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Nov. 14, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
50:27
Jordan Peterson & Dave Rubin LIVE IN NORWAY | Jordan Peterson | POLITICS | Rubin Report
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jordan b peterson
44:04
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dave rubin
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Speaker Time Text
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Jordan Peterson.
unidentified
[APPLAUSE]
[APPLAUSE]
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Norwegians, eh?
No one further extroverted enthusiasm.
unidentified
[LAUGHTER]
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
That's pretty sweet coming out to that, huh?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's for sure.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
All right, so here's what we're going to do.
I want to go through some of the big questions that I've come up with during the last five or six months on the road with you, which have just been an incredible, truly life-changing time for me.
And then we're going to end with Oslo's best question.
You got 45 minutes in you?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
We'll see.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
All right.
So first off, every single night you are different.
And I think tonight, perhaps more different than any night so far.
The hell do you do it?
I honestly don't know.
You know, I usually go back in the green room with you for a little bit before and about 10 minutes before showtime I walk out of there and you say you need to think for a little bit and then you somehow do an hour and a half summing up everything you think in a different way on any given night.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Well, there's some... I'll answer that technically.
You know, the first thing is that something I tell my students You know, if you want to write an essay, you need a problem.
Because the essay is an attempt to solve a problem.
So first of all, you need a problem.
And then second, if you're going to devote time to the problem, then it should be like it should be...
Problem that is your problem at least a piece of it should be you know I have students all the time and they come up to me, and they say Tell me what I should write my essay about and they're often very annoyed that I haven't you know you didn't give us a topic It's like yes, that's because The topic is the difficult part of the assignment right to specify the problem That's the difficult part of the assignment in fact when you're trying to when you're trying to address a complex Let's say, domain of suffering.
The diagnosis, which is the problem formulation, is the crucial cognitive step.
So, if you want to write, you need a problem.
And if you want to write truthfully, then you need a problem that's yours.
And if you want to write in a focused and aimed manner, then you unite your thinking around the problem.
And so, one thing I always do before, when I sit backstage, is I think, okay, What's the problem for tonight?
You know, and the problem for tonight was victim.
So it was one statement.
It's like, okay, let's explore the concept of victim and go down as far as we possibly can.
Okay, so then, well then, I would say, I have my knowledge organized in a idiosyncratic manner.
And that's a consequence of having spent, when I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning, I wrote every day for three hours for 15 years.
And I vowed when I started that I was going to make that, what would you say, the highest duty that I had.
Nothing was going to come before that.
And there's a certain amount of cruelty in that, because it meant that, you know, if my wife came into my office, then I would bark at her.
And if my kids came into my office, like a junkyard dog surrounded by barbed wire.
It's like, because you can always not write, It's not that important that day.
And there might be more pressing concerns, including people who would just like to have something to do with you for a while, or do something nice, or have a problem fixed.
It's like, no.
Go away!
I've got three hours, and so I... I was a thief, and I took that from my life.
And so, I spent a very long time writing and thinking about the hardest problem that I could conceptualize, and that was the relationship between the individual and the atrocity committed in the service of totalitarian possession.
It was the worst problem I could think of.
How?
So I looked to see what the worst thing people could do under the worst circumstances was, and tried to figure out why that happened.
That was step one.
And step two was, having come to some determination about how it might happen, then, and having learned Something that I had suspected all along, which was that that capacity was part of the individual, right?
Me, as well as everyone else, to determine if there was a mode of acting in the world that would restrict that possibility so that it would no longer manifest itself.
And so I spent however many hours 45,000 hours thinking about that and that's not right because that's how much time I spent writing about it most of that time because I have a very Obsessive mind in some sense if I lock on a problem, I can't let it go or it can't let me go I don't know which way to think about it.
And so it wasn't only that I was writing for three hours a day I was thinking about it all the time right from the time I woke up till the time I went to sleep and I was reading about it and Obsessively, you know I read a tremendous amount when I was in graduate school And so the reason I'm telling you all of that is to answer this question is like then I spent 30 years lecturing about it And you know I started out with my lectures fairly structured because I was still wrestling with the ideas But I tried over the years to reduce the amount of scaffolding
Safety wire netting that was underneath me while I was lecturing until I got to the point where I didn't need to do anything other than sit for 10 minutes and think, okay, what's the problem?
Where am I going?
I'm exploring a solution.
