the lobster runs on serotonin, neurochemical, And if the lobster loses, the serotonin levels go down, and if he wins, the serotonin levels go up. | ||
| And when the serotonin levels go up, he stretches out, and he's a confident lobster. | ||
| And one of the consequences of that is if a lobster loses a battle, and you give him the equivalent of antidepressants, then he stretches out, and he'll go fight again. | ||
| So antidepressants work on lobsters. | ||
| Right! | ||
| And you think, well, who cares? | ||
| It's like, no, no, no! | ||
| You don't get it! | ||
| We diverged from lobsters from an evolutionary perspective 350 million years ago, and it's the same circuit. | ||
| It's absolutely unbelievable, and that shows you how deep inside you, how basic, how primordial that circuit is in you, that's sizing other people up, and looking at where they fit in the hierarchy. | ||
| Well, with human society, it's more like hierarchies of competence than dominance per se. | ||
| But, and, like, if your serotonin levels fall, You get depressed you crunch forward and and the whole everything around you turns cloudy and black and and then you're inviting more oppression, right? | ||
| And so you get into this bad loop, you know, and so it's really important to if you're trying to get your act together. | ||
| It's really important to stretch yourself out. | ||
| And sit up properly, because it's part of the psychophysiological loop that can start you on the upward curve. | ||
| And so it's a really important thing to take note of. | ||
| Like if you've been bullied, say when you were a kid, maybe you've moved and so it's sort of irrelevant, you're still carrying that with you in the hunched shoulders, and then you can't breathe properly, and your voice isn't right, and you invite more bullying, because the predator types are always looking for people who Who look like they can be intimidated, and who will make a nice fuss if they are, you know, like a nice gratifying... They'll make nice gratifying sounds of suffering if you torment them, right? | ||
| Because that's what a bully really wants. | ||
| And so that's what the first chapter is about. | ||
| It's about hierarchy, about... And it's a critique in some sense also of the idea of the patriarchy. | ||
| I know, because the patriarchy is this dominant, oppressive hierarchy that everyone's embedded in. | ||
| And, you know, the social constructionist, social justice warrior, post-modernist types think about that as a social construction. | ||
| It's like, how about no? | ||
| That's just wrong. | ||
| Lobsters have hierarchies. | ||
| That's a third of a billion years ago. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That's not a social construction. | ||
| It's part of being itself. | ||
| And if you only see a hierarchy as power and tyranny, then you're looking at the world | ||
| wrong. | ||
| It's true that hierarchies can be tyrannical and dominant, and a degenerated hierarchy | ||
| is nothing but tyranny. | ||
| But in a functional society, the hierarchy is actually the structure of the society, and you're actually protected within it. | ||
| Well, then how you relate to that hierarchy is very important, but that's part of personal development. | ||
| That's part of standing upright. | ||
| And then people in the hierarchy think, oh, well, you're someone who could do good things for the hierarchy. | ||
| Let's promote you. | ||
| You know, like, men don't struggle for power. | ||
| That isn't what men do. | ||
| Not if they're civilized. | ||
| They size each other up and elect the competent to lead them. | ||
| And they do that at every level of society, like I tell a story in there about... | ||
| Might be later in another chapter. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| I worked in a rail crew in southern Saskatchewan. | ||
| They're rough guys, like a lot of them had been in prison, you know. | ||
| And when you first came on to the rail crew, you got a stupid nickname and people teased you. | ||
| And I remember this one kid called Lunchbucket. | ||
| That was his nickname because he came to the rail crew with a lunch bucket that looked like his mom had packed it. | ||
| That was a bad idea. | ||
| You bring your damn lunch and kind of a... | ||
| ratty paper bag, don't make too big a thing out of it. | ||
| And it's dirty and smelly. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| It's like, you're not pronouncing your status with your lunch bucket. | ||
| You don't have a Barbie lunch box. | ||
| Exactly, yes. | ||
| So they named him Lunch Bucket, which he wasn't very happy about. | ||
| Well, that was a mistake. | ||
| He should have taken it with a smile. | ||
| And then he was always peevish and irritable. | ||
| And if you asked him to do something, he'd whine. | ||
| And so like, this was soon after I joined the rail crew. | ||
| Well, soon, there was about 60 men on this crew. | ||
| It stretched out about a quarter of a mile down the tracks. | ||
| Soon, anonymous harassers were throwing pebbles at him during work. | ||
| We had hardhats on, so the game was, let's see if we can hit a lunch bucket in the hardhat with a pebble. | ||
| Anonymous, anonymous. | ||
| Yeah, well, because you don't know where it's coming from. | ||
| And that was purposeful, because he couldn't take a joke. | ||
| It's like, well, let's see if he can take this joke. | ||
| Clunk. | ||
| And everybody goes, No, and then it just got more and more peevish and the pebbles got bigger and bigger and you know a week later lunch bucket was gone Having not learned anything from the experience, but you know the men were testing him out. | ||
| It's like Can you take a joke? | ||
| Can you be useful? | ||
| Can you at least be amusing? | ||
| Is there something worthwhile about you? | ||
| It's like, no, it's like, okay, well then, you're outta here, because you never know when we actually might need to depend on you. | ||
| It's so interesting to me, because it fits fully within what you were saying about why it's important for a father to play with a kid, or why sibling, my brother and I used to beat the living crap out of each other. | ||
| He'd win sometimes, I'd win sometimes, but we learned something there, and I think you said, it's like learning how to dance. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| But I like that you started this with something physical, because all of us can do this. | ||
| Everyone watching this today that's struggling with whatever they're struggling with can just work on that. | ||
| Even whoever's watching this that has God's best given posture ever can still work on that. | ||
| Yeah, well if you happen to be hunched forward, you know weightlifting is really good for that because you | ||
| strengthen out your back muscles And it'll pull your shoulders back and you want that and it's | ||
| really important as you get older because you look at old people | ||
| You know and and if they're astute they start to calcify that way and then they start to bend down and like | ||
| You know, you don't want to be in that situation when you're 40 | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, maybe you want to be in that—you don't ever want to. | ||
| You don't ever, but yeah. | ||
| But maybe 90, you know, but not 40, and certainly not 20. | ||
| And so, you know, you need to do a postural analysis or have someone take a look at you and say, well, you know, yeah, you're kind of hunched forward, and you've got to be conscious about it. | ||
| You've got to pull back a lot. | ||
| Open up! | ||
| It's also kind of a... I think part of the reason it signifies dominance is because like this is a protective crouch, right? | ||
| And it's to stop animals that jump on your back from getting at your soft part. | ||
| So it's instinctual. | ||
| It's protective, right? | ||
| So this basically says, I'm open to the world, right? | ||
| But what it also says is, I can handle being open to the world. | ||
| So it signifies competence and confidence. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because it's also a sort of vulnerable position. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| And in, you know, yoga or certain other stretching things, Feldenkrais and things like that, you would work on this. | ||
| You would also, the mansplaining people will not be happy when they... No, no, they're not. | ||
| They're gonna see us doing this. | ||
| They're not gonna be happy about that. | ||
| Yeah, well, the thing about competence is acceptance of vulnerability. | ||
| That's what competence is. | ||
| That's a deep idea. | ||
| The deepest Christian idea, for example, is that you should accept the vulnerability of being. | ||
| That's the acceptance of the crucifixion, essentially. | ||
| It's like, you know, you're at the X where all the suffering takes place. | ||
| You're going to whine about that? | ||
| You know, and get resentful and bitter about it, because there's reason to. | ||
| Like, let's make no mistake about it. | ||
| Or you're going to say, bring it on, I can handle it, no matter what it is. | ||
| Well, maybe you can't do that, but that's what you're aiming for. | ||
| You're aiming at being able to handle it, no matter what it is, and to do that voluntarily. | ||
| And the idea is that if you can do that, you will transcend the tragedy. | ||
| And it's like, well, could that be true? | ||
| Well, most people admire tough, competent people. | ||
| So you know it's at least a little bit true. | ||
| You know, you admire the courageous. | ||
| So, well, how courageous can you get? | ||
| That's the question. | ||
| How courageous can you get? | ||
| Well, you practice and see. | ||
| And it makes you want to be better. | ||
| I'll tell you, I didn't tell you this two weeks ago, but when we did that event, which was spectacular, at the end, when all the kids were coming up to say hi to us, there's a line for the two of us. | ||
| Your line did have more people. | ||
| There were plenty on mine, too. | ||
| But I actually felt after, truly, I was like, I have to be better now. | ||
| This means I have to be better. | ||
| And I thought, I felt great about it. | ||
| Like, I actually didn't feel Jealous of you or whatever. | ||
| I was like, oh he brought it and it's like I Should bring it to so that well that competition is a wonderful thing. | ||
| It is it is it well the thing is is that and that's the opposite of Well in the story of Cain and Abel Cain kills Abel because he can't stand the fact that he's better than him That's really it. | ||
| It said he knows he's better than him. | ||
| There's no doubt about that and and so Abel is actually his ideal and Because that's what it means to see someone who's better than you. | ||
| If you get jealous of that, you're getting jealous of your own ideal. | ||
| Well, that's a very bad idea. | ||
| It's like, what you should do is, you should watch and you should think, well, there's something going on there that I haven't quite got. | ||
| And maybe if I watch, I could figure it out. | ||
| It's like, it's an opportunity, you know? | ||
| It doesn't mean you gotta take that guy down, and in this case, kill him. | ||
| It means you gotta work on yourself. | ||
| Well, that's, yeah, well, it's an opportunity even to do that, you know? | ||
| And you also have to remember, too, that people have their times and, You know, things oscillate, and sometimes you meet someone who's kind of at a pinnacle in their life in some sense, and you're not. | ||
| That doesn't mean it's always going to stay that way. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| It's like, even very successful people have their... well, they get sick and die, you know? | ||
| It's like, you've got to remember that. | ||
| We've got this fundamental limitation that equalizes us in some sense, and that's also very much worth knowing. | ||
| You know, it's like, you don't know when you see someone successful. | ||
| You don't know the full tragedy of their being. | ||
| And so there's another chapter there that's called, compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. | ||
| On that note, why don't we pause for literally, we'll pause for one minute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We'll look at the gin at least, and then we'll be right back. | ||
| Right, so we're gonna take literally one minute, guys. | ||
| Give me 60 seconds and then more with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| Just a sec. | ||
|
unidentified
|
♪♪ ♪♪ | |
| ♪♪ All right, guys. I think that was maybe 67 seconds. | ||
| There must be a rule about that, if you say you're going away for 60 seconds. | ||
| Yeah, don't go away for 67. | ||
| You can lambast me, I think that's rule number nine. | ||
| Rule number two, treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. | ||
| I mean, it seems pretty clear to me what this means. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's an investigation into why people don't treat themselves well. | ||
| And the thing is, is that, you know, human beings are self-conscious. | ||
| And we know about our limitations and we know about our weaknesses. | ||
| And so we can have contempt for human beings in general, because, you know, we're just flawed and breakable and all of that. | ||
| But we know ourselves better than we know everyone else, and so... | ||
| Unless you're narcissistic, and some people are, then you have a very acute sense of how you're not up to scratch on many of the dimensions along which you could be evaluated, even by yourself. | ||
| And so that leads, naturally, to a sort of self-contemptuous attitude. | ||
| And you can see that one of the stories I talk about is that people are more likely to give prescription medication to their pets than to take them themselves. | ||
| Right, right! | ||
| Even in the United States, because we're pretty over-medicated here. | ||
| Even in the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Well, people will get the prescriptions, but they won't take the pills. | ||
| Anyways, the idea there is, it's sort of a variation that I learned from Carl Jung on treat other people as you would like to be treated. | ||
| You reverse that. | ||
| It's like, imagine someone that you treat well. | ||
| that you love, then try to treat yourself that way. You've got to detach from yourself a bit. | ||
| You've got to think, okay, well, I'm a person among other people, and I deserve at least as | ||
| much respect as a person among other people. And... | ||
| And I should be trying to help myself across time, instead of being self-contemptuous and self-destructive. | ||
| I need to take care of myself, as if I'm potentially valuable, and to lay out my life that way. | ||
| And so that's what that chapter is about. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| It's hard for people, you know. | ||
| They don't take care of themselves as well as they should. | ||
| And I don't mean, you know, take care of yourself. | ||
| I mean, that is what I mean. | ||
| It's like, it's not a moralistic attack. | ||
| It's like, it's an encouragement to give yourself a bit of the benefit of the doubt. | ||
| And treat yourself as if you have some intrinsic value. | ||
| Yeah, so how much of that would you say is psychological? | ||
| Just being okay with the mistakes you're gonna make and all of that, as opposed to just, like, treat yourself meaning dress okay. | ||
| And posture, and all of that stuff. | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| It isn't clear where your borders actually are, you know? | ||
| It means take care of your room, take care of your things, like, have some respect for yourself as a as a Well, I would say in some sense as a miraculous being because that is actually what you are But you know that that sort of borders on the new age, which I don't I'm not very happy about that, but still the case It's like you are there is a lot of potential within you and there's many things that you can do and you're necessary You're necessary | ||
| More than you think to the unfolding of things. | ||
| Like, if you make a bunch of bad decisions, things get worse. | ||
| Not just for you. | ||
| Like, things get worse. | ||
| And maybe way worse. | ||
| Like, I don't know what mistake Stalin's mother made. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And she probably didn't necessarily think they were that important. | ||
| But it turned out they were pretty important. | ||
| You don't know how your actions echo. | ||
| And so it matters what you do. | ||
| And so part of what you do is you want to treat yourself as if what you do matters. | ||
