Jordan Peterson - In the Trenches with Ryan Roxie Episode #7069

today's episode of in the trenches is brought to you by system 12 guitar method sign up today at lionroxy.com in the trenches with ryan roxy hello folks and welcome to another episode of in the trenches with ryan roxy i am your host today is a very special show but as i let you guys come on into the chat it's the ryan roxy official youtube channel uh hit that subscribe button there vic our producer will there it is and come on into the chat because we really want you to be a part of it today it's going to be a great one and if you are listening to us on one of the audio podcasts where there's apple stitcher spotify thank you very much but we do want you to come over to our youtube official channel and um like i said before today is a very special episode because although we are used to having musical rock stars on the show today is no different when i use the term in fact you could say we have one of the biggest rock stars of the internet here with us to discuss his new book beyond order 12 more rules for life and much like a rock star there's been no shortage of controversy tribulations and craziness on the ascent upwards but today we're happy to have him down here in the trenches so would you welcome dr jordan peterson hello jordan hi ryan thanks for the invitation thank you so much for accepting it i just uh it's one of those moments you know and i think we're going to have a great show with it as the people file into the live chat because you do have an amazingly huge following much like a rock star you know how does it feel right now to have that sort of uh that sort of status of being that king of the internet right now well it's complicated i mean i it's an immense privilege it's completely it takes me about constantly this this all happened to me when i was you know in my late 50s really mid to late 50s and it's a it's a very large adjustment and and so i i'm still not really comfortable with it i've had to revise my identity substantially and that gets harder as you get older so i'm not complaining about it but it's it's complicated although there are interesting perks like i think it's extremely comical that i can talk about rules for living which is this like conservative boxed in thing to um someone who's playing rock and roll music with alice cooper and to a rock and roll oriented audience it's surreal and a lot of this is surreal and the internet is surreal and youtube and social media all of that and its magnitude is um somewhat incomprehensible i mean you must experience that to some degree when you're playing in stadiums i would think i definitely do have that feeling but when you when i take it back to that feeling of structure like you say the 12 rules that you have and obviously 24 now at this point no you can't have too many rules you know everyone knows that as rock and rollers our life is so structured if you think about it with all the time that i've been playing with alice uh our day to day is a very structured system it's we we have a schedule it's 6 a.m wake up play some golf then we go on and do some alice does some interviews if i get to do a podcast that's great slow nap go to the venue sound check catering meet and greet rock show tour bus playing some poker rinse and repeat so that's our structure and it is day in and day out when we're on tour but obviously this this last year has been quite different for us yeah how have you adapted to that i mean it must be amazingly disruptive doing this podcast has really saved me and the people that support the podcast thank you very much uh they have been so um they've been very very important to to keep me out of this uh of this funk because you know what jordan because we talk about sex drugs rock and roll and and i found that there's one thing that's more addictive than drugs or any of those things it's called attention yeah well it's the ultimate drug that everything revolves around attention it's the ultimate currency you know our eyes are evolved um so that we can tell where other people are looking so you know if you compare our eyes to the eyes of animals we have these really evident whites and the iris and people stand out against that and you can tell what someone's interested in and attending to by looking at their eyes and it's a primary form of communication among human beings and something that's quite unique to us and that's an indication of just how fundamentally important attention is you know even our eyes have adapted so that we can we can broadcast what we're attending to so that other people can read our minds so attention is but even when we're doing these podcasts i'm getting that attention i guess i'm just imagining that there's a lot of eyes looking at us right now or looking at me and i'm i'm getting that sort of ego boost nothing does though replace a live show and i'm wondering if it's the same for you with your lectures because you've done so much uh online the last couple years but you really really uh cut your teeth and you were basically in the trenches for many years doing lectures in front of live audiences all the time and you still do yeah i love doing that and i did that tour tour in 2019 2018 and and 2019 and spoke to audiences all over the world you know the attention issue it's not just an ego boost although it is that and it's also it's something that you should respond to if you're social properly socialized and and because it is a mark of quality although perhaps not an unerring one to produce something that many people attend to and if you were completely opaque to that well then what other people thought wouldn't matter to you and sometimes that's held up as an ideal you know why should you care what other people think of you but that's foolish what that really means is don't let ill-advised advice stop you from doing something that's necessary but that's in a much broader context of well if you're doing something and no one's attending to it well maybe it isn't very