I'm not necessarily putting forward a pre-constructed solution.
Like, it'll be in the universe of solutions I've considered, but I'd like to get it sharper and clearer.
So I got to the point where I could go from the problem, through the story, using all these things that I had already talked about and knew, and so then I can sequence them.
And I think the closest analogy I can think of is Jazz improvisation it's something like that.
You know an expert musician has a tremendous number of Habits deeply ingrained like an athlete same thing That are part and parcel built into to him or her and so I have that and so then I can come out and think okay well I A little of this and a little of that, and that's new.
It's like each of these ideas is a personality of sorts, and you can let them have a dialogue in real time and see where it goes.
And that's a story, right?
That's what a great author does when he writes a book, is he puts out some characters, and then he lets the characters do whatever they would do, and that reveals the story.
And so I kind of do that.
I let the ideas do what they're going to do and see how they fight and compete with one another.
And then that's...
See, what people want in a lecture is, assuming that this is a lecture and it probably isn't, it's probably more like a strange sort of dialogue with the audience.
What people want in a forum like this is they want to see thought in action.
They don't want to see something that's already crystallized and dead, which is why I did read the last time I was here, although I do that rarely.
They want to see something... They want to see... Well, what they want to see, technically speaking, is something, if you thought about it metaphysically, is they want to see the logos in action.
That's really what people always want to see.
And I mean that philosophically.
And so the...
The real-time part of it the fact that it's not a contrived performance is actually Crucial to its success and also what keeps me engaged like it's I don't know how these damn lectures are gonna Go when I come out here.
I think okay victim man.
That's a big problem.
Okay.
Well we could we could address it with this and then we could use this and And I can play those together and we can see how that goes and then perhaps I'll be able to draw a rousing conclusion because it's hard to bring that to the point at the end, you know, successfully.
Which is something I've got better at over the tour, which is quite fun.
But I never don't know if it's gonna work.
And so I'm...
On edge, when I come out on stage, I think, oh my God, I've got a big problem here, and I've got to sort it out in 70 minutes, and there's all these people here, so... And that makes it really tense for me, in an exciting way.
It's an exhilarating... You know, it's an exhilarating challenge, but that also makes it alive, because I could easily fail.
unidentified
So...
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Well, so that's how.
It's lots of practice.
And then the final thing is, I don't talk about problems that don't matter to me.
They matter.
This victim thing, that matters.
It's important.
It's fundamental.
And so every night I come out and I think, okay, well, what's the fundamental problem for tonight?
And it's a problem that affects me as far, as deep down as I can go, you know?
And so, yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Do you know the point in life when you became a serious person?
And I mean that in the best sense of it, because when people ask me what it's like to be on tour with you, I always say, well, he takes life seriously.
And it's making me take life more seriously.
And I think it's making these people take life more seriously.
Do you remember the moment that that happened?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Can you tell me that moment?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Yes, I can.
unidentified
Yeah.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
So it was in, I think, 1980.
Three.
And this is a strange story.
I came home from a party, a university party, and I wasn't in the best mood.
I've always had a certain proclivity towards depression, which I've recently discovered is probably an autoimmune problem.
In any case, I'd gone to this party and I'd had a lot to drink, because I like to drink, and I don't know, I wasn't happy with something that happened at the party.
I wasn't happy with the way I behaved.
I mean, that's not uncommon, right?
If you like to drink, then you're not happy with the way you behave.
Those things just go together.
But it was deeper than that.
It wasn't just that I was unhappy with the way the party had gone, but I was deeply dissatisfied with how I was oriented in life.
Like, I felt that there was a... It was an nihilism, I suppose.
That was that was gnawing at me.
This was not long after I'd stopped I'd worked for a socialist party in Canada for a while when I was a kid and this wasn't long after I stopped doing that and so I kind of lost my moorings and You know that the Christianity that my mother practiced in particular I'd abandoned that when I was like 13 and so I I didn't have any structured orient me at all and and so I was experimenting a little bit with artistic production at this point.
Not a lot, but a bit.
And so I took out this canvas from my closet and I sat down and I sketched out this picture.
I just let my imagination roam, and what came out was it was a crucifixion, and there was a... I drew a picture of Christ on the crucifixion, but with a very judgmental face, very angry face, and with a snake wrapped around his waist.
And it was a really harsh picture.
It was like an expressionist picture.