| And so you want to have some respect for yourself and some fear of yourself. | ||
| That's also that. | ||
| And so that's what that chapter is about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Number three, rule number three, make friends with people who want the best for you. | ||
| This is a particularly interesting one these days, I think, because we connect with people all over the world that we don't meet face to face. | ||
| You know, there's kind of a rule of thumb for that, which is If you have a friend and you tell them bad news, they're actually sad. | ||
| And you can tell them. | ||
| They will listen. | ||
| They'll listen. | ||
| They'll take the damn pain. | ||
| And they won't tell you about some worse thing that happened to them, defensively say. | ||
| Or they won't secretly be happy that you got knocked off your pedestal. | ||
| They'll listen. | ||
| And then the other thing is, if you have a friend and something good happens to you, they're happy. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's the thing is you like, you know, if you're trying to quit smoking and your friends are offering you cigarettes, that's like, look, there's a joke. | ||
| You can make a joke about that. | ||
| And if it's a joke, it's fine. | ||
| But often those sorts of jokes aren't jokes. | ||
| It's like I'm smoking, you're smoking, you're quitting. | ||
| You think you're better than me. | ||
| It's like, can I get you to smoke? | ||
| And then I don't have to be like embarrassed that I'm not able to do it or you're an alcoholic. | ||
| And I think, yeah, you know, who cares about the fact that you've screwed up your third marriage? | ||
| It's like, have another drink. Ha ha ha. | ||
| It's like, no, it's the other thing. | ||
| You know, people don't exactly understand that they it's OK morally to choose people that are trying to help you be | ||
| better and to shy away from people who are going to drag you down. | ||
| So this image always comes to mind for me. | ||
| You know, if you're a lifeguard and you want to rescue someone who's drowning, the way you swim up to them is like this with your foot out. | ||
| And the reason is, well, maybe they're panicking and two drowned people is not an improvement over one. | ||
| So, you know, you're not morally obliged to go down with someone else's ship. | ||
| Now you think that's pretty harsh and pretty rude. | ||
| You can't abandon a friend in need. | ||
| That's not what I'm saying. | ||
| I'm saying that it is appropriate for you to look at your social surround and to make decisions. | ||
| If you have a person who's hurting you and who won't quit and who's pulling you down, it's like you don't have to. | ||
| That is not necessary. | ||
| You are not obligated to do that. | ||
| You go with people that are trying to elevate you. | ||
| You know why I think I thought this chapter was particularly powerful is because I get so much email, and I think one of the questions we got at Clemson was related to this, that so many of the people who are waking up to the nonsense of postmodernism and all that, they're losing friends. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They're losing their old friends who view that thing as this religion that you must adhere to. | ||
| But what I've found, even though I did lose a lot of friends over the last couple of years from my old life, even though I'm the same me that I always was, is that I've gained newer, richer friends, including the guy sitting right across from me right now. | ||
| And that is a powerful thing. | ||
| You can shed people, too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, you actually are obligated to. | ||
| It's like you're not obligated to associate with people. | ||
| Who are making your life worse or who are even more and I would say this more more profoundly in some sense You are obligated not to associate with people who are trying to damage the structure of being You're being so the family being social being all of that. | ||
| It's like no wrong move away and you think well, you know, that's Cruel, it's like it's not cruel. | ||
| You're sending a message this sort of behavior is not to be tolerated plus if you Make a success out of yourself. | ||
| Let's say that you develop your character. | ||
| Well, then you're an you're a you're a Example and at some point maybe that's what that person is going to need is an example, you know Maybe they'll hit bottom and think oh my god. | ||
| I'm not on the right path. | ||
| It's like there's an example I could follow so and you can't justify it by compassion because often that's an excuse too. | ||
| It's like I'm hanging around with my drug addict, alcoholic friends because I want to help them. | ||
| It's like, really? | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Probably not though. | ||
| You're not a saint. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Maybe you are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's unlikely. | ||
| Number four, compare yourself to someone who you were yesterday, not to someone else, not to... Let's start that over. | ||
| Sorry, because I wanted to get it right. | ||
| Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. | ||
| Yeah, well, you've got to improve, right? | ||
| And so, and you might think, well, I'm a real fixer-upper, and I'm really embarrassed about that, because there's 50 things wrong with being like, look at that guy, and so now I feel all terrible because of the comparison and all of that. | ||
| First of all, it's unfair, because, especially by the time you're about 30. | ||
| When you're 17, you're like every other 17-year-old, and so that kind of social comparison is more appropriate. | ||
| By the time you're about 30, your life has become quite idiosyncratic, you know? | ||
| Like, let's say your life has eight dimensions. | ||
| Family, friends, intimate relationships, health. | ||
| You know, you can kind of lay them out. | ||
| You're individually positioned in all those dimensions. | ||
| Your life isn't like anyone else's life. | ||
| And so you see someone who's doing better than you. | ||
| It's like, you're only seeing one dimension at one slice of time. | ||
| So it's not reasonable. | ||
| You don't have the whole picture. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So, and then you get down on yourself. | ||
| And take the spirit out of yourself, and you get bitter and resentful. | ||
| There's nothing good about that. | ||
| But you do need to improve, because there's not as much of you as there should be. | ||
| So what's the comparison? | ||
| Well, that's easy. | ||
| You just say, OK, well, here's my position in time and space right now. | ||
| Here's my virtues and faults. | ||
| It's like, I can be a little bit better tomorrow, in some minor way. | ||
| Well, that's the right comparison, because You are very much like you. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Everything's the same about you. | ||
| And so it's a perfect comparison. | ||
| And then you get a trajectory going. | ||
| It's like, well, obviously I'm not perfect, but I'm slightly less terrible than I was yesterday. | ||
| Man, you keep that up for five years, and you're wherever you should be. | ||
| That isn't where someone else should be, right? | ||
| Because you really are an individual. | ||
| There's an interesting element of this on a biblical note that I think you hit sometimes, which is sort of, don't pray to false gods, because it's sort of like, well, the guy that you're looking at that you think has everything, you have no idea. | ||
| And we see that now with all these people crumbling in Hollywood that are worshipped by so many people who have done all sorts of terrible things or whatever it is. | ||
| Yeah, well, you just don't have insight into the tragedy of someone else's life. | ||
| You know, and you might think, well, he's rich and successful. | ||
| It's like, yeah, but you just don't know. | ||
| You don't know what his relationship is with his wife or his children. | ||
| You know, you don't know that he's gone through two divorces, and his daughter won't talk to him, and one of his kids is schizophrenic. | ||
| Like, most people's lives are pretty nicely saturated with tragedy. | ||
| you know, and with a certain degree of malevolence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you might think, well, I'd trade places with him in a minute. | ||
| And I'm also not saying that some people don't have it really rough. | ||
| It's like, look, man, some people have it rough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not the point. | ||
| It's not the point. | ||
| The point is, you should be better than you are, but it's not because you're worse than other people. | ||
| It's because you're not everything you should be. | ||
| And so you've got to pick the comparison right. | ||
| And then that's also ennobling. | ||
| It's like, and instantly hopeful. | ||
| There is absolutely no doubt that you can be slightly better tomorrow than you are today. | ||
| And then, because of the Pareto Principle, that movement towards the good increases exponentially, that trajectory can just take you out of hell very, very rapidly. | ||
| And so, you know, there's nothing but good about that. | ||
| Yeah, just quick sidebar before we get to number five. | ||
| So you mentioned sort of 17, we're all sort of at that same, you can't have that much differentiation probably between the people around you. | ||
| But 30, it's a little more calcified. | ||
| Do you think there's a cutoff age? | ||
| I don't mean exactly a number, like you're gonna say 56, but do you think that there's a point, and there was a question asked at Clemson where somebody said to you, you know, you've really helped my 60-year-old father who had all this stuff going wrong in his life. | ||
| He started listening to you and he said he's, I think she said he's in the best place he's ever been or something. | ||
| But do you think that there's a cut-off age where, just physiologically, you can't quite do a lot of this stuff? | ||
| Well, I think it gets harder, because you get more who you are as you get older. | ||
| So there's not... the ratio of actuality to potential starts to shift. | ||
| But it doesn't change the underlying simple truth, which is, there is definitely something that you can do today that will make you slightly better For the next day. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Always. | ||
| Now, let's... Okay. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| You're 85. | ||
| You have Alzheimer's. | ||
| You know, you're done. | ||
| Sometimes you're done. | ||
| But, most of the time you're not. | ||
| And most of the time there's something within your grasp that you could put right. | ||
| And, see, that's the fundamental issue. | ||
| It's like, life is tragic. | ||
| It's full of suffering, and it's full of malevolence. | ||
| There's no doubt about that. | ||
| And it's brutal. | ||
| It's more brutal than you can even imagine, in some ways, or willing to imagine. | ||
| but there's something you could put right. | ||
| And we don't know what would happen if you put everything you could right, | ||
| if you put it right. | ||
| And then we don't know what would happen if everyone did that. | ||
| But you can be certain that it would be less tragic and less malevolent. | ||
| And so, you don't have anything better to do than that. | ||
| Right, like get cracking. | ||
| Get at it, man. | ||
| Get cracking, man. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Number five, do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. | ||
| This has sort of been a through line to at least the beginning part of our conversation. | ||
| Well, the first thing is it's the monster thing, like the beauty and beast thing. | ||
| You are not a good guy. | ||
| And you will take revenge on your children if they misbehave. | ||
| You think, oh no, I like my children. | ||
| It's like Other people might not like them. | ||
| Maybe they don't behave very well, you know. | ||
| And you think you like them because you're a saint, but you're not. | ||
| And you will take revenge on those children if they do things that make you dislike them. | ||
| So, you're in the grocery store, and you've got a four-year-old, and the four-year-old's pretty smart. | ||
| Checking you out all the time. | ||
| Like, poking you and prodding you and seeing what's there. | ||
| Because that's what little kids do. | ||
| They're not that verbal. | ||
| So they're, they're, they're like, they, they, they have, you could compare their behavior in some ways to pack animals, like dogs, which is why they like dogs, and get along with dogs, they understand each other, you know? | ||
| And so, they're testing you out. | ||
| And so they have a temper tantrum in the store, and you don't know what to do about it. | ||
| What you do, your kid has a temper tantrum in the store, you pick up the child, you go outside, with them, you stand them up somewhere, and just, let them have it! | ||
| Let them have the temper tantrum! | ||
| It's like, They'll get sick of it soon enough. | ||
| Go somewhere boring and dull and say, well, have at her, man. | ||
| Then the kid's done, you say, we're going to stand right here until you decide that you're going to behave. | ||
| The child knows what that means. | ||
| It's like, you're going to behave, or we're just going to stand here. | ||
| It's like, fine, okay, you don't do that, the child has a temper tantrum. | ||
| It's the third one, you know, you're embarrassed, you're turning red, everyone's sweating, everyone's looking at you like you're a horrible parent, it's like, really unpleasant. | ||
| They go, I love my child, I like my child! | ||
| It's like, no you don't! | ||
| That's a lie! | ||
| You go home. | ||
| The kid's forgotten all about it, you know. | ||
| They go in their room. | ||
| They make a little drawing. | ||
| They're all thrilled. | ||
| They come out and show it to you. | ||
| And maybe they did a really good job, you know. | ||
| Maybe they're even a little guilty about having the damn tantrum. | ||
| But you, man, you're not happy. | ||
| And you think, yeah, that's nice. | ||
| And you go back to whatever useless thing you're doing. | ||
| And you think, I got that little bastard. | ||
| And you think, no, I wouldn't think that. | ||
| It's like, wrong, wrong. | ||
| Not only would you think it, you would act it out. | ||
| And if you don't think that that's true, then you don't know yourself very well. | ||
| And so you've got to think, that little kid is little and powerless. | ||
| Well, not as powerless as you might think, but fundamentally you got the upper hand | ||
| and you've got the proclivity for tyranny deeply rooted in you. | ||
| And so, you better be real careful around that child. | ||
| I used to tell my kids, you know, when I was not in a good mood, to say, like, it would be better if you were in your room. | ||
| And they didn't mind. | ||
| They knew what it meant, you know. | ||
| They were very young, they could understand that. | ||
| It's like, you're a fine kid, you know. | ||
| Pat, pat, pat. | ||
| I'm not in a good mood. | ||
| Things are likely to be unpleasant. | ||
| Why don't you just go play in your room for a while? | ||
| It's like, away they went. | ||
| They knew how to play in their room. | ||
| You know, because I didn't want them being around me when I wasn't going to be a good guy. | ||
| And so, kids, they know they can handle that, man. | ||
| They can't handle lies. | ||
| They can handle that sort of truth. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| And so, both my wife and I, we were very careful. | ||
| When we're starting to not be happy with the kids, with one kid or the other, it was time to have a chat and figure out what it was that had gone off the rails and how we were gonna fix it so that we were, like, thrilled to have that kid around. | ||
| And that's the thing about kids, is you can be thrilled to have them around. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| You're tired, you're hungover, like, you've had a bad day, the kid's cranky. | ||
| Like, I'm not saying this is utopia. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| That's not the point. | ||
| The point is, though, you can manage your relationship with your kids, and you can have an honest relationship with them, and then it will be the best relationship with anybody you've ever had in your life. | ||
| And I can say that with some certainty, because, like, I had a rough time with my daughter, because she was very, very, very ill for a long time. | ||