good or maybe you're not communicating it well and so the fact that you desire that attention perhaps you're extroverted as well um that certainly isn't only an indication of ego it's also an indication of the fact that you care what other people think about what you're doing and you sort of already indicated that by thanking your listeners you know that's something i've become very uh appreciative of more and more appreciative of is the support that i've got from the people who are watching my youtube videos and listening to the podcast and reading and all of that it's really it's been so great it's so great to have that happen there's so many people that are supporting the new book and i am going to start talking about beyond order 12 more rules in just a bit but first i want to kick things off with a little bit of full disclosure um i'm not used to having clinical psychologists on the podcast and watching everything you're doing so much so i i asked you what do you prefer do you prefer jordan peterson or dr jordan peterson i think i might have introduced you as both uh so far but uh yeah i i i guess i do care what other people think very much so i want them to uh feel comfortable and feel good here down in the trenches but um the thing that i was going to say is that we're both here i'm not used to having clinical uh psychologists on the podcast and perhaps you're not used to being on shows that focus on larger than life rock and roll personalities but we find ourselves here because i'm not only interested in your work but you yourself have shown some interest in my boss particularly the welcome to my nightmare album and uh i was i initially saw an interview with howard bloom where you talked a little bit about welcome to my nightmare what was that experience what was it about that album that interested you about alice well when that album came out i was a kid you know i was about 14 i think and it was shocking um and and i remember i first heard it i remember when i first heard any of it i was delivering papers in my small town and um this stoned girl was listening to it and it was really intriguing but it it's quite a powerful album and especially for someone that young you know it's a it's a real dramatic piece there's a couple of songs on it that were designed to be hits on the radio which was typical for concept albums of that time you know the concept album would be the entire album and all the songs would fit together thematically but there'd often be a song or two that was designed for am radio to push the album forward and if i remember correctly welcome to my nightmare had at least one of those on there but the rest of it was well a whole dramatic world and it was the investigation of nightmarish fantasy and yeah it scared me the album really scared me to begin a boy named stephen yes yes it took me a while to get over that it was shocking and frightening both at the same time and and but it's brilliantly arranged and it bears repeated listening i think it's one of the outstanding albums of the 1970s it came out in the night yes it definitely came out in the 1970s 75 right right right and so it had heavy competition because there were a lot of great albums in the 70s but it it definitely withstands the test of time in my estimation and it does draw you into this whole dramatic world and great musical artists have their little they have their universes i shouldn't say little universes they have their conceptual universes there's a beatles land you know and it's it's populated by marching bands and and animated characters and monty python-like comedy and tom waits has his own dramatic universe and it's always three o'clock in the morning and and you're hungover and and the garbage cans are clanking around outside and um you know maybe you you have a foul taste in your mouth about what happened last night but and it's it's really something to be able to climb into those worlds and it's really something for teenagers it helps it helps them explore the dramatic world and i think that was one of bob esrin and alice cooper's collaborations one of one of the first collaborations that really really got into that concept album because bob ezran fellow canadian went on to produce the wall and many other you know huge classic albums as well but welcome to my night where mayor sort of started that all and i'm looking at us and i'm thinking wow we have the same musical background because i'm a couple years younger your class is 79 i want to say i'm class of 83. so you would have been basically a senior when i was a uh when i was a freshman coming into high school in that sense but that meant we still had a lot of those classic rock influences i think you look better for for wear than i do i think i would have pegged you was younger than that maybe it's the lighting i hope i'm gonna play oh it's all lighting it's smoking mirrors it's rock and roll smoke and mirrors you look great jordan by the way it's an illusion well i was gonna say you know i was gonna one of my uh i don't know one of my gotcha questions was gonna be you know who took whose haircut you or bill maher did you take kids or did he yeah well it's been hard to get a haircut up here and kovid locked in canada so in toronto so well you're in toronto now but uh you grew up in alberta and i want to say that uh i do know medicine hat i believe that's in alberta yeah it's about 700 miles south of where i grew up so yeah well a lot of people don't realize that you did a lot a lot of hard labor up there in the uh great great white hope of the north and i i live in stockholm sweden so i know my share of snow in april as well so god we had august 6th one year when i was taking swimming lessons [Laughter] well you know the name actually jordan b peterson as well i'm familiar with the b maybe some people don't know in our chat and our uh fans that by the way thank you so much for uh subscribing to the channel right now uh we have a dr jordan peterson with us what is the b it's for burnt which is a