Not that I have the talent of an expressionist, but that's what it was, and I thought... I mean, I wasn't thinking...
I didn't think that I was thinking in religious terms at that point at all and, you know, I was an absolutely sporadic churchgoer and I was absolutely shocked by this picture.
I thought, what?
Where the hell did this come from?
What did that possibly mean?
You know, it took me years to figure out what it meant.
I mean, really, one thing, so I'll tell you part of what it meant.
So, Carl Jung said something very interesting about the structure of the New Testament.
He said that the Gospel Christ is fundamentally, although not entirely, fundamentally a figure of compassion.
But the ideal is not only compassion.
The ideal is also a judge.
Because an ideal is a judge.
You know, let's say you have an ideal.
Well, it's a judge, because you don't live up to it.
And so your ideal is always looking at you like you're not what you should be.
And the higher the ideal, the more judgmental the judge.
Well, that's why he thought the book of Revelation, first of all, emerged as an unconscious revelation.
Because Christ comes back at the end of time, so the story goes, as the ultimate judge.
And virtually no one is judged acceptable.
Well, why?
Well, because by the highest possible... See, speaking psychologically, even biologically for that matter, The idea of Christ is the instantiation of the ideal as such.
That's what it is.
Now, it might be more than that, but that's what it is.
It's whatever a human being would be if a human being was perfect.
And it's an effort of our collective imagination to represent that symbolically, which we do with cathedrals, for example, when we paint the image of Christ against the dome that represents eternity itself.
That's the ideal.
Now, you might say, well, I don't believe in the ideal.
It's like, You're missing the point.
You're missing the point.
And so that ideal is a judge, and the farther you are away from that ideal, the harsher the judge.
And so the snake was part of that, because the thing is, is that if you're low enough and the ideal is high enough, the ideal itself is so judgmental and so detached for you that it starts to look to you like your enemy.
And so that was the painting and it was like and I was asking a question that was the thing that I was asking the question I was asking like what would I have to do to set this?
What would I have to do to set the situation that I'm in right?
And so then I drew this picture and the picture had the had the Answer?
I mean, artistic production always has the answer.
That's where the answers come from, you know.
And so that was a manifestation of imagination.
It was part of me attempting, in its symbolic mode of personified thinking, to deliver a message.
And so, I swore that night that I was going to do whatever it took to set myself right.
Period.
Whatever and I was dead serious about that And so that was the that was the moment and then I don't know what I did with that picture I hid it in my closet because I was so freaked out by I thought what the hell is this?
It's like some schizophrenic nightmare.
It's like underneath the covers with that thing but that was the that and that was it wasn't long after that that I wrote the first essay that eventually turned into a So I think this is our 13th show in Europe.
We've got a couple more over the next couple days and now it sounds like we're extending for another 30 or 40 probably in the spring.
to straighten myself out, regardless of, to straighten myself out, that's what I
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
was gonna do. So, I think this is our 13th show in Europe, we've got a couple
more over the next couple days, and now it sounds like we're extending for
another 30 or 40 probably in the spring, I mean this thing has just grown and
grown and grown. Are you shocked at the amount of people that live in Western
societies, here in Norway, especially when we were in Sweden a couple days ago, but
all the countries that we've been in, that live in free societies yet are
completely afraid to say what they think. Is it absolutely shocking to you? I think
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
the most, I think what I've been most shocked about in all of that is what's
happened in the UK.
With the police starting to prosecute people for crimes of offensiveness.
That's just... And I think that's probably partly because I'm... And I mean, I see that as broadly reflective of something that's happening in the West in general, but it's particularly shocking and appalling to me as a Western Canadian, you know.
Because obviously Canada was part of the British Empire, and when I grew up, like, there was a pretty tight affinity still in Western Canada with the British Empire.
I mean, our maps were the dominion of Canada.
It was still pink.
You know, it was still part of the British Empire.
We sang God Save the Queen constantly at public gatherings.
That's gone by the wayside.
And so, and, you know, I've always regarded British common law and the British parliamentary tradition as, well, one of perhaps the highest achievement of Western civilization.
I mean, you could argue about that, but it's in the top ten, let's say.
And then to see the Brits, who also have this phenomenal sense of humor, this ability to say anything, no matter how outrageous about anyone, and to include themselves in the joke, right?
Which is such an Elegant way of expressing comedic freedom to see them going down this road.