| It was really bad for, like, seven years. | ||
| It's still touch and go, but it was... She was in excruciating agony for two straight years, which I can't believe she even did it, because, like, Three hours of pain that's intense, that's rough. | ||
| Two years, it's like, maybe you don't get through that, you know? | ||
| But we had a good relationship during, and thank God, if our family hadn't been well put together by that point, it would have been, it would have taken tragedy and turned it into hell. | ||
| And so we had a rough time for those years, and still it was good. | ||
| You know, that's saying something, because while she lost her hip and her ankle during that period, they were both replaced when she was 16, and so she was walking around on two broken legs for two years. | ||
| It was brutal! | ||
| But... | ||
| But, like my son, for example, during that period of time, and like, hats off to him. | ||
| He was only 14, you know, when he wanted to be out with all his friends. | ||
| He stuck around. | ||
| He supported her. | ||
| He never complained about it. | ||
| He never complained about the fact that he didn't get the attention he should have got. | ||
| He was there like a bloody rock. | ||
| And his sister relied on him a lot, loves him to death, partly because of that. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| That was a good thing, and it was because of that foundation that we had laid. | ||
| We wouldn't have got through that without that. | ||
| It's powerful. | ||
| I could even see it in your face, just a slight change as you talk about it, because it's real. | ||
| It was brutal, man. | ||
| One night I went down to talk to her, and the pain had driven her past the edges of her sanity. | ||
| I could see that she was going to crack. | ||
| We were looking all over the world to find somewhere to get her ankle replaced fast. | ||
| You know, because it degenerated very quickly and the surgeon that we had been talking to | ||
| wanted to fuse it and we weren't into that. | ||
| We wanted to get a replacement but they're rare. | ||
| Anyways, I won't bore you with all the details but yeah, it was brutal. | ||
| And in those situations, if your family is fractured, it's like you don't have the | ||
| extra energy to deal with the fracturing. | ||
| You've got to have had your ship in order, you know, when you're in stormy seas. | ||
| It's almost like when, you know, it's like when grandma dies and then the family just goes crazy after that or that type of thing. | ||
| Yes, just like that. | ||
| Like it all starts coming out when there's a tragedy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, that's it. | ||
| That's how you see that. | ||
| That's a great example. | ||
| You see that a lot at a deathbed. | ||
| My wife's mother died of... essentially of Alzheimer's. | ||
| It was prefrontal temporal dementia. | ||
| And she got it pretty young and degenerated over about 15 years. | ||
| And her husband, who was a really extroverted, party-type guy... I have a lot of respect for him. | ||
| I like him a lot. | ||
| But he wasn't the sort of stay-home-and-tend-to-the-needy type, you know. | ||
| But when his wife got sick, man... | ||
| He took care of her. | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| I just cannot believe how good he was, and how patient. | ||
| And her family just pulled together. | ||
| And on her deathbed, too. | ||
| Like, her sister's a palliative care nurse, and her other sister's a pharmacist. | ||
| They've had some contact with the rough parts of life, you know? | ||
| I was at her deathbed, and like, the family was together. | ||
| And one of the things that was so interesting about that was that they lost their mother, and like, that's horrible. | ||
| And it's a horrible way to die. | ||
| But... | ||
| It's so interesting, because the bonds between them, the sibling bonds and the bonds with the kids and the father, were tightened a lot after that. | ||
| And so in some sense, although there was something taken away, and it wasn't trivial, And I'm not being a Pollyanna about this. | ||
| They strengthened their damn family, and we spent more time with them, and we get along better, and it's like there was a compensation for it. | ||
| And so you think, well, what happens if you act nobly through a tragedy? | ||
| Well, first of all, it's better than not doing it, but then you also increase the probability that whatever good might come out of it is going to come out of it. | ||
| So, you know, you can take a tragic situation, and tragedy isn't hell. | ||
| But you can make tragedy into hell, and then it's hell, and no one can stand that. | ||
| Yeah, that's good stuff. | ||
| Rule number six, set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. | ||
| Oh, that's a rough one. | ||
| That's about a mass murderer, and about mass murderers. | ||
| Yeah, so I didn't get this far, because as I said, I just got this yesterday. | ||
| Yeah, that's a rough one, man. | ||
| Well, there's plenty of things to criticize about being. | ||
| It's tragic. | ||
| There's malevolence. That's basically the issue and You can complain about that | ||
| But the thing is if you complain about that if you adopt that attitude, which is sort of an anti being attitude | ||
| You go places that if you knew you were going you probably wouldn't want to go | ||
| It's the places where the kids that shot up Columbine went. | ||
| Those are bad places. | ||
| If you read the writings of the Columbine high school kids, and you really read them, if they don't make the hair stand up in the back of your neck, you are not paying attention. | ||
| One kid wrote things I cannot believe. | ||
| That people could write and I've exposed myself to a lot of crazy things that people have done and said You just can't understand it. | ||
| It's it's It's uncanny, you know Well, that's where you end up if you're If you get bitter, it's like well, what can you do about that? | ||
| Well, the world is harsh. | ||
| It's like Should you criticize it? | ||
| It's like, not until you put yourself together. | ||
| You gotta bring everything you can to bear on the problem before you have any right to stand in judgment about being itself. | ||
| And that's what these mass murderers do. | ||
| That's what they're doing. | ||
| That's what they're acting out. | ||
| They're saying, well, I'm looking out in the world. | ||
| I don't like people. | ||
| They're full of flaws. | ||
| They act badly. | ||
| They're a cancer on the face of the planet. | ||
| It'd be better if they didn't exist at all. | ||
| So... | ||
| I don't like being. | ||
| It's too full of suffering and evil. | ||
| I'm the judge of this. | ||
| It's like I'm going to make my goddamn case. | ||
| I'm going to take them out. | ||
| And then it's more than that. | ||
| It's like I'm going to take them out and I'm going to do it with innocents first. | ||
| Because that's the thing you've got to get about the mass murderer types. | ||
| It's like they're not hunting down the guilty. | ||
| That's too obvious. | ||
| They're hunting down the innocent. | ||
| That's the best protest. | ||
| That's why the guy shot up the elementary school in Connecticut. | ||
| It's like, why do you shoot kids? | ||
| Well, think about it. | ||
| Well, I don't want to think about it. | ||
| Well, that's for sure. | ||
| You bloody well don't want to think about it. | ||
| But you better think about it. | ||
| It's like, well, that's where you go when you take that criticism of being approach. | ||
| It's like, you don't get to do that. | ||
| Not unless you want to end up there. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| So what do you do instead? | ||
| It's like, okay. | ||
| Stop doing stupid things. | ||
| Stop lying. | ||
| Stop making things worse. | ||
| Stop making yourself weak. | ||
| Everyone does that. | ||
| They know it, you know? | ||
| And I'm not saying follow the rules. | ||
| I'm not saying that. | ||
| I'm saying even in a day, you'll see that you have choices in front of you, and sometimes you don't know what to do. | ||
| Okay, you're ignorant. | ||
| Maybe you make a mistake. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| That's just ignorance. | ||
| Malevolence is when you know what you shouldn't do, and you do it anyways. | ||
| And people do that all the time. | ||
| And that's arrogance. | ||
| That's, I'll get away with it. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| It's deceit, because you're lying to yourself about whether you should do this or not. | ||
| You know you shouldn't. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And then it's resentment, because, well, it's like, I'm gonna do this bad thing, because that'll teach the people, or whatever, that'll teach God to treat me this way. | ||
| It's like, that's... | ||
| That's the terrible trinity. | ||
| Deceit, arrogance, resentment. | ||
| Chase those out of your life. | ||
| Rule number seven. | ||
| Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. | ||
| Yeah, well, meaning is what you have to To buttress yourself against the tragedy of life. | ||
| It's like engagement. | ||
| We're having an engaging conversation. | ||
| You know, we'll walk away from this, and hopefully the people who are watching, they'll walk away and they'll think that was worthwhile. | ||
| It's like, okay, think about what that means. | ||
| It means that despite the fact that you're a fragile, damaged, mortal creature, you found something to do that announced itself as Worthwhile. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| That's meaning. | ||
| It's an instinct like it. | ||
| It's not it's a deep deep instinct. | ||
| I It's it's maybe the deepest instinct. | ||
| It's like a form of vision except it's not a it's not Like an embodied sense. | ||
| It's not a specified sense Meaning tells you when you're in the right place and the right place is between chaos and order and those are real places your hemispheres like your right hemisphere is roughly Evolved, let's say, to deal with things you don't understand. | ||
| That's chaos. | ||
| And your left is there to deal with things you do understand. | ||
| You can't just stay with the things you do understand, because you already understand them. | ||
| And you can't just stay with what you don't understand, because then you're lost. | ||
| Well, you need to be in the middle of those two. | ||
| And you can tell when you're in the middle, because everything lines up. | ||
| And you feel engaged, and that what you're doing is meaningful. | ||
| It's like, that's what you pursue. | ||
| Expedience is you do the thing that gets you off the hook the fastest right now. | ||
| Well, you play that game across time, it doesn't work. | ||
| It sends you down. | ||
| Because you're sacrificing the future for the present. | ||
| Meaning doesn't do that. | ||
| Meaning says, I'm here where I should be. | ||
| And you can't tell why. | ||
| It's just that everything is right. | ||
| And you get this physiological sense. | ||
| Right place, right time, right conversation. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And that's usually a conversation where you're both trying to expand the way that you look at the world. | ||
| Well, so you follow this meaningful path. | ||
| That's your buttress against the tragedy that produces resentment and malevolence. | ||
| His meaning is the antidote to that. | ||
| And that's the fundamental religious truth. | ||
| And it's really true! | ||
| That's the thing that's so... Life is suffering. | ||
| That's true! | ||
| There's malevolence. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Meaning is the antidote to that. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| And it's not... | ||
| It's not some kind of fragile epiphenomena. | ||
| It's the deepest thing. | ||
| So people need to know that. | ||
| It's so important to know that. | ||
| And there's a feeling associated with it too, right? | ||
| A physiological feeling, because as you're saying that, I feel that. | ||
| I mean, I'm sort of lucky as an interviewer. | ||
| Sometimes I interview people and I don't get that, but I find that in the best interviews that I do, and even in portions that we've done here, when I really am in it with somebody and I can see that they know what they're talking about and they believe what they're talking about and all that, I feel sort of differently. | ||
| I actually feel a little bit differently. | ||
| Even just looking at you, not this specific second, but there are moments where it's almost like, it's not blurry or something, but like colors are a little heightened. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| you can actually feel something powerful. | ||
| And it's interesting because for me, the only reason I do this show | ||
| is because I wanted something like this to be, and I didn't see it. | ||
| I was like, where are people having meaningful conversations? | ||
| Where are people expounding on ideas and all that? | ||
| I started doing it, and now people come up to me and say, man, what you're doing has meaning to me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that's a pretty powerful thing right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and people say, well, meaning isn't real. | ||
| It's like, no, that's wrong. | ||
| It's actually the most real thing. | ||
| It might even be more real than suffering and evil. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| And like I think about this technically, you know, this isn't a metaphysical assumption that I'm making. | ||
| And you do feel it. | ||
| You feel it in your body. | ||
| It's not just a mental thing. | ||
| It's not an idea. | ||
| It's a place. | ||
| It's a place. | ||
| Because we're in time and space, right? | ||
| And a place is a place. | ||
| You know, three dimensions of space. | ||
| But it's also a time. | ||
| And when the place and the time are set up properly, you're in the right place. | ||
| And your brain is telling you that. | ||
| Your being is telling you that. | ||
| Yeah, you got it right. | ||
| Right, you know, it's gonna fall apart because you're not gonna be there all the time. | ||
| You got it right. | ||
| You forget that pretty quick often, right? | ||
| Like, that's just part of life. | ||
| Yeah, well, you say, you know, you go see a great movie. | ||
| It's like, hey, you're in the right place at the right time and you're engaged, you're completely engaged in it. | ||
| It's because it's, there's no other way to put it. | ||
| You're in the right place at the right time and the meaning is the signal of that. | ||
| And so the purpose of profound religious contemplation in some sense, in the deepest sense, | ||
| profound philosophical contemplation is to learn how to be in the right place | ||
| at the right time all the time. | ||
| Now, you can't, because you're not perfect, but you can't be perfect. | ||
| You can be there a lot more than you are and you can actually practice it. | ||
| You practice it by paying attention. | ||
| You think you watch yourself during the day like you don't know who you are or what you're doing and you notice. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Right there, I was listening to that piece of music, or I was having that conversation, or I was doing this piece of work. | ||
| Then I was there for like 10 minutes. | ||
| Okay, why? | ||
| I was doing something right. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| Or I wasn't doing something wrong. | ||
| And so I got this little illuminated moment. | ||
| It's like, okay, I need to figure out how to be there more often. | ||
| So there's this line from the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in like 1957. | ||
| And that's kind of what it's referring to. | ||
| It's like, there are times when you're in the right place at the right time. | ||
| And then you're where you should be. | ||
| And you don't notice that. | ||
| You don't say, oh... | ||
| Look, wow, there's something about this that says, right, I've got to figure out how to do this more. | ||
| Right, because that sucks you out of it immediately, even if you could do that, right? | ||
| Right, well that's also partly why it's hard, and you're not really trained to notice that, because it isn't something we ever talk about. | ||
| It's like, you're in the right place at the right time. | ||
| Okay, why? | ||
| What did I do right? | ||
| What did I do? | ||
| I need to do more of that. | ||