nordic name i want to say it's norwegian yes it is it's my great grandfather's name yep what about the other classic rock bands besides alice and because you're from canada was i mean i grew up in the bay area was rush triumph were any of those bands big as they were in my little world of california were they as big in canada um rush was big i wasn't a rush fan um and i wasn't a triumph fan either but those bands both were big um i in the 70s i really liked supertramp especially crime of the century which is brilliantly arranged um and unbelievably well produced and very melodic and it bears re-listening uh crime of the century was a great album too uh and they they were really popular in alberta supertramp for one reason or another um obviously pink floyd the dark side of the moon all pretty much all the led zeppelin albums that came out in the 70s were were major smash hits at that point doors that it was funny back in the 70s um you you'll remember this and i suppose this was true until the internet kicked in any music that was more than a couple years old was old you know and you couldn't really find it often like it sort of it sort of disappeared in into the distance it wasn't being played all the time you couldn't access it all the time you couldn't find the records even and so a 10 year old band was really old in the 1970s maybe among you know 25 year old people that's still the case but now music is just there everywhere all the time and you know my son listened to music from you know the 1920s right through well whatever time happened to be current when when we were listening to music and all those temporal barriers to listening to recorded music were all gone because of the internet so that was quite cool i always wonder if you think that uh perhaps the technology that's opened so many doors for uh music and and it actually opens my eyes to a bunch of new bands i find new bands every day by just going down a uh playlist rabbit hole but does it always does it always close the doors as well to because back then we would have to do the research we really did have to go out if you liked a band you had to go out and search for them and you know find the one magazine that would come out a month to hopefully find maybe some words about them now you can just go on the internet and find out their net worth right right and everything else well you know technology technology has changed other aspects of of musical recording popular music recording too because it's it's decreased the importance of concept albums for example because the single tends to be the the unit of of of production even more than it was back before the net uh we people who were listening to music i suppose seriously more than you know top 100 am would really get into a full album i mean i used to sit around with my friends when a new album came out especially one that was rather complex so that may be typically a pink floyd album or something like that or a led zeppelin album which you often had to get accustomed to through multiple re-listenings we'd listen to the whole album and assess it and analyze it and to the degree that we were capable but it was an album-oriented experience and that and and of course all the graphics that came along with the album were also of them of were also an important part of that experience so it was more theatrical i would say it was more of a theatrical experience than just listening to a single and uh a lot of a lot of well you lose something because of that you you gain this incredible access to to every form of music at your fingertips and that's really something but um but with alice with alice cooper did you ever see him live during those days or was it just that sort of uh step away listening to welcome to my nightmare and being a little bit you know trepid of of what you're actually going to see well he also had quite a reputation i mean cooper's stage persona and his shows were notorious i never saw a live ellis cooper show but all sorts of rumors circulated about what he did on his shows or what he did in his personal life and that sort of added to the mystique and he was a uh a controversial character to say the least and and that added to some of the trepidation and fear that surrounded the welcome to my nightmare album as well so i suppose that's all part of what made it somewhat exciting but for me the the it was the music that was paramount i think welcome to my nightmare was brilliant conceptually and really unbelievably creative and well arranged and well produced and so that's also extremely nice i mean that's one thing i don't know what you think about this but i think some of the production uh that was done in the 1970s has never been exceeded or even paralleled i seldom hear a band recording now where the the the arrangements are so brilliantly laid out in this stereo landscape and so carefully uh uh delineated you know note by note and instrument by instrument those people were technological technical masters there was no cut and paste um the the thing that i say that's different from the way i grew up listening to music starting to record music and then ultimately being able to play it for a living is that when i first started i needed to learn the song from the beginning to the end and then all the parts in between you had to break down breakdown you couldn't just copy paste a part that you thought was cool in the front of the song and then paste it into the end of the song you had to play the entire song front to back and you know as recording went on now i'm used to playing a song recording it and then only having to record a verse in a chorus because the other stuff can be sort of copy pasted and then it goes on and it's a really good point that you make because i think it should go back to a more analog sort of mentality even though we have such great technology you can make great technology things can go quicker because obviously you don't want to be recording vocals the way we did back in the 1980s and 90s with tape