It's just it just it's it's It's what is it exactly?
Well, it's deeply saddening.
That's for sure and and What's horrifying that's not exactly the right word.
I don't know what the word for it is There's certainly sorrow that's associated with a disbelief.
It's also that at at watching that happen in what I still think is like the
central core of the idea of individual sovereignty and freedom as expressed across the
Western world and so and then there's similar manifestations of that everywhere else, but the
police for prosecuting people for you know Asking people to turn in their neighbors if they say
something offensive and that's happening in in the UK Yeah, literally, we saw that!
You know, somebody sent me posters, pictures of posters in the Scottish subway, in the metro, in the tube, you know, saying, inviting people to inform on their neighbours for being offensive.
It's like, what the hell?
I knew this was coming, because I knew We brought our first hate speech laws in Canada back in the 1980s.
We were after this character named Ernst Zandel, who is a particularly despicable piece of work, hard hat wearing, right wing, anti-Semite, Holocaust denier.
You know, he had it all, that guy.
And, you know, it was his shenanigans, careless, malevolent shenanigans that Enticed Canadians into producing hate speech legislation.
I thought, no, that's not good.
It's not good.
You're making a big mistake.
We're going to pay for this.
It's going to unfold over a long time.
Who defines hate?
The crucial issue.
It's not like it's a scientific category.
It's a judgment.
And the answer is, those whom you least want to have the power to define it.
Because they're the ones that will take that power to themselves.
And if you think that isn't going to affect what you get to say, well, you've got another thing coming.
So, I think it's... I think it's... We're going to pay for it.
And hopefully... Hopefully we'll wake up and push back before we have to pay too high a price.
We're going to pay for it.
So, yeah.
And we're gonna deserve to pay for it, too.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
He's talking to you.
unidentified
What?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
You know, last night, Last night I was on this British show called Question Time, which is a very famous British show, and there was a woman parliamentarian there from Ireland who was pretty bright.
I liked listening to her.
But the host asked me about this character named Count Dankula.
I don't know if you know about him.
His girlfriend, he's a comedian.
Well, he thinks he's a comedian.
And, well, but, you know, There are lots of comedians who think they're comedians that aren't funny, and I'm not saying he's not funny, because other people think that he's a comedian too, but he presents himself as a comedian.
Count Dankula.
I mean, that's actually a joke, that name.
And his girlfriend had a pug, and I liked Count Dankula because he hated that pug, and I'm not very fond of pugs.
I think they're hideous little creatures, and...
You know, I don't really hate them.
If a pug comes along, then I'll pet it and everything.
But it's just sort of like this little rat-like dog with these bug... You know, if you hit a pug on the back of the head, the eyes will pop out.
And so... Because they've been so genetically mishandled.
And so... I don't know, man.
It's just...
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
You do realize we're putting this on YouTube and you're just... You're unleashing a whole new world of hate from the pug people.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
I know, I know, I know.
But whatever, whatever.
So you can have your pug and you can love it.
My dad had this dog that was so damn hideous and useless that it was just a miracle.
And he loved it to death and so... And you know, that's fine, that's fine.
But... And there's kind of an ironic attitude in the dismissal of pugs.
And Dankula didn't like his girlfriend's pug and so he thought he'd play a mean trick and...
or a mean/funny trick and teach it to do a Hail Hitler salute,
which I actually thought was quite funny.
It's like, I don't, look, I don't see that as glorifying Hitler.
It's a pug, for God's sake.
It wasn't a, it wasn't a, what do you call those, Doberman, you know?
It was a pug!
It's like teaching a rat to do a Hail Hitler salute.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
I love how this has come down to the breed of dog with you.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Well, these things matter in terms of the way they're represented, you know.
And then, you know, he taught it to... It's so horrible.
And I'm gonna be so killed for this.
He taught it to do its little salute when he said, gas the Jews, which is not funny, you know, except it's horribly funny, you know, that's the thing.
Well, look, and so yeah, you laugh, that's right, because you're all horrible, and you know perfectly well that it's
horribly funny.
unidentified
[Applause]
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
And you know, we need to be able to be horribly funny.
Because life is horrible and we need to be able to find...
We need to be able to allow people the freedom to find the ability to transcend that horror with comedy.
And a mark of a free society is that comedians can be just exactly what they are, which they're people who push the edge of what's acceptable.