| So maybe it's only half an hour a week when you first start noticing, and then maybe with three months of practice you can get it up to like An hour a day. | ||
| And then maybe you can get it up to four hours a day. | ||
| And God only knows where you could get it if you keep practicing, you know? | ||
| You can be there. | ||
| We don't know what the upper limit of that is. | ||
| You know, if you're in a crowd where the music is really kicking in, the band is, you know, now and then you'll get a band and they just, they're on the same wavelength. | ||
| It's just something else. | ||
| And you can feel it snap in. | ||
| So a concert will go from good to great. | ||
| And all of the audience is participating as well, right? | ||
| They're all moving to the same rhythm. | ||
| And you get this intense feeling that everything is lined up and is in the right place. | ||
| It's like, yes! | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That's why people go to concerts. | ||
| Because they get the chance to have that happen! | ||
| And it's sort of like this... It's this vision of how life could be. | ||
| You know, and then, you know, you go home and things fragment again, but at least for a minute, everything came into alignment harmoniously. | ||
| And that's what you're trying to do, is to get every level of being harmoniously lined up, like music, like a symphony. | ||
| That's why people like symphonies, because everything lines up, and then you're there, you know? | ||
| So, that's what you want to aim at. | ||
| Yeah, if I can take it to a basketball metaphor. | ||
| I mean, this is what when players talk about being in the zone, when you're just throwing it up and you're not even thinking and it's going in and you don't even realize it. | ||
| And often when they talk about it after, you know, they won't even realize that, wow, that was a seven minute stretch. | ||
| They think of it as a 30 second little thing. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Time goes away. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that's the Tao that the Taoists talk about. | ||
| That's the zone. | ||
| That's the line between chaos and order. | ||
| And to be there is to be in the right place. | ||
| That's why people watch sports. | ||
| Like, part of it's the competition and the victory, and that's all fine. | ||
| But the serious thing is those moments when you're in the zone with the players, because they're acting out being in the zone, and everyone loves that. | ||
| In the Quidditch game, in Harry Potter, there's two games going on at the same time. | ||
| There's the ordinary game, which is just a game. | ||
| And there's the seeker game. | ||
| And the seeker is going after this golden thing that flickers in front of them. | ||
| And if they get that thing, then they win. | ||
| And the team wins. | ||
| Well, she got it exactly right. | ||
| That little thing, the snitch that everyone is chasing, is actually an ancient alchemical symbol | ||
| for the union of chaos and order. | ||
| I don't know how in the world she figured that out. | ||
| It's called the round chaos. | ||
| It's unbelievably obscure. | ||
| If you look it up on Google, I think the only reference to the round chaos is from my website. | ||
| I learned it from reading Jung. | ||
| I don't know how she figured it out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So the seeker is seeking this thing that glimmers in front of him, right? | ||
| It moves everywhere, right? | ||
| That's Mercury, the winged messenger of the gods, right? | ||
| And so you're chasing that, and now and then you get it, and everyone wins. | ||
| So yeah, that's meaning, yes. | ||
| That is meaning. | ||
| Rule number eight, tell the truth or at least don't lie. | ||
| This has been a sort of theme of everything we've been talking about. | ||
| Tell the truth or at least don't lie. | ||
| Telling the truth is hard, because you have to know the truth. | ||
| And that's hard. | ||
| But you can know when you're lying. | ||
| Sometimes you don't know, because what the hell do you know? | ||
| But sometimes you know. | ||
| And you can feel that. | ||
| That's a disjunction of meaning. | ||
| So you'll know... | ||
| You see this often with people who are very socially awkward, you know? | ||
| They'll say something that's sort of grandiose, and it really falls flat, and everyone's a bit embarrassed, including them. | ||
| It's like, if they were paying attention, they would notice that that disunited them and made them weak. | ||
| And then they wouldn't say it. | ||
| And so that's the thing about not lying, is that lies make you weak, and you can feel it. | ||
| It's the antithesis of meaning, I would say, because meaning is associated with the truth. | ||
| So if you're lying, you're at the opposite pole of that. | ||
| That's the deceit part. | ||
| And it makes you weak. | ||
| You think, well, I'll lie, and I'll get away with it. | ||
| It's like, no, you won't. | ||
| You cannot get away with warping the structure of being. | ||
| Well, that's why the arrogance comes in it's like well, I can lie and get away with it. | ||
| It's like I see here's your theory there's all this reality around you that you don't comprehend at all and There's not that much of you. | ||
| There's a lot of it and you're gonna do something that isn't in harmony with that and It's gonna work that's your theory it's like Go try it out, man. | ||
| That's some serious narcissism. | ||
| And yet we all do that to some degree. | ||
| Or at least at some point in our lives, right? | ||
| We all think we can manage everything. | ||
| Well, it's partly because you can get away with it for a short period of time, right? | ||
| So you think, well, I've got away with it so far. | ||
| It's like, yeah. | ||
| It's like that funny line in The Simpsons. | ||
| Bart comes up to Homer and says, Dad, this is the worst day of my life. | ||
| And Homer says, the worst day of your life so far, Bart. | ||
| The worst day of your life so far. | ||
| It's that show, man. | ||
| Now and then they nailed it. | ||
| That was one of them. | ||
| Those ten years, I mean, between like season four and twelve, eight, maybe, whatever that is, oh, just perfection. | ||
| Yeah, perfection. | ||
| Rule number nine, assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't. | ||
| I have a little of that at the moment. | ||
| Yes, well, that's what a good conversation is about. | ||
| It's like, because what you want to do is you want to enter into a conversation so that you come out wiser than you went in. | ||
| And so, The best example of this is when you're having an argument with your intimate partner, let's say. | ||
| It's like, because you're going to want to win. | ||
| And then, especially if you get angry, because anger wants to win. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| So then you've got to think, okay, well, wait a second. | ||
| We better sort out what winning means here. | ||
| So let's say that you're more verbally fluent than your partner, and more treacherous. | ||
| So you can win. | ||
| That doesn't mean you're right, first of all. That's a big problem. Winning when you're wrong | ||
| is a really bad idea because then you think you're right and you're not. And then, well, | ||
| maybe the person can see things you can't but I don't get exactly why you're annoyed. | ||
| I'm not sure exactly what you want me to do to change it. | ||
| Just because there's the possibility that they're trying to tell you how not to run headlong into a brick wall | ||
| There's some possibility of that and so maybe you even have to help them for me. It's like okay | ||
| I don't get exactly what you're saying. I don't get exactly why you're annoyed | ||
| I'm not sure exactly what you want me to do to change it. | ||
| Let's get this clear, and then I'm gonna think about it It's like, maybe you're right. | ||
| I'm going to see if possibly you're right. | ||
| I'm not going to roll over, because I would rather you weren't right. | ||
| I'm not going to change, unless I'm convinced. | ||
| But I am going to listen, because I would rather not run headlong into a brick wall, if I don't have to. | ||
| And so that's the idea with the conversation. | ||
| It's like... And this is, I think, why you're also supposed to listen to your enemies. | ||
| It's because your enemies will tell you... Like, they'll tell you all sorts of lies about you. | ||
| That's not so good. | ||
| Maybe you'll even get confused about that, but now and then your enemies will tell you something your friends won't. | ||
| And you think, well, they said 90 things about me that weren't true, and like two things that were. | ||
| And so you separate the wheat from the chaff, and you think, okay, you know, okay, maybe I was a little... I tried to learn that a lot in the last year, you know, maybe I was a little too harsh in that... | ||
| And I've had people talking to me about my public appearances. | ||
| They're watching and trying to help me not make mistakes, you know. | ||
| And then they call me, my friends. | ||
| They say, well, you know, you're a little arrogant there. | ||
| You're a little harsh there. | ||
| You're better when you're not so angry, you know. | ||
| You're better when you're making some jokes. | ||
| And I'm listening because, well, I'd rather not have the mistake because the mistakes could be fatal. | ||
| So it's like, let me know. | ||
| I don't want to hear it. | ||
| Especially if it's a deep mistake, because then I have to take myself apart, and that's no fun. | ||
| And maybe a bunch of me has to burn off, which is no fun. | ||
| But... Listening. | ||
| Well, and that's, you know, obviously you're good at it, because otherwise you wouldn't be interested in this, and your show wouldn't be popular. | ||
| So you're doing that, obviously. | ||
| Somehow I got one thing right. | ||
| I like this one, and I think, I mean, this is very clearly what you do. | ||
| Be precise in your speech. | ||
| So, in Genesis, one of the things God has Adam do first... So, God makes the world by speaking. | ||
| Okay, so that's the first thing to think about. | ||
| You're supposed to think, like, in a sophisticated way about this. | ||
| The idea is that there's some integral relationship between communication and the structure of being. | ||
| It's part of the role that consciousness plays in the world, whatever that role is. | ||
| Language takes the chaos and makes it into things. | ||
| And so, God has Adam name all the animals. | ||
| They're not even really real until they have names. | ||
| Now, they're more implicit. | ||
| That's another... You know, here's an example. | ||
| Let's say that you're having a rough patch in your relationship. | ||
| And you don't know why. | ||
| It's unnameable. | ||
| Is it real? | ||
| Well, yeah! | ||
| It's manifesting itself in like a physiological discomfort. | ||
| Then you talk about it and you name it. It's like it goes from this blurry thing that's kind of potential it goes | ||
| snap And then it's this thing | ||
| Right, and then that's a horrible thing. It's like a little poisonous thing, but it's not a whole | ||
| Foggy cloud of potential poison. It's like this little sharp poison thing and then you think okay | ||
| It's real It's a little monster, but it's not... it's little at least, and now probably we can do something about it, if we can admit to it. | ||
| So it's this precision that specifies, and like... So this is a little bit of the Voldemort effect, right? | ||
| Since you're a Harry Potter guy, they wouldn't name him. | ||
| Right! | ||
| This is the problem. | ||
| We got to name him first. | ||
| Oh yeah, you got to name him first. | ||
| Absolutely, because the unnameable is far more terrifying than the nameable. | ||
| You see that in, there was this great Blair Witch Project. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Terrifying movie. | ||
| Oh, it's scary. | ||
| I thought it was brilliant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, it's unnamed. | ||
| There's nothing terrible happens in that movie. | ||
| It's all the unnameable. | ||
| It's like, what's going on? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| And no matter how terrible the actuality is, it's rarely as terrible as your imagination. | ||
| Because your imagination, like it's an old thing. | ||
| It's seen a lot of terrible things in the history of life. | ||
| Like, it can put monsters everywhere. | ||
| And so it's almost always better It might be better without exception to name the thing, no matter how terrible it is. | ||
| And if you can't name it, what that means is that you're telling yourself that you're so terrified that you can't bring your attention to bear on it, and that makes you... you're the loser. | ||
| Instantly. | ||
| If it's so terrifying that you cannot face it, It's one. | ||
| You know, it's interesting because just in the political sense, I think a lot of people listening are probably thinking, well, this is unfortunately one of the things that the left has done with radical Islam, where they refuse to talk about it. | ||
| Name it. | ||
| Just name it. | ||
| So then Trump comes in and he names it. | ||
| And then it's like, well, he's the hero. | ||
| But all we want you to do, if you just can't even say the words, then how do we actually address the issue? | ||
| Well, anything that's threatening is like that. | ||
| Like, let's say we want to specify something that's threatening. | ||
| It's like, well, you know, you shouldn't be prejudiced against an entire group of people. | ||
| It's like, hey, fair enough, man. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, but ideas have consequences, and there is religious conflict, and there is terrorism. | ||
| It's like, okay. | ||
| What do we make of that? | ||
| Well, the way you figure that out is you have a conversation about it stupidly. | ||
| You make all sorts of mistakes. | ||
| You might even make racist mistakes. | ||
| It's like, well, what is this thing? | ||
| How are we supposed to get our hands around it? | ||
| How are we supposed to know what it is? | ||
| Well, you can't talk about it, because that's bad. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's not as bad as what you conjure up if you can't talk about it. | ||
| Then it's the devil himself. | ||
| I mean, that's how we demonize people. | ||
| The worst way of demonizing people is to not be able to say anything about them. | ||
| Because then God only knows what... They're unspeakable! | ||
| There isn't a better... | ||
| synonym for what's terrifying, then that's unspeakable. | ||
| What you did was unspeakable. | ||
| It's like, no, no, you wanna bring things out of the realm of the unspeakable. | ||
| That's why I'm a free speech advocate, in part. | ||
| It's like, bring everything out of the realm of the unspeakable. | ||
| Because it's also the direct attack on the intellect, isn't it? | ||
| It's a direct attack. | ||
| If you can't speak about something, you can't exercise. | ||
| It's worse. | ||
| It's just gonna make that box around your brain that much tighter and tighter. | ||
| It's worse. | ||
| It's deeper than the intellect. | ||
| It's an assault on whatever role consciousness has in being. | ||
| It's not just the intellect. | ||
| That's a shallower thing. | ||
| It's not like it's not important. | ||
| You can't even attend to it. | ||
| You can't bring it out of the chaos. | ||
| It means you can't participate in the process of creation. | ||
| It's something that deep. | ||
| Not good! | ||
| Freedom of speech, that's the worship of the Logos in many ways. | ||
| That's a very deep idea in our culture. | ||
| The deepest idea of our culture is the Logos is creative, and what it makes is good. | ||
| That's God, at the beginning of time, saying... He makes things as a consequence of the Logos, and He says it's good! | ||
| That's the idea! | ||
| Is that to bring things out of the murk is a good thing. | ||
| You don't mess with that, man. | ||
| Not unless you want murk. | ||
| You don't mess with that. | ||
| It's the fundamental, it's the most sacred principle of Western civilization. | ||
| And not only Western, the Daoists know this as well. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| There's a lot there. | ||
| Alright, two more. | ||
| Rule number 11, do not bother children when they are skateboarding. | ||
| That's a very specific one there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Well, that's an essay about masculinity, mostly. | ||
| You know, I used to watch kids skateboard on St. | ||
| George Street, which is kind of cool, you know, because obviously St. | ||