because it would take too long to actually get to vocal performance down but at the same time i do feel that that having that time to really break down a song strengthened the music and what do you think about on the technical end i mean do you do you feel that that there that recording techniques and arranging techniques the quality of published music now do you think that on average it's better than it was in the 70s with the more analog equipment or i think you all that all the uh digital equipment tries to model what an analog equipment can do i understand that there's certain things in certain styles of music that have actually benefited from it you know for instance whatever disco is today probably sound even maybe not though because i think they had this got a little bit more soul i know you're not a big fan of disco but i grew up in the bay area i grew up on am radio i had rock and roll and disco and funk and soul kind of all meshed into one on an am radio kfrc i'm not sure if alberta had that or you know growing up but uh i definitely had a huge spectrum of music growing up but and by the way i gotta say there's so many canadian bands that i really do appreciate and and i know that you like uh i know that uh you you've mentioned tom waits before but um i really like arcade fire yeah arcade fire you said and there was a there was a couple other bands that did you ever get into sloan from canada no no i don't i don't know uh you know when you get older as you know it's young people who kind of keep you on the cutting edge of musical appreciation for whatever reason that is maybe i don't know exactly what it is maybe they have the time or they have the time and the interest or maybe it actually is an age-related phenomenon but my kids uh also alerted me to all sorts of bands that i wouldn't have found on my own but i really like i really like arcade fire i think they're absolutely brilliant they produced some albums that are so good that it's it's really difficult to believe i think you'd said something about a band called beach house as well as yeah as well i like to vodka it's haunting it's got this eastern european uh waltz um thing going that's really quite interesting and the lead singer's great [Music] i know your son plays music as well right yeah he's got a couple of he's got a couple of songs online julian peterson yeah he's got a really good voice and it was it's been great to listen to him sing it's a real pleasure he comes over and plays the piano or the guitar and we sing together and i love that it's so great that's i would love more than anything else i think to be able to sing i imagine i can't really imagine that there's anything more fun and that's not the right that's such a weak word fun um it's because music is is way whatever music is it's way much it's much more than just fun it's great and to be able to participate in producing it you know it involves your whole body your your you dance to it you you you sink your your your musculature to it it change changes your perceptions when you're singing you're immersed in that patterned rhythmic harmonious landscape um it it's it's so such a healthy and great thing to do i'd love to be able to do it i'm not good at it unfortunately i think there's a lot of jordan b peterson fans that would like to hear you sing on a song sing on a record sing some sort of rock record well one of the things that's funny there's this character first of all i did release a song on tick tock did you know all right do you have a clip of that can you put that up oh god don't do that i sang the philosopher's song from monty python which is about all these philosophers on a drunken binge and it's a very comical song and i did it i put it on tick tock because i was bored out of my skull one day and thought that i'd do something um completely different to to use monty python speak and so that's that's up there um now you play piano as well well no i'm a complete fraud when it comes to the piano i would say look i can play or i could play the moonlight sonata and the apache nada and one other beethoven sonata but the reason i can play them and i really can't because people who can play them are great and i'm not great i'm i'm uh i'm gonna say fraud because i i had i i told you earlier before we started david that had eric weinstein on and he he definitely told me he convinced me that i'm i am not a fraud of a podcaster i am an imposter which means i have the will to do it and someday i have i have the uh sort of chance that i'll get better at it and eventually achieve what i'm going after so yeah well that's a really important distinction that you're making there because i do write about that um in in both books uh in in in 12 rules for life and beyond order nietzsche said at one point the german philosopher that every great man is an actor of his own ideal and there's something in that about greatness in general so imagine you do have an ambition and so an ambition is who you could be calling to you let's say and you start to um put that ambition into practice by doing this thing that you want to get good at to begin with you are an imposter and and weinstein emphasizes that rather than a fraud you're an imposter because you're not good enough at it to be doing it but how in the world are you going to be good enough at it unless you stumble around in the dark to begin with and and that now it might be fraudulent at that point for you to pass yourself off as greater than you are you know but you do have to adopt a new identity and in some sense try that on and pretend to begin with before you actually become that thing and but i don't think that's what i'm doing with my my piano piano no i i've played these beethoven sonatas for 30 years i don't think i can play them at all now because i haven't really played the piano for for about two years unfortunately uh it's too loud i'm too s my hearing is too sensitive to really be able to tolerate i couldn't even listen to music for a long time which was just a