If you're a brilliant comedian, you get right to the edge, right, and you dance there.
And the audience is thinking, oh, Sarah Silverman's a good example of that, you know, because you can just see her She's got all politically correct recently, but when she was in her heyday, you could just see Sarah.
She's so smart.
You'd see her sitting there and she'd think of something just spectacularly evil and horrible, and she'd think, And then she'd say it, you know, and everyone would just crack up because, like, the darkest part of their soul had once thought something like that, and she dared to utter it, and by uttering it, she also simultaneously transcended it, you know, and that's the beauty of comedy.
And, well, so anyways, they went after Dankula and nailed him legally, and I thought, that's in Great Britain as well.
And last night, so, they brought this up on Question Time, and, you know, the Irish woman, She went off on a talk about how terrible Kristallnacht was and what an awful thing Auschwitz and the Holocaust was.
It's like, well... You're not that morally virtuous to notice that.
You know what I mean?
It's like, and it didn't have anything to do with the topic at hand.
It's like, you wouldn't say that you noticed that unless you were implying that there were people around you, including this Count Dankula, who didn't notice that.
Okay, it had nothing to do with whether he should have been prosecuted for his stupid joke.
And you can say, well, you could say it was a stupid joke, which it certainly was.
You could say that it was a hateful joke, which I don't agree with, by the way.
But you could say that, and I think you could make a credible case for that.
But then to say that because you think that the Holocaust was bad, he should be criminally prosecuted.
It's like, no, sorry man, you've crossed the line.
And there's no excuse for it.
And so that's part of what's worrisome about the state of discourse in the free West.
That same thing, comedians won't go to university campuses.
The same thing, you don't get to be funny.
So, and if you can't be funny, then you're not free.
You know, the jester in the king's court's the only person who gets to tell the truth.
And if the king is such a tyrant that he kills his jester, then you know that the evil king is in charge.
And so, when we can't tolerate our comedians, it's like, well, there you go.
They're the canaries in the coal mine, as far as I'm concerned.
unidentified
[Applause]
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
You know, I promised my wife that I wouldn't hit any hornets' nests with sticks for like a day.
unidentified
And now I just hit a big hornet's nest with a stick, so... Sorry, Tammy.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
She's here somewhere.
Give it up for Jordan's wife, by the way.
She's been on this entire tour.
unidentified
All right, so let's... It's David's fault.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Let's shift gears a little bit.
What has been the best part of this adventure, of this tour, for you personally?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Oh, well, the best part happens all the time.
The best part... I think I told this story tonight.
Though I'm not sure, because I talked to a bunch of journalists today, so I can't remember when I told this story, but this guy came up to me last night.
He was a kind of a pierced guy, rough-looking guy.
And about, he's probably in his late 20s, maybe early 30s.
He said, I've been smoking drug-free for nine months.
And I said, hey, good work, man.
Because he looked pretty pleased about that.
I said, well, you know, hopefully that's a lot better.
And he said, it's a lot better.
I said, well, good for you for sticking it out, and I hope you can continue it.
And I meant that, because I did mean good for you, and I hope you can stick it out.
And he knew I meant that, because he wouldn't have bloody well told me that to begin with if he didn't think that that was going to be the response.
And then he said, I got nine of my mates to do the same thing.
Yeah, I thought, right on, man, that's great.
And then, you know, I was in Birmingham two nights ago, and I walked out of the hotel, and this kid, working-class kid, came up to me, you know, just out of the blue, and he said, thank you very much for elevating my vision.
I thought, hey, look, it's really a good thing to be able to go around the world and to have people stop you on the street and say things like that to you.
It's like, that's as good as it gets, you know?
And people are telling me stories like that all the time.
They come up and they say, well, you've watched this, it happens all the time.
People come up and they tell me some way that their house was out of order, you know, they're hopeless and and nihilistic and and drinking too much and watching too much pornography and procrastinating too much and Being not serious with their relationship and not getting along with their parents and you know not formulating a vision and not growing up and well, you know, there's just endless ways that you can descend into a kind of what would you call it a kind of grungy Filthy carpet infested hell and and so and then they say look I've been watching your lectures and I I developed a plan for my life and I've been trying to be more responsible and I've been really trying to tell the truth and I Mended my relationship with my father and I got married to my girlfriend and now I have a flat and I quit doing drugs and I've just tripled my salary in the last year and I
And I didn't commit suicide like I was going to six months ago.