| George is the Dragon Slayer. | ||
| That's the street I work on, which I think is quite funny. | ||
| And anyways, these kids used to, you know, they're teenagers, young teenagers. | ||
| We had these long bar Hand railings going down some shallow stairs, but a fairly good flight of them and they would board slide down these rails. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's this concrete that's pebbled. | ||
| It's like you don't want to land on that. | ||
| You probably heard a lot of bones crunching over the years. | ||
| Watching them it's like... You know, but and they didn't have much protective gear on and you know, and eventually this the university put up things to stop them, you know from doing this which I complain about in this chapter for a bunch of reasons, but like I liked watching those kids. | ||
| I like watching skateboarders do those crazy things because they're trying to become competent. | ||
| Like, and they're facing danger. | ||
| They don't want the damn protective gear. | ||
| Like, sometimes it's just stupidity. | ||
| It's like, wear a damn helmet, you know? | ||
| But sometimes it's not. | ||
| It's like, no! | ||
| I don't want to wear a helmet. | ||
| I want to expose myself to this danger. | ||
| It's not that I'm stupid. | ||
| Maybe it is. | ||
| You know, I'm just being careless. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But maybe it's not. | ||
| It's like, no, I'm facing the danger. | ||
| I'm trying to master it. | ||
| And if you watch kids board slide down like handrails, if you don't think that that's courageous, then you're maybe stupid. | ||
| Those two things aren't so easy to distinguish, but it's brave. | ||
| And when they do it, it's like amazing. | ||
| It's impossible to do that. | ||
| You jump in the air, you grab your skateboard, you balance on this stupid rail, you slide for 20 feet. | ||
| And the price for failure is, well, you do the splits on the rail. | ||
| That's not fun. | ||
| Or you land head first on the gas. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| That's not fun. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| That can change your masculinity like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the kids are often shooed away. | ||
| Wait a sec, they're they're practicing being courageous. | ||
| They're practicing Mastering something in the face of danger, you know and a lot of the rebellious behavior of young men in particular Which is very frowned upon in the schools. | ||
| It's like that's toxic masculinity, you know that horrid horrid phrase It's like leave those damn kids alone let them like Another thing I referred to in that chapter is about ten years ago in Toronto, they changed the insurance rules governing the playgrounds. | ||
| And parents had raised money for these damn playgrounds, so there's nothing wrong with them. | ||
| They tore them all out, the whole city. | ||
| Like two weeks before school started, there was nothing but like dirt and gravel. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| They weren't rubber enough? | ||
| Or they weren't bouncy enough? | ||
| They were too unsafe. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Who knows what? | ||
| There was nothing wrong with them, you know. | ||
| Well, then the kids were... I saw the kids on top of the schools, you know? | ||
| Because they needed some danger. | ||
| And we know that kids on playground equipment, they will push to the limit of their ability. | ||
| That's what you see, what you like when you go see a sport like gymnastics. | ||
| You know, you think. | ||
| You go see a gymnast, and the gymnast does a flawless routine, and everybody claps like mad, and the judges say 9.9, and then the next person comes up, and they're screwed. | ||
| It's like 9.9. | ||
| It was basically perfect. | ||
| How can you do better than perfect? | ||
| And then they do it. | ||
| And you can do better than perfect, so the person is there on the edge. | ||
| And they go out there, and you know, you watch them, you feel it in your body, because you're mimicking them physiologically. | ||
| You see that everything they do is that much farther out into chaos than anything they've ever done, right? | ||
| They're pushing themselves to the absolute limit of their ability. | ||
| And everyone's like this, because you tell with every gesture that they're that close to making a mistake. | ||
| And so, they've taken this courageous step beyond their competence, And put everything on the line, and then when they land, they land in a way that's unlike perfect, it's perfect plus, and everybody immediately leaps to their feet, and like they get a chill, right? | ||
| And it's the same chill, your hair stands on end, it's the same chill that a mouse has when it looks at a wolf. | ||
| The mouse puffs up. | ||
| It's awe. | ||
| And so what you've just seen is awe-inspiring, because you've seen someone courageously move past perfection into the unknown, and not only ennoble themselves more, but to ennoble humanity itself. | ||
| And up on your feet, it's like, yes! | ||
| And then it's tens, right? | ||
| It's tens. | ||
| And they win the gold. | ||
| And it's like, Well, everyone knows what that's like. | ||
| It's like a great musical performance. | ||
| That's being in that place where everything lines up. | ||
| It's better than perfect. | ||
| Better than perfect. | ||
| I don't know how we can end this then. | ||
| And this one... I'm a dog guy. | ||
| You've met my dog. | ||
| Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. | ||
| Well, it's funny that you said you're a dog guy, because about the first three pages of the chapter are actually an apology for not including dogs. | ||
| Because I had a dog, you know. | ||
| I start by talking about dogs quite a bit, actually. | ||
| But, well, that is a bit autobiographical. | ||
| I talk a fair bit about my daughter in that, and she's actually vetted the chapter and helped me write it. | ||
| Because I wrote about Tragedy, really, about pain. | ||
| Well, and the pain of caring for someone, especially with children, you know. | ||
| And what you have to do when you're in a situation where tragic things are happening in front of you and you're somewhat powerless in the face of them, you know. | ||
| And part of that is you have to keep your eyes open for the little opportunities For the redemptive elements of being to sort of pop themselves up. | ||
| So I talk a little bit about this cat that's across the street named Ginger. | ||
| Ginger is this... Siamese cat. | ||
| It's really friendly. | ||
| Made friends with our dog. | ||
| Just by refusing to be afraid. | ||
| It would come over and the dog would sort of bark and it would roll over and like paw at him, you know. | ||
| So they were friends in no time. | ||
| And the cat would just come over and like... Let you pet it and be happy with it for a minute. | ||
| And that's... When things are... | ||
| not good and hard, then you get these little moments where a little bit of possibility still shines through | ||
| and you gotta take those moments when you get them, and so that's what that chapter is about | ||
| it's about how to manage when things are too much, and there's some practical advice in there | ||
| like, one of the things you have to do when things are just going to hell in a handbasket, let's say, is | ||
| you gotta also shrink your temporal horizon It's like, you know, you think, well, I'm planning three months out. | ||
| It's not... Not if you're on fire. | ||
| You're planning for the next two seconds, you know, and if things are really harsh in your life, someone's suffering around you, and you've got too many problems, it's like you shrink your time frame to the day, and you try to... or the hour, or the minute, you say, okay, well, we've got to have the best next minute we can have, we've got to have... that's a deathbed thing too, right? | ||
| It's like, you shrink the time until you can handle it. | ||
| There's not any more going on in that tiny fragment of time than you can bear. | ||
| That's how you adjust to the catastrophe. | ||
| And you try to stay on your feet and react during those periods of time. | ||
| And so, it's a bit of a discussion about how you reconfigure your perceptions of things when there's too much pain and trouble in your life. | ||
| It's actually a very positive chapter, even though it deals with very, you know, harsh things. | ||
| It was the most emotional chapter to write, I would say. | ||
| And my daughter's actually doing quite well. | ||
| She's figured out a lot of what was wrong with her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's great. | |
| And an amazing tour de force of concentration and care, you know, that I can't believe she's managed it. | ||
| So, it's a positive thing, the chapter. | ||
| And, you know, it's a reminder to look for What's meaningful and soul-satisfying, soul-sustaining, even when you're where you'd rather not be. | ||
| Well, listen, I could, I mean, I really could do 10 hours of this, and it would be no problem whatsoever. | ||
| We're going to take a 60-second break. | ||
| We'll do some audience questions. | ||
| You got it in you? | ||
| Sure, let's do it. | ||
| Should this be over a gin on the rocks? | ||
| Or does that... I think I'll wait till tonight when we go out. | ||
| Then I too should. | ||
| See, you're a man of discipline. | ||
| No, it's mostly terror. | ||
| It's mostly terror. | ||
| It's a fine line between terror and discipline. | ||
| Well, I think discipline sometimes is a matter of being terrified of the right things. | ||
| You know, because I really do believe that. | ||
| It's like there's things to be concerned about everywhere. | ||
| You want to be concerned about the right things. | ||
| And if you think through the consequences of your misbehavior, if you really think it through, then you get your fear pushing you forward instead of in front of you, stopping you. | ||
| Would this be a bad time to tell you that this was gin? | ||
| Alright guys, 60 seconds. | ||
| We'll be back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to be back. | |
| 69? | ||
| 71? | ||
| Getting worse. | ||
| That's the wrong trajectory. | ||
| You see what you did to me here? | ||
| All right, Peterson, here we go. | ||
| We're gonna start on, well, first, a quick super chat. | ||
| Somebody donated $6 of coffee for both of us, so we will have coffee in the morning. | ||
| And another quick one. | ||
| Peterson, you're a hero. | ||
| Professor, never stop. | ||
| You have no intentions to stop, I know that. | ||
| Do you have to even respond to that one? | ||
| You want to just tell the guy you'll never stop? | ||
| As long as my health holds out, I should be able to manage this. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Dr. Peterson, this is Patreon. | ||
| Can you recommend any good sources on the connections between personality type and political affiliation? | ||
| Which model of personality type is the most reliable in this context? | ||
| Big five. | ||
| The big five. | ||
| Extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness. | ||
| The liberals are open and low and conscientious. | ||
| Conservatives are high in conscientiousness and low in openness. | ||
| Openness is the creativity dimension. | ||
| Liberals and conservatives need each other. | ||
| The liberals are entrepreneurial and creative. | ||
| The conservatives are diligent and implement things. | ||
| That's why the temperamental niches exist. | ||
| If you look up Big Five political preference online, you'll find papers right away. | ||
| Yeah, I've never heard you specifically call yourself anything politically. | ||
| I think you're basically a classical liberal and we had a funny moment in the Q&A when you were talking about the difference between leftists and liberals. | ||
| You're saying liberals have not been good about this and I'm trying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm trying to help this Well, increasingly, liberals are described as being right-wing by the radical left types. | ||
| But I'm kind of mixed, because I'm very, very high in openness, which is the best predictor of liberalism, but I'm also rather high in conscientiousness. | ||
| So I've kind of got a foot in each camp, in some sense. | ||
| To the degree that I'm a conservative, it's more because I'm a traditionalist, not so much because I'm by temperament. | ||
| I'm not a conservative thinker. | ||
| I'm a wild thinker, actually. | ||
| And that doesn't go with being a conservative. | ||
| It doesn't jive well with that. | ||
| Okay, Patron. | ||
| Dr. Peterson, my husband and I are expecting our first child. | ||
| Do you have any thoughts on early childhood care for working mothers? | ||
| Should the mother stay home longer than typical maternity leave allows, even if she is the higher earner in the household in the interest of healthy psychological development? | ||
| That's an interesting twist on this when it comes directly to earning. | ||
| Because I think I know what your answer would be. | ||
| Well, one question might be, whose psychological development? | ||
| You know, like, it's a lot harder on mothers to leave their infants and go back to work than they typically think. | ||
| Like, it's really rough. | ||
| And, you know, you wonder too to what degree, this is speculation, but as a protective mechanism, you know, you don't want to be divorcing yourself in some sense from that intense relationship with your child to soften the blow of having to go back to work. | ||
| Because, you know, you really have to fall in love with your infant. | ||
| And this really affects women. | ||
| It's a big change. | ||
| It's biochemically mediated to a large degree, for whatever that's worth. | ||
| But, you know, children, infants are a tremendous amount of responsibility and trouble. | ||
| Because they can't do anything. | ||
| And you have to be seriously in love with them to do right by them. | ||
| And then it'll wrench your soul to part too early. | ||
| And so it's a personal decision. | ||
| And it also depends on the degree to which your partner is maternal, let's say. | ||
| Because some women aren't very maternal. | ||
| It's a temperamental thing. | ||
| Some men are more maternal than others. | ||
| If your partner is capable of providing that maternal care. | ||
| Infants are perfectly capable of forming multiple attachments. | ||
| What they don't like is to have a primary attachment disrupted. | ||
| Because the person to whom the infant attaches primarily is the infant's entire world. | ||
| So when that person goes away, their entire world goes away. | ||
| So they can have multiple close attachments. | ||
| And so if the father can get in there and have a really tightly bonded attachment, he can take over the roles. | ||
| Although I would say in my personal experience, it's very rare, it's hard for men to do right by infants for the first year. | ||
| They just don't have the equipment. | ||
| They can do it! | ||
| But it's not easy. | ||
| It's not as built-in, basically, because we discussed this a little bit. | ||
| Well, they also don't have breasts, which actually turns out to be somewhat of a problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because breastfeeding actually matters, and there's a lot to breastfeeding. | ||
| You know, you think it's just a matter of nutrition. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's skin-to-skin contact. | ||
| It's eye-to-eye gaze. | ||
| It's embodied rhythm. | ||
| It's the beginnings of the establishment of the relationship. | ||
| And that isn't to say that you can't bottle feed with success, right? | ||
| But breastfeeding also tends to produce children who have higher IQs, so that's also worth knowing because that actually matters. | ||
| Yeah, one of the things that I asked you privately a couple weeks ago, because I was saying how you talk about these things often in the terms of sort of male-female, And you were very clear that your position on all of this isn't that it has to be a male and a female, but you were just talking about the traits of masculinity and femininity, and sometimes there are very effeminate men who happen to be straight and there are very masculine women who happen to be female. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| I just think it's worth mentioning in all this, because I think people accuse you sometimes of somehow you're being, you know, anti-gay or something in all this, and I think it's... Yeah, well, I mean, look, there are pronounced personality differences between men and women. | ||