terrible loss man it sucked it was terrible you know it was too loud and hurt but also the the depth disappeared i i couldn't get into it in in that lovely way that sort of puts you into a trance one of the things i really love to do is drive um with loud music on and i can put myself in a kind of well i hope it's a safe trance and that i'm not posing a danger to everybody anybody on the highway but i can look at the entire landscape in a sort of non-focused way and listen to the music and it just transports me i love that it's it's i can do that for hours but i but i haven't been able to anyways with these beethoven sonatas i could eke them out on the piano and a passion at it particularly is quite complex but i can virtually play nothing else i can do some improvisation i know some chord structures and i can produce relatively complex improvisations but fundamentally i'm like uh um an idiot savant on the piano i've got a couple of tricks but other than that man um i'm not there it's the one instrument i wish i would have learned it i i never did i bought a fender rhodes in los angeles i bought it out of the recycler it's a you know sort of a used magazine everything is used you buy it and i had it in the apartment and the only song i learned because i said i would learn at least one song and piano was uh best friend queen you know that's another great 70s album right the knight at the opera opera races oh my god yeah but but my son ended up playing piano and he's quite natural and good at it and the thing that's uh a little bit frustrating is that he's really good at it but shows no interest in like pursuing it like he's like yeah well i got it now i did it now i'm moving on and that's okay because i want him to you know what you say a lot is i want him to find purpose meaning something that speaks to him and go for it because that's what i did with music at a young young age i knew that it was music that i wanted uh to do i didn't really have a backup plan to say you know i kind of thought about other options but music was always at the forefront and i i'm wondering was it the same for you or you know did you obviously you might not have thought of being a clinical psychologist at such a young age but there had to have been an age where he said you know what i do want to pursue this observe well i took piano lessons when i was a kid and i was trained by in in a classical way um and i wasn't really very interested in that classical music i was much more interested in the kind of music that we're discussing that that was really what compelled me so that took some of my interest out of it the the issue with your son is a complicated one because with some skills and musical skills are certainly in that category it may be that you have to put in a kind of painful apprenticeship before you actually get swept along on your own interest and compulsion you know because it's not that much fun to learn an instrument although it's very fun to play one it's also not that much fun to learn to read you know because you you have to struggle to identify the letters and then to put them together in words and it isn't until you can kind of glance at whole phrases without having to undergo that painful conscious processing that the intrinsic interest kicks in and so when you're thinking about your son that's i don't want to give unwarranted advice here but i i really am i really am in favor of let your interest take you where it takes you but there is this element of discipline that's also necessary for complex skills and so with children it's complicated because you want them it's such a gift to have musical skill once you're an adult and you have to ask well how much is it worth torturing your children to get them to develop that and the answer is probably quite a bit because it's such a gift i mean my son and my daughter has musical interest as well it was harder for her because she was really ill for most of her childhood so she couldn't pursue it to the same degree that he did but you know it makes up probably about a quarter to a third of his life in terms of what brings him along and compels him forward and he gets to perform and he's good he's a good guitar player and and he's credible on the piano as well uh much better at it than me with with much much much less practice on the piano per se and so you think with your kids well you know how much do you crack the whip we we put julian in piano lessons when he was young about four and it was a struggle because he was a strong-willed kid and he didn't necessarily want to sit there for half an hour but um it was easier for him for singing that was more compelling for him and and that's where he got most of his musical education and that's been great it's great gift to the family it's wonderful to be able to go over to his house and to have him play and to for all of us to sing together great he actually sang a really great rendition of so lonely at your graduation [Music] yeah you saw that did you that's one oh dude if i am going to interview dr jordan b peterson i am going to do my research and go down that rabbit hole and it's a great version i it's somewhere on the internet it's in the ethers there but you can find it you can't be one of the things i loved about watching him was he was so self-possessed as a performer he just got right into the music and he he keeps the beat really carefully and and he's he's sunk right into it makes him it's hard for me to judge of course because i'm his father and you know you just can't overcome a bias like that but but how do you how far do you push jordan because this is this is what's interested me because i have never pushed my daughter to um i have a son and a daughter and my daughter i've never pushed her musically but her voice is just one of those natural really good sounding voices and she turns me on to all these bands she's the one that turns me onto cave town cage the elephant black blackpool all these indie bands that come sort of come from a little bit from