I think I have, I don't know, out of the 150 people that I talk to each night, I would say probably over the course of the lecture series, there's probably 10 people like that a night who tell me that.
And so...
See, and because I believe what I said tonight, I believe that the individual is sovereign, and that individual sovereignty is the cornerstone of reality itself, and it's the cornerstone of the state, and it's the cornerstone of reality itself.
I truly believe that to be the case.
That every time I hear someone say, look, I've got my act together, I think that's one more Wait on, you know, if the scales are always tilting towards good or towards evil, then every time someone decides to straighten themselves up, they take a major weight off the evil side and they put it on the good side, and it's not trivial.
And I believe that that's what the redemption of the world depends on.
It's not political.
It happens at the level of the individual, just like the descent into totalitarian catastrophe.
Occurs when people abandon their sovereign responsibility, which I think is the most accurate way of diagnosing what happened in the 20th century so whenever someone comes up to me and says I Was not doing so well, and here's you know three ways where I've really put my life together We have a little 15-second party, and we both know why and so that's that's as good as it gets and so that's happening constantly and I feel generally speaking that these events are Like, there's celebrations of that.
And so interesting to watch the media miss this completely.
It's like they don't have the conceptual... What would you say?
They don't have the conceptual tools to understand that Something might be happening that's worthy of note outside the purely conventional confines of, you know, the stultifying and dull political discourse.
But it doesn't matter.
It might be nice if it didn't happen.
It doesn't fundamentally matter because I'm a psychologist.
I decided a long time ago that the individual was the right level of analysis and so it's an absolute It's not a pleasure.
It's not the right way of thinking about it.
What's rule seven?
Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
This is the most deeply meaningful thing that I can envision doing.
So, that's great.
It's great.
It's hard.
Great is hard.
When something great happens, that's hard.
Right?
It's not something trivial.
But it doesn't matter, because it's great!
And so, every time someone says to me, I'm better, I'm getting along with my father, I've married my girlfriend, we're going to have a child, we weren't going to have children, now we're going to have children, I think, that's one more.
So, that's great, man.
unidentified
[Applause]
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Tell the audience a little bit about Jordan Peterson having fun.
We did serious Jordan Peterson.
and what's Peterson doing for fun?
I stumped him, actually.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Well, it's not like I don't... It's like most of what I've always done for fun in my life has been Play, you know, and so when I had little kids, I played with them all the time.
And my kids are grown up, and I play with them all the time.
And my daughter is so playful, despite her rather catastrophic life up to this point.
she's much better, but, is that every single thing she says, you know, when she's not delivering,
like, when she's not focused on talking to people about a serious topic, everything she says is a joke.
You know, and my son is ridiculously teasy and playful.
And so, and so that's fun, and when they were little kids, we just played all the time.
And so I really like that, and most of the people who've been my close friends, have been people like that.
They're, they're...
They play with their speech all the time.
Which is why I think I get along with comedians, you know?
It's like, it's partly why we travel well together.
And John, my tour manager, who's a great guy, very, very useful.
He's also a comedian, and Rogan's a comedian, and so many of the people that I got along with are comedians.
And the best interviews I've had have been with comedians, because there's that element of play, so I really like that.
On this tour, There's not a lot of fun, I wouldn't say.
We had a good time when we went to the comedy club in... Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake City.
That was fun.
That was 45 minutes of fun.
And I had some fun at Cambridge.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
I had some fun at... Just to be clear, I brought Jordan up as the surprise guest.
I did about an hour of stand-up, and then I brought Jordan up, and we did... We sort of did stand-up together.
We just kind of riffed for about 45 minutes, and people were... Yeah, it was fun.
They were thrilled.
And they loved seeing you laugh.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, well I did, I was at the Cambridge Union just a couple of days ago and I was in a fairly high-spirited mood and I had a fair bit of fun with the students there.
It was still serious but, you know, what I really like, the times in my life that I've had the best time is when I'm sitting around with A variety of people who are very amusing, and all they're trying to do is to outwit each other with something absurd and funny.
It was really a part of... I don't know if it's a part of Scandinavian culture or not, but in the West, where I grew up, which is a working-class culture, I mean, most of what my friends and I did with regards to conversation was, like, Half-witted upmanship?
I guess that's what it is.