| Women are higher in negative emotion, and they're higher in trade agreeableness, and it's not small. | ||
| But there's more difference within women and difference within men than there is between the groups. | ||
| It's true with almost every group comparison. | ||
| So there can be significant differences, There's still enough individual variation, so you can't do a good job of categorizing a person as a consequence, say, of their gender. | ||
| Basically, with the agreeableness, the difference is enough so that if you took random sets of men and women out of the population, and you said you bet on who was more agreeable, if you bet on the woman, you'd be right 60% of the time. | ||
| Like, that's a significant difference. | ||
| But you'd be wrong 40% of the time. | ||
| So this is the problem. | ||
| This is one of the things that the people who criticize James Damore, for example, they just don't get it. | ||
| And they also don't get it with their damn diversity arguments. | ||
| I hate those arguments. | ||
| Diversity of race and gender makes for diversity of opinion. | ||
| It's like, you can't have both of those beliefs at the same time. | ||
| That's actually prejudice! | ||
| No, it's actually wrong. | ||
| Because there's more difference within the groups than there is between them. | ||
| Otherwise... I don't even want to get started with that. | ||
| It's so wrong. | ||
| Technically wrong. | ||
| It's not a matter of political opinion. | ||
| It's wrong. | ||
| There's more difference within people, within groups of people, than there is between them. | ||
| Otherwise, we couldn't even communicate. | ||
| And I like the passion with which you're saying it, because this is why we know that social justice and the diversity memo and all of this nonsense is going to come into direct conflict with biology. | ||
| So that's why your lack of tolerance for it is because you get it! | ||
| Well, it's already come into conflict with biology. | ||
| I wouldn't say that these are precisely theories. | ||
| No one was thrilled about these discoveries. | ||
| They're hard-nosed, statistically derived, Agnostic knowledge statements. | ||
| It's like, no one knew that when the Scandinavians produced more equitable societies that the personality differences between men and women would get bigger. | ||
| No one thought that. | ||
| No one predicted it. | ||
| No one was happy about it. | ||
| It just happened. | ||
| There's nothing political about it. | ||
| In fact, quite the contrary, because most of the people who discovered this, if you would have asked them what their preferences were, because they'd be more liberal-leaning, they would have said, they would have predicted, eh, well, if you make societies more equitable, men and women are going to get more of the same, obviously, because it seems obvious, and yes, that would be a good thing. | ||
| It's like, well, obvious or not, it was wrong, and it's reliable, because the people who discovered it wouldn't have wanted it that way. | ||
| They weren't beating, they weren't conservatives saying, oh well, we have to sustain the difference between men and women. | ||
| It was like, oh my god, that happened? | ||
| We better replicate that because it seems unlikely. | ||
| Well, it took a long time even for people to figure out how that could possibly be the case. | ||
| The answer was, well, men and women differ for two reasons, environmental and genetic. | ||
| If you take all the differences out of the environment, all you're left with is the genetic differences. | ||
| They maximize. | ||
| It's like, oh, that makes sense. | ||
| We didn't predict it. | ||
| We wouldn't have guessed it. | ||
| But how else could it be? | ||
| Well, it could be that there were no genetic differences. | ||
| The fact that women have functioning breasts and men don't, that's actually a genetic difference. | ||
| There are genetic differences. | ||
| The hate speech never ends with you, huh? | ||
| Yeah, I know, I know. | ||
| It's one thing after another. | ||
| Superchat, this is a great question. | ||
| Dave, wish you and Jordan well. | ||
| What are your biggest criticisms currently and how do each of you respond? | ||
| So I'll let you go first. | ||
| Criticisms directed at me? | ||
| Yeah, directed at you. | ||
| I talk too much? | ||
| That's one. | ||
| Especially if I'm interviewing people or having a discussion with them. | ||
| I can get irritable and angry and that's not... | ||
| Optimal and I've had lots of discussions with people like I'm better when I'm calm and and collected and friendly You know, but I use anger to some it's fairly well integrated in me And I use it as a way of overcoming fear say which is one thing anger does by the way because it suppresses fear circuitry So but I haven't got the belt that balance exactly, right? | ||
| I forget things that's another thing What else what else I take on more things than I can probably attend to properly, and that's openness. | ||
| It's like I'm interested in everything. | ||
| So it's easy for me. | ||
| If I'm healthy, I can do a lot. | ||
| I can stay on top of a lot. | ||
| But I don't leave much of a margin for error. | ||
| And so if my health declines a bit, I'm really in trouble because I've got all these balls in the air. | ||
| And so I probably work more than I should, and that's hard on my wife. | ||
| And that's really been exaggerated in the last year. | ||
| That's not too bad. | ||
| I'm susceptible now and then, and have been through my whole life. | ||
| I really like alcohol. | ||
| I really have to be careful about that, and I am. | ||
| I know for a fact you are. | ||
| But it's a temptation. | ||
| Um... | ||
| That'll do for now. | ||
| That'll do for now. | ||
| I would say for me, I think the biggest, the question was about the biggest criticism. | ||
| I think the biggest criticism I get, and it's from a very small minority but I do get it, is that people sometimes want me to browbeat my guests more. | ||
| They want me to be a little more combative or fight with people more. | ||
| It's not my nature as a human being. | ||
| It's also just not my approach to interviewing. | ||
| It was a criticism, you know, my friend and mentor Larry King, he used to get that criticism too. | ||
| I always find that sitting across from someone, listening to them, asking the right follow-up questions, really understanding their line of thinking, And knowing what the next good question is, I think is a much more effective way than browbeating them. | ||
| But in terms of criticism, it is something that I hear. | ||
| And as I often say in live streams, it's like, maybe I'll look back five years, you know, if I'm doing this in 10 years, maybe I'll look back and go, man, there were moments I could have done this. | ||
| And I'm not perfect and I want to change. | ||
| And I hope I'm better in five years than I am now. | ||
| Well, you can get in trouble, like Faith Goldie, who worked for Rebel Media, got in trouble. | ||
| She's pretty agreeable. | ||
| She's tough, but she's agreeable. | ||
| And then she went and talked to these, like, white supremacist types and she justified that on the | ||
| grounds that she was a journalist. This was down in Charlottesville. She was the one who caught the | ||
| footage of the vehicle, right? So, you know, she had every reason to assume that it was okay | ||
| for a journalist to be there. | ||
| But she went on this far-right show and she was too agreeable. | ||
| You know, she was kind of joking and laughing and conducting the interview in the manner | ||
| that you just described. | ||
| And, you know, she really got cut off at the knees for that. | ||
| Because the idea was, well, in that situation, she had an ethical responsibility to be a hard-ass and to ask penetrating questions. | ||
| You know, I think it was temperament, in large part, that got her in trouble. | ||
| Yeah, and I think there's some legitimacy to all that. | ||
| If you were a white supremacist, of course, I would be questioning you differently and trying to figure out your motives differently than someone that comes from your background. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's harder than people think, though, because, you know, when you meet the devil himself, he's a lot more like you than you think. | ||
| And if you're a polite person, and you're a polite person, and you have decent manners, it's not an easy thing to go and gnaw on someone's leg, even if you know that... | ||
| Most of them is quite a lot like you. | ||
| And so, it's not easy to come out and attack someone, especially if you're a compassionate, relatively compassionate person. | ||
| So, I mean, sometimes that's obviously necessary, especially if you're a journalist. | ||
| I think people find it very easy on Twitter. | ||
| That seems to be the place. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Relentlessly. | ||
| Just like honking your horn behind the safety of your windshield. | ||
| It's like that's easy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| We'll jump back to Patreon. | ||
| Dr. Peterson at 33 years old and living in expensive Southern California with now three young children. | ||
| What is your advice on how to balance having a parent at home with our children versus pursuing dual incomes. | ||
| There's a little bit more to that, and we sort of hit on this with the other one. | ||
| But it's another interesting one, how all of these things about personal responsibility and children, they're so related to economics. | ||
| Well, the one thing you want to think about with children, especially young children, this is really important, you've got to get this right. | ||
| When you have a baby, say, you can't believe it. | ||
| And you can't believe that you're going to be able to figure out what to do with this thing. | ||
| It's the most complicated thing you've ever had, and no one has helped you figure out how to do it. | ||
| So you're stuck. | ||
| And then, like, three months later, it's like, you can't really imagine what life would be like without that baby. | ||
| And then it's sort of like, this goes on forever. | ||
| That's how it feels, but it doesn't. | ||
| You have little kids for four years. | ||
| And if you miss it, it's done. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So, you gotta know that. | ||
| It's, you know, lots of things in life you don't get to do more than once. | ||
| Now, obviously you can have more than one child, but all I'm saying is that period between 0 and 4, 0 and 5, there's something about it that's really... It's like a peak experience in life. | ||
| And it isn't much of your life. | ||
| You know, because you think of it as a long time. | ||
| It's not that long, man. | ||
| Four years goes by so fast you can't believe it. | ||
| And if you miss it, it's gone. | ||
| So, you miss it at your peril, and you don't get it back. | ||
| And that's not... I know with your career, you miss opportunities, you fall behind. | ||
| This happens to women a lot. | ||
| It's part of the reason for the pay gap. | ||
| And it's really hard on women. | ||
| You know, although no one knows what to do about it. | ||
| So... And I would also say, well, you talk to each other. | ||
| Try to minimize your financial requirements, to the degree that you can. | ||
| See if there's other ways that you can generate income. | ||
| But... | ||
| And do your... come to a consensual solution, and try not to torture yourself with guilt, with whatever you come up with. | ||
| But do remember, because you know, you've got financial responsibilities, and often you need two incomes, and there's no easy way of dealing with it, and for women, it often seems that no matter what they do, it's wrong. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They stay home with the kids, it's wrong. | ||
| If they go to work, it's wrong. | ||
| If they do both, it's wrong. | ||
| And I'm not being smart about that. | ||
| That's rough, man. | ||
| But having said all that, I would say again, you got little kids for four years. | ||
| Don't miss it. | ||
| You will regret it. | ||
| So. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| All right, we'll try to knock a couple quick ones out and then we'll get into some of the longer ones. | ||
| Superchat, have you ever thought about teaching creative writing? | ||
| That's an interesting one. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't have the expertise to do that. | ||
| Super chat also, King George the Dragonslayer, a fitting street for the father we all one day claim, aim to be. | ||
| Thank you, Dr. Peterson. | ||
| Alright, so that wasn't even a question, but that's nice to hear. | ||
| Another one, Jordan, thank you for sharing your wisdom. | ||
| Your lectures did change my life. | ||
| Yay, hopefully for the better. | ||
| Now we're in the accolades portion here apparently. | ||
| Hi Jordan Peterson, I believe there's a growing number of ANCAPs, free market anarchists, that are trying to influence society. | ||
| I would like to know your opinions on them and how we should keep them from thrusting us into chaos. | ||
| So they editorialize a little there at the end. | ||
| These people that basically want to get rid of government altogether. | ||
| Well, you can't get rid of government, because government is just an expression of the necessity for groups of people to reach a consensus about how they're going to behave. | ||
| There's no getting rid of that. | ||
| A family has a government. | ||
| If it doesn't, it has unspoken rules. | ||
| And there's a ritual, so if there's no government, it's ritual. | ||
| But families are actually better when some of the governing principles are articulated. | ||
| So, you know, any... | ||
| To get to the proper place usually means to balance a number of competing forces. | ||
| It isn't like, well, no government and everything will be okay. | ||
| It's like, no, sorry, it isn't that simple. | ||
| And nothing is that simple. | ||
| That's why I'm not a fan of ideologues. | ||
| It's like ideologues have the same answer to every question. | ||
| It's like, well, that's the same as not thinking. | ||
| Generally, it turns out that things are very, very complicated, and you have to take them apart in detail, and then you have to solve a small part of the problem. | ||
| And that's hard. | ||
| It's like, everything is like fixing a military helicopter. | ||
| There's a lot of parts. | ||
| And you don't understand most of them, and you'll make it worse if you don't know what you're doing. | ||
| And so, those movements, like anarchists, or progressives, or... It's like, no! | ||
| It's too complicated. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because I've had a couple ANCAPs on here. | ||
| Intellectually, I love the exercise of how much could we chop away from the government, but for me at least, as someone that believes we have to have some level of government, the chaos that we would go through and the pain and probably bloodshed and God knows what else, Just wouldn't be worth even getting there. | ||
| But I like the idea. | ||
| Well, it's necessary to figure out how to limit the growth of anything that has the proclivity to grow. | ||
| And I'm not a fan of bigness. | ||
| You know, there is this idea, especially around 2008, of too big to fail. | ||
| I think of all the bloody phrases that have ever been coined, that has to be one that's nearest to the stupidest. | ||
| Because the actual, in my opinion, the proper Viewpoint on that is that it's so big it has to fail and so this is one of the things that I think could actually unite Conservatives and liberals or conservatives and leftists even it's like leftists don't like big companies | ||
| And conservatives don't like big government. | ||
| It's like, okay, there's something in common there. | ||
| Big. | ||
| Well, big's a problem. | ||
| I really think this is part of the reason for Brexit. | ||
| It's like the European economic community was too big. | ||
| And that means the separation between the citizen and the ruler, there's so many levels in between it that there's no communication. | ||
| And that's what happens to... that's the Tower of Babel, right? | ||
| If it gets so big, it doesn't work anymore. | ||
| And so too much government's like, no, no, too big a monopoly. | ||
| Ah, well, you see this starting to happen with Google and Facebook, and they're playing games, YouTube too, they're playing games. | ||
| Well, it's funny because I then see a lot of conservatives saying, well, we need to break them up. | ||