my generation but she's doing that on her own volition but how far do you push kids i mean before it becomes tiger woods father and is tiger wood's father making tiger as great as he is is that the right thing to do or is it where's that line god wouldn't it be lovely if we could figure that out you know i mean i would say for every child that's over encouraged there's a thousand that are under encouraged you know and you obviously don't want to push so hard that your relationship is disrupted and so to some degree you have to calibrate your interactions with each child and you do that even with discipline you know some children you can just shake your finger out when they're misbehaving and that'll stop them and other kids are really stubborn and put up a really remarkable fight and so there's not even a universal prescription for disciplinary measures and there's a wide cultural variation in in that in the answer to that question as well i mean asian first-generation asian immigrants have um disproportionately successful children and it looks like the reason for that is that they push and they instill in their children conscientiousness and that gives them what's equivalent to about a 15 point iq advantage that disappears by about the third generation by the way so i think i think we probably under push as a culture that's that's my sense but it's very very difficult to tell and i think partly we under push because well there's there's first dismiss apprehension that if you discipline your children you'll destroy their creativity and that's just not true that's that's based on a misapprehension of creativity and i also think often it's an excuse for not engaging as well you know i don't want to push my child too hard it's like well yeah really you just don't want to take the time my father spent an awful lot of time with me when i was a kid three four five six years old especially learning to read and it was a tremendous gift to me and i'm i'm thrilled that he did it but and he had extremely high standards but i don't think he pushed me at least with reading what he did was encourage me and that's a skill and a gift to manage that with your children isn't it to encourage them that's that balance and i'm sure there's a lot of people right now listening to the show that have kids that are dealing with this day in and day out because it is that where do you where do you cross that line where where is it where you think you know okay i'm just maybe becoming uh pushing too much of my dreams onto my well that's another thing you can do exactly is live out your unlived dreams through your children look you shouldn't be any easier on your children probably than the world is going to be because you're not doing them well you're not doing that my wife would love that that that advice because she she's wanted actually to ask wanted me to ask you about your sort of feeling on consequences and this sort of becomes about that you know it's it's uh yeah you're exactly right when you say that jordan well if you if you if you over protect your children or if you're too forgiving and you know in our culture it's hard to believe that there could be such a thing as too forgiving you don't prepare them well for how they're going to be received in the world and there's definitely something useful in setting high standards for your children and look you do this with your partner too you want to set high standards but you want to modify them so they're achievable and you want to be participating in that game as well and you can tell if you're pushing too hard you're going to demoralize the child and if you're not pushing at all well then well then you're not there you're not attending to them and so you want to set high standards that are also attainable but even having said that there's still a gray area that that's very difficult to play with are you able to apply about all these um values all these ideas i think you are obviously you you've done it now with not one not two but three books and the newest uh being the the 12 more rules beyond order um do you address a lot of that responsibility finding purpose and sort of rules in these books and who do you think it's for would it be would it be not just for uh not just for one demographic of of audience it's for everyone i feel yes well that's my intent and it's also for me you know while i'm writing and i think any book well writing for me is a form of thinking it's not like i think things up and then i write them down it's the the writing is part of the thinking and so i'm thinking about ethics because i'm thinking about how to behave and and that's for me too and so i'm clarifying my own thoughts while i'm writing these books and then i share that process of clarification with everyone else and walk them through the thought process which is that that that makes the uh argument that's being presented more compelling i would say because the development of an argument is like the telling of a story well we start here and then we investigate a large number of propositions and we end up here and maybe you find the voyage convincing and enlightening and hopefully that would be the case but i'm certainly including myself in the audience that the books are targeted at i'm not saying well here are the rules that have enabled me to master my life and i can deliver them to you it's these are call the question of how to behave and why to behave in that manner what rules to follow what ethics to to what ethics you might adopt to guide you is very very complicated and well it's worth thinking through and i'm guiding the reader through the process of thinking that through in the books and it's there for everyone as far as i'm concerned um some of the rules in the new book uh imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that might be more relevant to younger people who are just formulating their educational plans and their career goals but you know our our identities shift and change with time and so through your life