Your goal was to say something funnier than the person just before you said.
And so it was competitive humor.
And I really, really like that a lot.
And so when I'm able, that's great relief.
But this tour, like, it's very tightly Scheduled crazily tightly scheduled and Tammy and I decided at the beginning that because it was such an absurd opportunity That it was a working tour You know and that we were going to subordinate everything to making sure that these shows went as well as they possibly could and that we would take whatever
Refuge and amusement we could you know where we could steal it and and we've had some of that I mean the last time we're in Oslo we walked up to the sculpture gardens And so that was really cool And we walked down the boulevard and we only had about an hour and a half to take a look around the city But but it was a nice hour and a half.
You know the Sun was out and we enjoyed ourselves and so that's rule 12 right pedicab on the street when when you see one, when you encounter one, and you take your joy where you can get it.
And you don't complain if it's not happening perhaps as often as it should, especially when you're given, like we have been, this absolutely improbable adventure.
And we'll have time, hopefully, God willing, knock on wood, with some luck, for some more fun in the future.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's actually quite a segue to my next question, which is, because you talk about stories so much, and the importance of stories, does the Jordan Peterson story have a happy ending, and does that even matter?
Or what do you think the ending of the Jordan Peterson story is?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
I don't have any idea.
You know, when I was, from the time I was about I kind of had a sense of what would happen to me.
I had some sense of it.
But only, it really only extended until I was about my age, 50, something like that.
And I didn't know what would, I didn't have a vision for after that.
And see, I thought when I wrote Maps of Meaning, I remember telling one of my peers, I said, I think everyone will think the way that I think in this book in 50 years.
And he said, well, that's a pretty grandiose claim, I guess.
That was it.
Something like, well, fair enough, you know.
But by the same token, I wasn't taking credit for the ideas.
Like, I was taking some credit for clarifying them.
The ideas were already there.
They're everywhere, those ideas, but clarifying them is something.
And so I knew that what I was working on in Maps of Meaning was at the center of things in some sense.
And that manifested itself in my teaching career, because, well, I taught at Harvard for six years, and the course there, which was based on my book, was very, very popular, and students regarded it as life-changing, and the same thing happened at the University of Toronto, and so I knew that That power was in those ideas.
But I don't see my future very clearly from here on in.
You know, over the next year, I'm going to do more of what I'm doing.
I want to return to Exodus.
I liked doing those biblical lectures.
I thought that was useful and important.
So I want to do that.
But my vision kind of runs out in December of 2019.
And I don't know what... Because all of this is so unlikely.
You know, I've thought, for the last two years, every single day, I've thought, well, this has got to come to an end.
Like, this is ridiculous.
This is ridiculous.
This can't continue.
But it is continuing.
And so, I have no idea.
How do you predict something like that?
I mean...
For the longest time, I thought that as this wave grew, the probability that I would end up like a surfer, smashed on the beach, was the highest probability outcome.
And I still probably think that that's the highest probability outcome.
But I'm not as apprehensive about that now as I was.
Because in some sense, assuming I don't do anything spectacularly stupid like defend Count Dankula on Dave Rubin, the people who would like to That who would have liked to have taken me out, have thrown the worst that they could throw at me, as far as I can tell.
I mean, my cardinal day in terms of vilification, and it's quite a contest, by the way, because there were many days like that, was the day where I was simultaneously accused by an alt-right magazine of being a Jewish shill, And accused by a Jewish magazine of being tantamount to Hitler himself.
I thought, well, that pretty much does it.
It's like, the Nazis hate me because I'm a Jewish shill, and the, and, well, this particular Jewish publication, you know, compared me to Hitler, and I thought, well, that's it.
There's, where else do you go after that?
We're gonna call me Mao?
It's like, it's already, that's just not that much past Hitler.
And so, You know, and so I'm not that concerned that in the absence of some fatal stupidity on my part, which certainly could still happen, because we have that proclivity for fatal stupidity within all of us, I'm not too concerned that I'm going to be taken out by my ideological opponents, but by the same token, this is a pretty unwieldy
and unprecedented situation to be in, and so I'm not under any illusions about its stability or safety.
So, who knows, man?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Well, I'll stick with you as long as you'll keep me.
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
So far, so good.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Alright, so I promised you guys that I was going to take what I thought was the best question from you guys, and there were hundreds of them.