| And my thought is, well, wait a minute, do I want the government now to tell these companies what to do? | ||
| Well, sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, so I struggle with that one. | ||
| You should struggle with it, exactly. | ||
| Well, you know, you got demonetized. | ||
| It's very interesting how close that word is to demonized, eh? | ||
| I really get a kick out of that. | ||
| Well, you can't say demonetized without demons, so there you go. | ||
| You know, it's funny though, the too big to fail thing, what was their answer? | ||
| They made them all bigger. | ||
| I know! | ||
| That's what they did. | ||
| They're too big to fail, so what are we going to do? | ||
| We'll make them bigger. | ||
| I mean, it just doesn't even stand to reason. | ||
| Okay, a couple more Super Chat quick. | ||
| Jordan, I'm a master's student in mathematics. | ||
| How do I know whether or not to enter academia? | ||
| How do I know I will be smart or creative enough? | ||
| That's an interesting second part of that. | ||
| Well, do you like to teach? | ||
| Because that would be good. | ||
| Do you like to do research and write? | ||
| Writing is really important. | ||
| If you don't like to write, well, or the equivalent in mathematics, I mean, it's publishing papers. | ||
| If you don't like to sit down and do that, if you're not compelled by ideas ridiculously, and if you don't like to teach, get the hell out! | ||
| Because that's what it is, and it's getting harder in academia, not easier, and the positions are getting worse, not better, by a lot. | ||
| Yeah, that's why it was so refreshing to be at Clemson, where we met some, not only did we meet great students, but there were some academics there and some professors that really, they got it, and they wanted to fight for the right thing. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| So I would say if you're in love with ideas, And you're inspired by teaching. | ||
| It's like, there, you know, you're the guy or you're the girl. | ||
| But otherwise, don't do it. | ||
| This is a sidebar from that one from Patreon. | ||
| Dr. Peterson, I'm a relatively new assistant professor in physics. | ||
| I'm concerned not only for myself, but for my students about the current situation on college campuses. | ||
| What kind of physics or astronomy class provide, by the way of curriculum or approach, Well, I think that with those disciplines you can give people a sense of the grandeur of being. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's the mathematical element of it and the pure scientific element, but the great scientists are overcome by awe constantly, right? | ||
| I mean, that's what's driving them forward. | ||
| And certainly it was with something like astronomy. | ||
| I mean, that's just, it's right there at your grasp. | ||
| And I think that's the romantic side of science, and that's science as a calling, and science as an aesthetic experience, and there's absolutely no reason not to capitalize on that. | ||
| You know, what you want to do, really, is you want to share your love of the discipline. | ||
| You want to model your love of the discipline. | ||
| So, as well as teaching the facts and the rituals of the discipline, you're modeling And that's a big deal. | ||
| That's the apprenticeship part. | ||
| and ideas, and that's what a teacher should do. | ||
| That's what a university teacher should do. | ||
| You're there as an embodiment of the practice of the discipline. | ||
| And so you wanna show that as part of a rich life, and you wanna make people excited about doing it. | ||
| So you have to be excited about doing it. | ||
| And that's a big deal. | ||
| That's the apprenticeship part. | ||
| It's a big deal. | ||
| This is particularly interesting, I think, because when we did this event at Clemson, | ||
| it was through the Ayn Rand Institute, and they said to us, they've said to me, | ||
| because I've done a bunch of them. | ||
| We don't, you know, do whatever you want. | ||
| They just like what I'm doing, they like the free speech thing, they invited you on, they didn't tell you to do it, unless they secretly did. | ||
| All right, so the question is, Dr. Peterson, I'm very curious as to your opinion on objectivism and the philosophies of Ayn Rand. | ||
| It's the one thing I've never heard pop up in your lectures, And it's great to have you back here with Dave. | ||
| So you mentioned Ayn Rand briefly, but you were talking about sort of the fiction writing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you have any thoughts on objectivism generally, or the sort of greater philosophical part of it? | ||
| Well, I like the emphasis on individual responsibility. | ||
| You know, I think that's very important. | ||
| And I like also, although this is still more the fiction element, you know, I think she was actually more powerful as a fiction writer than as a philosopher. | ||
| And that's not a denigrating comment, because I don't believe that philosophy is a higher calling than fiction. | ||
| They have their own domains. | ||
| I don't regard Ayn Rand as a great mind. | ||
| I don't think that her take on things was sufficiently differentiated and sophisticated. | ||
| Like I said, she had reasons to be anti-communist, man. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| There are plenty of reasons to be anti-communist. | ||
| And I can resonate with her critiques of that collectivism. | ||
| And I like the romanticism in the books. | ||
| I enjoyed reading Atlas Shrugged. | ||
| I read it again recently. | ||
| I enjoyed it again. | ||
| But I also don't think it's great literature. | ||
| And the reason for that is that She doesn't place the struggle between good and evil inside her characters. | ||
| It's always between characters, and that's a mistake. | ||
| Because, like, even your most radical left-wing revolutionary is mostly not a radical left-wing revolutionary. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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You mean he's mostly home watching Seinfeld and doing the same... Yeah, exactly, exactly. | |
| So you have to show the struggle within more, and I don't think she does a very good job of that. | ||
| Her noble people are too noble, and her ignoble people are too ignoble, and it divides the world too much into the bad guys and the good guys, and it's like... that's comforting! | ||
| There's an archetypal element to it too, but it's not sufficiently differentiated enough or sophisticated enough. | ||
| It's interesting because I know that if any of the ARI people are watching this, they'd be happy to continue that conversation with you publicly. | ||
| That's what it's all about, so that's nice. | ||
| Superchat Dr. Peterson, please can you come to my school in England? | ||
| We are falling down the rabbit hole and I need your wisdom to be spread throughout the UK. | ||
| Please consider a UK tour. | ||
| They didn't tell us what school, but will you consider a UK tour? | ||
| Well, I hope to be going many places in the next year, especially after this book comes out, which is in end of January. | ||
| So I'm sure that my publicists and all those people are going to be shipping me everywhere. | ||
| And so I would really like to know the UK better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we're thinking about possibly doing a little speaking thing together. | ||
| So we'll see if we can get across the pond. | ||
| I'd love to go to the UK. | ||
| I'm sure it'll happen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, I love this question. | ||
| Dr. Peterson, this is Patreon. | ||
| Have you thought of the idiocracy scenario? | ||
| For example, smart people get few children, dumb people get many, average intelligence fails over the generations. | ||
| Did you ever see that movie, Idiocracy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's basically the question. | ||
| Like, are we destined for it in a sad, tragic way? | ||
| No, I don't think so at all. | ||
| I mean, besides, all bets are off for the future, fundamentally. | ||
| I mean, things are going to change so much in the next 30 years, either for They could go terribly wrong. | ||
| I mean, North Korea could explode at any moment, right? | ||
| I mean, we've got problems that could be very, very serious. | ||
| But we're also going to undergo a wave of technological revolution that's going to make what's already happened look like nothing. | ||
| And so, I don't even know what people will be like in a hundred years. | ||
| I really, I can't, I have no idea what human beings will be like in a hundred years. | ||
| We'll be augmented in all sorts of ways, assuming that, you know, we're not all living in the rubble. | ||
| So no, I wouldn't. | ||
| I don't worry about the future, because I don't know what to worry about. | ||
| Really, it's like, I figured this out about 20 years ago. | ||
| It's like, I have no idea what's going to happen next. | ||
| It is absolutely unpredictable. | ||
| That's also why I ask people to sort of concentrate, to suggest to people that they concentrate on that domain of phenomena that they can actually directly affect. | ||
| Because Really, all bets are off, man. | ||
| But the probability that we're going to breed ourselves into stupidity, I think, is pretty low. | ||
| I think we might end up in a dystopia where we're served badly by really annoying robots. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that. | ||
| That one's a definite, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| The robots will all be like those, you know, when you phone someone now? | ||
| Yeah, that's what the robots will be like. | ||
| They'll almost be helpful. | ||
| Man, I was feeling hopeful, now you gave me the most dystopian thing possible! | ||
| Superchat, what can be done from a strategic sense to combat the postmodern movement? | ||
| For example, something like hashtag Gamergate, which was reasonably effective. | ||
| I have an answer, but I'm gonna let you go first, obviously. | ||
| Okay, well, I think that combating it fundamentally is probably a mistake. | ||
| Now, it's not like I've sorted this out completely, because I dabble a bit in the political realm. | ||
| Like, I'm fighting a war right now in Canada with the Ontario Law Society, which has made it mandatory for its members, on pain of losing their license, essentially, to come out with a statement of principles, a voluntary statement of principles. | ||
| That's in accordance with progressive doctrine. | ||
| It's like, no! | ||
| How about no? | ||
| Where are you guys at with that? | ||
| Because last I spoke to you- We're at a lose, I think. | ||
| Really, because last I spoke to you, just a couple weeks ago, you were sort of hopeful. | ||
| Well, I'm not not hopeful. | ||
| It's just that this thing is many-tentacled and we're concentrating on one, but there's been lots of press coverage of it, lots of criticism of the Law Society, lots of lawyers rebelling. | ||
| I've got another video where I talk to a couple of Ontario lawyers that's up on YouTube. | ||
| I haven't released it yet. | ||
| We're fighting with it, but But I don't think the political realm is the right realm. | ||
| I think the battle we're fighting is actually philosophical and even theological. | ||
| I really believe that. | ||
| And I think the right thing for people to do, I truly believe this, is to get their damn acts together. | ||
| I don't think we're gonna get out of this by Fighting between left and right about who's right or even by delimiting the left I think we're gonna have to go around them even and maybe that'll happen That's partly why I'm interested in starting this online university, which now that I have some more energy and I'm feeling better I've got a whole bunch of ideas about again. | ||
| I think You go look there's this line in the New Testament says resist not evil, right? | ||
| It's like okay. | ||
| What the hell does that mean? | ||
| That's a complicated one but I think what it means is that You amplify your enemy by fighting against them, because you admit that they're worth fighting against. | ||
| Yeah, you give them legitimacy. | ||
| Yes, you do, you do, you do. | ||
| And then it also distracts you from doing other things that you could be doing that would be better. | ||
| And like, I look at the university and I think, well, can it be fixed? | ||
| It's doing a lot of things wrong. | ||
| Well, maybe it shouldn't be fixed. | ||
| Maybe something else that is better should be put in its place. | ||
| Now, that's not a simple thing, and maybe it's not even possible, but I think your efforts are better spent Fixing what you have already at hand. | ||
| I really believe that I think that's the right pathway Yeah, I love that answer because when I was when I was in the progressive world Which I was part of for a long time one of the things that exhausted me and really led to my awakening Was that it was always about complaining about someone else not what are we doing? | ||
| Not what how do we make ourselves better? | ||
| How do we figure out what's right? | ||
| It was always, ah, Fox News is doing this, ah, the Republicans are doing... And it was like, well, all right, I get that. | ||
| You can do that a little bit, but you can't... That in and of itself... No, it also drives you crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's joyless. | ||
| I mean, I found myself falling into that repeatedly. | ||
| Yeah, well, they always lay trapdoors for us. | ||
| Well, and I don't like it. | ||
| It's the wrong entanglement, you know? | ||
| And it can make you bitter, that's another thing. | ||
| And fearful, that's bad. | ||
| And mistrustful, that's not good. | ||
| So I think it's better, it's like, repair what you can now. | ||
| And, and, and, you know... | ||
| I had to get political, let's say, a year ago, because I felt that | ||
| the government was doing something that interfered with something that I regarded as sacred, let's say | ||
| like, which is the right for me to formulate my own damn language | ||
| without threat of penalty but I'm not happy about that, about that necessity, nor | ||
| about being involved in this law thing so there's times when the political structure is so damn | ||
| unstable and things are twisting around that it intervenes in a way that you can't ignore, and then | ||
| I don't think you can ignore it but that doesn't take away from my fundamental belief that | ||
| enough pointing your finger at what other people are doing wrong in the world | ||
| it's like, fix something instead It goes to that alternate title I offered you, Get Your Shit Together. | ||
| Twelve ways to get your shit together. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Patreon. | ||
| Dr. Peterson, I'm father of a 15-year-old girl who's wanting to study psychology at university. | ||
| How can I advise her to gain resistance to postmodernism while still pursuing her interests in psychology? | ||
|
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Oh, that's easy. | |
| That's easy. | ||
| Ask her to make sure that she masters statistics. | ||
| It's really important. | ||
| And she might not be temperamentally inclined to do that, because lots of psychology students aren't. | ||
| Get a tutor if necessary. | ||
| Get your damn statistics. | ||
| And then concentrate on the elements of psychology that have at least one foot in biology. | ||
| Stay on the biological end. | ||
| Clinical is pretty good too, or at least it was. | ||
| I don't know to what degree it's got warp, but if the discipline has one foot in the sciences, then it's much safer, and it's more rigorous, and then you can move out from there into the other sub-disciplines, like social psychology, which is quite corrupt. | ||
| But if you're grounded in the biology and the statistics, then you've got the mental tools and the constraints | ||
| necessary to keep yourself oriented properly. | ||
| Yeah, this is interesting, because this is where I see, | ||
| I really love the Joe Rogan with you and Brett Weinstein, and he's grounded in science, | ||
| so you're not going to beat him with cries of social justice, | ||
| because he's grounded actually in science. | ||
| Hello, Dr. Peterson, are there any good ways to increase your levels of conscientiousness? | ||
| Keep up the great work. | ||
| Well, I think you've been sort of hitting all of this. | ||
| Well, I would say one thing is do the self-authoring program, the future authoring. | ||
| That'll help. | ||
| We have documented now. | ||
| I don't know if it specifically makes you more conscientious, but at least it makes you act out the routines that a conscientious person would act out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, by the way, we're going to put a link to it right down below, and if they enter code RUBIN, all caps, right? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| There's a discount. | ||
| They get a 20% discount on the two for one self-authoring special, which gives them the autobiography. | ||
| That's past authoring. | ||
| The analysis of their faults and virtues and the future authoring, which is a future plan. | ||
| That helps. | ||
| Okay, so we're going to put it in the description below. | ||
| So it's selfauthoring.com, Rubin in all caps. | ||
| So that's one thing. | ||
| Do the future authoring program, because that'll help. | ||
| It orients you and it makes you more efficient. | ||
| Because you can't hit something unless you're aiming at it. | ||
| Then the other thing I would say is learn to use a schedule, a calendar like Google | ||
| Calendar, and use it as if it's your friend, not your tyrant. | ||
| So the way you use a schedule is you design days that you would like to have. | ||
| And so some of that has to be responsibilities. | ||
| And those are things you have to do or your life gets worse. | ||
| So you have to schedule those in. | ||
| But you also schedule in, you try to design days that you would like to have if you were | ||
| taking care of yourself. | ||
| And if you don't use a schedule, it'll take you like 18 months to two years to get expert | ||
| at it. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| But that will help you immensely because you're basically consciously figuring out how to | ||
| use your time. | ||
| So if you use the future authoring program to figure out what it is that you want and | ||
| why and then you figure out how to utilize your time properly and then practice it. | ||
| You know if you're scatterbrained and you procrastinate It's gonna take you a long time to get disciplined, but you can do it. | ||
| And if you fail, then do it again. | ||
| And if you fail, then do it again. | ||
| And, you know, don't torture yourself to death if you fall off the wagon, say. | ||
| It's just back on the schedule. | ||
| Back on the schedule. | ||
| You know it's interesting because fortunately I have my guys that, my team, not all guys, my team that helps me deal with my schedule. | ||
| So I sort of give the general idea of I can do a lot this day but then I might need a little more time this day, a downtime or that sort of thing. | ||
| But yeah, just getting a schedule in order so you're not in this endless chaos. | ||
| Oh yeah, it's huge. | ||
| But you've got to think about the schedule. | ||
| The schedule is not a tyrant. | ||
| It's your friend. | ||
| It's like, I want to have the life that would be best for me, whatever that is. | ||
| It's not impulsiveness. | ||
| It's that would do me the best as a being. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| I have to figure out how to do that day by day. | ||
| Schedule. | ||
| And those computerized schedules, those things are great. | ||
| They're really simple to use. | ||
| Be expert at it. | ||
| All right, Super Chat. | ||
| What advice would you give a young graduate student pursuing a PhD in the humanities, should I give up on that field? | ||
| That's a great question, because we keep going science. | ||
| Read the greats. | ||
| Like, read the classical canon. | ||
| Read great literature. | ||
| Educate yourself. | ||
| You know, and become an expert in postmodern thought. | ||
| Great! | ||
| You know, like, you need to give the devil his due, let's say. | ||
| But, I mean, An hour online will tell you what you should read. | ||
| You know, I have a reading list on my website at jordanbpeterson.com. | ||
| You know, that's a good place to start. | ||
| It's by no means comprehensive, but they're books that have really had an impact on me. | ||
| Read. | ||
| The other thing is, write. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Every single day. | ||
| Like, you gotta get religious about that. | ||
| An hour. | ||
| An hour and a half. | ||
| Whatever you can steal from the rest of your life. | ||
| Write down what you think. | ||
| Pick a problem and try to start sketching it out. | ||
| And remember that, you know, as a scholar, a PhD student, you're basically educating yourself. | ||
| And you have this time to read and write. | ||
| And so... And the humanities... There's nothing wrong with knowing about postmodernism. | ||
| But it's really bad if you believe it, you know. | ||
| And if that's all you know, that's not good at all. | ||
| You're not educated at all. | ||
| You're just an ideological puppet. | ||
| My fear of bringing a child into this world is chaos and an authoritarian society. | ||
| I've had that feeling since I was a child. | ||
| I am so ready to fight. | ||
| into this world is chaos and an authoritarian society. | ||
| I've had that feeling since I was a child. | ||
| I am so ready to fight. | ||
| Am I right for this fear? | ||
| Oh yeah, you should be afraid of bringing a child into the world. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| I mean, one of the images I use in the book is Mary, the Piera, Michelangelo. | ||
| It's illustrated by Ethan Van Scriver, who's a famous comic book artist. | ||
| And it's a great sculpture. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| So it's Mary, and she's holding the body of her adult son, who's being tortured to death, and is dead in her arms. | ||
| You know, it's rough, man. | ||
| It's rough. | ||
| And what does this sculpture mean? | ||
| It means that married mothers voluntarily offer up their children to be broken by the world. | ||
| That's what you do if you're a mother. | ||
| It's an awesome responsibility if you do it consciously. | ||
| Should you do it? | ||
| The answer is, it depends on how you do it, and why you do it, and how you orient your children. | ||
| You know, you want to Be a mother in a way that justifies having children. | ||
| And then you want to raise your children to act in a manner that justifies being human. | ||
| You should be terrified of bringing children into the world. | ||
| Well, you don't have any sense if you're not. | ||
| I mean, there's... Bad things will happen to them. | ||
| Things that will break your heart. | ||
| So it's like unbelievably... And you don't want to be naive. | ||
| Oh, it's all wonderful. | ||
| It's like... No, it's not. | ||
| That's not the point. | ||
| You do it consciously. | ||
| You do it courageously. | ||
| Just like you trust people when you're no longer naive. | ||
| This is a really important thing to know. | ||
| Why trust people when you can be hurt? | ||
| It's like you trust them as a manifestation of your courage in their potential. | ||
| So you offer your hand and say, look, I'm willing to trust you. | ||
| I can call the best out of you with trust. | ||
| And I know I can be knifed as a consequence. | ||
| But you don't get the best without the trust. | ||
| And society crumbles, and everything goes to hell. | ||
| So it's an act of courage, and that's the same with having a baby. | ||
| It's an act of courage. | ||
| This is good, because I don't think I've ever heard you talk about this from Superchat. | ||
| What are your thoughts on the death penalty? | ||
| Am I wrong to think that Canada should have it? | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Well, the first thing is, there's crimes that the proper penalty is obviously death. | ||
| Obviously, and I've read a lot about serial killers, for example. | ||
| I've read a lot of brutal material, you know. | ||
| I was very interested in criminology and antisocial behavior, as well as political pathology. | ||
| It's like, there are guys like, I think it was John Wayne Gacy, who, yeah, you don't want to know about him. | ||
| I think he begged the judge for the death penalty. | ||
| He knew himself, it's like, there was no coming back from where he went. | ||
| So, but that's not the issue for me. | ||
| The issue is, do you give the state that much power? | ||
| And I would say, practically, no. | ||
| I think, this is a very callous way of looking at it, I think in the United States it costs 20 million dollars to put someone to death. | ||
| It's like, why? | ||
| Well, because the state shouldn't just be able to do that easily. | ||
| And they make mistakes, like a lot of mistakes. | ||
| So, you gotta get your theory about this right. | ||
| Are there crimes that warrant death? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Like, violent rape might be one of those, you know, and there's certainly crimes that go beyond that. | ||
| I mean, if you have a daughter, mother, someone you love, who's raped violently, and you're not homicidally enraged by that, there's something wrong with you. | ||
| It's up to the state to take that burden off of you with a sufficient penalty. | ||
| And maybe that penalty should be death, but then there's the state. | ||
| It's like, who's the monster here, the criminal or the state? | ||
| It's like, well, the criminal for sure, but also the state. | ||
| And so maybe you just never want the state to have that much power. | ||
| And I think that's a reasonable argument. | ||
| I'm not comfortable with that. | ||
| That's where I'm at with it. | ||
| I just don't want to give the state that power. | ||
| So I'm against the death penalty. | ||
| But I understand. | ||
| I mean, I've had Dennis Prager in here. | ||
| who is pro-death penalty, and give the full argument on why that some things are so horrific. | ||
| Oh, they are, clearly. | ||
| No, there's just absolutely no doubt about that. | ||
| I mean, you just have to casually read the proper criminal. | ||
| I outline a person in my book. | ||
| His name was... Oh, hell, now I'm not going to be able to remember. | ||
| Anyways, he was brutalized when he was a kid. | ||
| He was a delinquent. | ||
| Pansram, Carl Pansram. | ||
| Fascinating autobiography. | ||
| and he was brutalized when he was a delinquent raped and tortured and all of that in that reform home and he came out of there like he was a very powerful guy very big guy and he came out of there seriously unhappy and he spent his whole life Producing nothing but mayhem. | ||
| And his dying words were... He was being hung. | ||
| He said, hurry up you who's-your-bastard, I could kill ten men in the time it takes you to hang me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, and he said, I wish the human race had one collective neck so that I could put my hands around it and choke. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Those were his dying words. | ||
| It's like he was a seriously bad guy, you know, and like there was nothing to do with him. | ||
| Not only did he deserve the death penalty, he did everything he possibly could to deserve it, consciously and malevolently. | ||
| I talk about him in the chapter about getting your house in order before you criticize the world. | ||
| That's not the issue. | ||
| It's not the case that there are things that are so vile that you shouldn't be around anymore. | ||
| There are things that are so vile that you know you shouldn't be around anymore. | ||
| Not the issue in my estimation. | ||
| All right, you know what we're gonna do? | ||
| We're gonna do five minutes more. | ||
| We'll have taken us to an even three hours. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And then we're gonna do one other thing, a Patreon exclusive thing. | ||
| All right, here we go. | ||
| Dr. Peterson, how does your definition of truth, as you outlined on the Waking Up podcast, enrich your arguments for free speech? | ||
| Wow, that's... That might take us home. | ||
| That's a complicated question. | ||
| I've got it. | ||
| Partly what you're trying to do in life is to provide yourself with the best possible set of tools. | ||
| Those are perceptual tools and practical tools to move forward through life and live properly. | ||
| The free speech... There isn't a difference between free speech and thinking. | ||
| And there isn't a difference between thinking and making tools. | ||
| That's what it's about, thinking. | ||
| It's not about describing the objective world. | ||
| This is the conversation that I was having with Harris. | ||
| Yeah, it's about describing the objective world, but only insofar as that's useful for us to live. | ||
| So it's nested inside this tool development. | ||
| And so, to the degree that free speech is required to think, and thinking is required to make tools, or to remove obstacles, which is approximately the same thing, then the two are integrally related. | ||
| And free speech isn't the freedom to speak. | ||
| It's the freedom to think! | ||
| And you might say, well, why should people be able to think? | ||
| And the answer to that is because they let stupid thoughts die instead of them. | ||
| That's Karl Popper. | ||
| It's very, very smart. | ||
| It's technically correct. | ||
| So, you're condemning people to suffering and even death if you don't let them speak. | ||
| Thought's a collective process. | ||
| This isn't this conversation. | ||
| This is thinking what we've been doing. | ||
| It's not like you had all these thoughts, and I had all these thoughts, and we're just bringing them forward. | ||
| We're creating the thoughts on the fly, and refining them, and communicating them. | ||
| It's like, you interfere with that. | ||
| You interfere with the logos. | ||
| You stop chaos from being turned into order. | ||
| It's like, That's bad! | ||
| It's a bad thing! | ||
| I feel that that's the appropriate question to end this on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I do have to tell you, you know, for the hundreds of interviews that I've done, I have to say that, and perhaps this one being at the top of all of the ones that we've done together, I find that I get so much out of what you talk about. | ||
| And I think that, so I truly understand why people are Why you are resonating with people the way that you are. | ||
| Because the clarity that you talk about, the vulnerability that you don't know everything, all of those things, I mean, the reason I do this is I want to be better as a person. | ||
| And it's really, to sit here for three hours, it was like that. | ||
| And I suspect we shall do it again. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Well, I would also like to say, too, like, I don't... I read this essay by Carl Jung called Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious. | ||
| That's a very important essay, but you can't understand it unless you kind of know what it's about. | ||
| And Jung warns about inflation, ego inflation, narcissism. | ||
| You know, and so people are writing me saying, well, you've changed my life and, you know, and I'm popular and having this positive effect. | ||
| It's like, well, I'm so great. | ||
| It's like, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm fortunate because I've been able to articulate these ancient ideas. | ||
| And the ancient ideas aren't me. | ||
| They're not me. | ||
| They're seriously not. | ||
| Like I said, I'm fortunate that I can articulate them. | ||
| And that helps transfer the power of them to other people. | ||
| People already know them in some sense. | ||
| They resonate with them. | ||
|
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But... | |
| But it's very important to maintain a distinction between being the messenger and the message. | ||
| And I'm not the message, although to some degree I'm fortunate enough to be the messenger. | ||
| And this essay of Jung's was a life-changer for me, because it's brilliant. | ||
| It's absolutely brilliant. | ||
| He says very clearly... | ||
| Discipline yourself. | ||
| Be careful with your life. | ||
| And do not confuse archetypal ideas with yourself. | ||
| It's like, right, yes, don't do that. | ||
| It's a bad idea. | ||
| Hitler did that. | ||
| Stalin did that. | ||
| Mao did that. | ||
| You do not do that. | ||
|
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So... | |
| On that note, it's been a pleasure. | ||
| Thank you guys for watching. | ||
| We're going to do one extra thing. | ||
| If you are a Patreon member, if you're not, you can jump over to patreon.com slash ReubenReport and later there will be gin. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Sounds good. | ||
| And later there shall be gin. | ||
| All right. |
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