I was reading through them during the lecture, but I thought this was the best we got out of Oslo.
Will you move to Oslo and run for Prime Minister of Norway?
unidentified
[APPLAUSE]
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Well, first, you probably want someone who can speak Norwegian.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
And second, more seriously, throughout my life I've considered a political career,
and certainly when I was young, very seriously, that was my ambition, till I was about 18.
But, yeah, it started when I ran for an executive position in the Socialist Party in my home
province when I was 14.
And so that was the first large-scale public speech I gave to about 700 people.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
Wait, can everyone pause for one second?
Try to picture a 14-year-old socialist Jordan Peterson.
That's an incredible image to me.
What was that kid like?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
Like me.
It's kind of, you know, I could speak to a crowd then.
The speech was very successful.
I lost the position by 13 votes out of 700, something like that.
And, you know, I had the audience under...
I had the audience, you know?
unidentified
Um...
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
So, you know, there's certain things about you that remain constant.
Hopefully I know more than I did then.
you know, that's to be devoutly hoped for.
I've stopped actively pursuing a political career when I was 18.
And the reason for that was because I became more interested in something else, which is what I was talking about tonight.
Because it turned out that the political problems that I was interested in were deep enough, arguably, not to be political.
Because they were really For some reason I was very interested in totalitarianism right from the time I was like an adolescent.
I don't know why exactly.
Who the hell knows why you get interested in what you're interested in?
Some problem... You know, this is a thing that's useful to know about life.
You know, all of you have problems that bother you.
And you think, well, I don't want to have a problem.
And fair enough.
But, like, there's a whole lot of problems you could have that could bother you.
Because there's lots of things wrong with the world.
And you could be obsessed by, like, a million problems, right?
Because there's just problems everywhere.
But you're not.
Some problems grab you.
unidentified
Why?
jordan b peterson ▲ ● ▼
It's a mystery.
It's the mystery of the autonomy of being in some sense.
The problem grabs you and it won't let you go.
It's like there's suffering in that.
That's your problem.
And you know, in that problem might be your destiny.
I think that's right.
The problems that grip you are the portal to your destiny.
And so, well then you can accept them.
It's like, what are you going to have?
No problems?
Good luck with that.
So, you've got your problems.
One of the things you learn as a therapist is you don't interfere with people's problems.
And what I mean by that is this.
Let's say you come to me and, you know, we have a discussion about what's going wrong in your life.
And I listen because I want you to explain what the problems are because what do I know about your life?
It's like I need to listen so that I can hear what your problem is and not rush to a conclusion.
And then I want to listen while you generate a solution.
Now, I'm going to help by asking questions and help you explore, but if I... Let's say you lay out your problem, and I think, hey, I know what would fix that, and then I just say to you, well, you know, here's a solution.
Well, first of all, you're going to be very annoyed about that, because I just took your problem, and it was up to you to wrestle with that problem and come up with a solution, and then to have a little self-congratulatory Burst of pleasure at your own intuitive genius that you could solve your problem, and then you're motivated because you've come up with a solution.
Maybe you go implement it, right?
And so, well... So my problem became something that wasn't political, and so I pursued that.
And so I'm not going to pursue a political career.
And I've also decided to.
I didn't know this, but I don't have the temperament for it.
I couldn't do it.
I find the adversarial interviews that I'm in, for example, they take me like, it takes me three days
to recover from one of those.
Well, it does because I don't like that mode of discourse.
And if you're political, you're in that mode of discourse all the time.
And I'm not cut out for it.
Like, I'm not a particularly combative person by nature.
I'm a person who's terrified about leaving monsters under the rug ignored.
But that is not the same thing.
And it's not like I enjoy the process of calling them out and hashing them through.
But I think, well, better get at them while they're small.
So no, I'm not coming to Norway.
That's the answer to that question.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼
All right.
Well, on that note, I've said this to you privately before, but I may as well say it publicly since we're putting this up on the YouTube.
This, what we're doing here, this started as a professional joy for me, but it has become a personal joy that I can't explain.
I am better than when we started.
Like, I know what it's like to be these people that taking these ideas in and changing, and I'm better.
And it's because of the work that you've put into your life that you've helped give to all of us.
So I want to thank you for that.
And on that note, I've never ended a show like this before, but I'm gonna get out of the way, and I need you guys to go bananas for Dr. Jordan Peterson.
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