who you could be tomorrow is still going to be a question well like you said earlier your your huge success has come later in life do you feel that that's a bit of a blessing or a curse in some ways it's both um it it's um what would you call it ungrateful to dwell on the curse part of it you know it's sort of the poor celebrity story um i've had a lot of negative attention um and that's uh damaging i would say and difficult to cope with you never know when that's going to take you down and so my family's also had to put up with that uh i think what's happened is it's really expanded the breadth of my experience it's made it more positive and more negative it's it's multiplied it you know and i was successful in a satisfying way before all this took off many years many years before i was gonna say it's not like you haven't had experience since the you know so much successful experience harvard uh started started speaking um and writing books in fact your first book came out in 1999 so it's been you know it's been a long run it's just that it's sometimes that window of where people go oh and it happens all the time with bands too like you'll hear a new band and you'll say oh i love this band uh when did they come out and you'll find their history that they've had five six albums out already right what's the joke it takes 10 years to produce an overnight success something like that and you know what happened and two things happened i guess in conjunction is i started exploring youtube and it's such a powerful technology i mean obviously we're making use of it now it's it's a revolutionary technology for communication and i put my lectures on youtube just as an experiment and i also thought well why not i'm giving these lectures they're popular because i was fortunate enough that my lectures were popular and i thought well i might as well make them accessible to a broader audience and that was partly just curiosity it was like well here's youtube and it's full of at that point it was like mostly cat videos and i thought um well i what what will happen if i put these lectures up on i thought that a lot in my life what will happen if i you know do x and so i had this back catalog of lectures and and then i made some more political videos criticizing some legislation that was coming into canada that i thought was based on a misapprehension of identity from a psychological perspective and also interfered with freedom of speech and it was the conjunction of those two things with this back catalog that produced this spiral upwards you know people came to my youtube site because of the controversy but then they found this back catalog of lectures and that probably saved me from the political uh catastrophe to the degree that i was saved from it which still isn't all that evident but that's but you actually took that technology and made it your own because you know there's not a lot of clinical psychologists rock stars out there when you think of youtube stars or that's or that's the thing i want to say when i went on to your even your own wikipedia says clinical psychologist and youtube personality those two things when when i think of youtube personality pewdiepie you know or you're thinking of logan are you thinking logan paul or you're thinking of you know who whoever but now you have to include your name in that in those senses and this is what brings me to this point of so many similarities of your ascent uh from a rock star and you you have very many uh similarities if i could say you both have you know in general you both have huge fan bases with devoted followers and attractors if you if i must be honest oh yeah yes well there's there's no doubt that there are detractors yes but you know you have 2 million instagram 3.5 million on youtube i think you've sold close to 6 million record or 6 million records here i am six million books um you know between uh 12 rules for life well and some records right that's funny too because you know you know of akira the dawn no no oh well you have to do your research you see i am did i miss that you did you did akira the dawn does this music called meaning wave and he uses ellen watts um as well as me and some other people as well and he takes our lectures and sets them to to music and there's dozens of songs and so that's really interesting i i mean i've i've been in touch with akira a number of times um i'm i don't have anything to do with what he's doing except that it's okay with me and and it's really interesting to watch but he's also he did crowdfund a while back to raise money to produce a vinyl album and i believe that it's coming out in well maybe this month if i remember correctly so that's quite funny so i i do have some records and this meaning wave um my wife likes it yeah there you go that's it right there producers on it my producer didn't miss it i i i didn't catch it i do a musical uh related interview with jordan b peterson and i miss them for them because their pain is so overwhelming that it feels like it will last forever you missed my recording yeah that's that's not good that's not good so you can feel guilty about that after the show if you want i'm not supposed to feel guilt no guilt right yeah or or some or feel some guilt where do you stand on that feeling guilt or not feeling good because there's oh guilt man but look there's you need boundaries on that all the negative emotions can go out of control look it's like philosophy of punishment how bad should you feel when you did something stupid you should feel just bad enough so that you don't do it again but no more than that because it's it's there's no utility in it like imagine that the the functional point of feeling regret is to alter your behavior in the future and then think further about that you might think well what's the purpose of memory and you would say well it's to remember the past to provide an accurate record of the past and that's not right that isn't the purpose of memory the purpose of memory is to stop you from doing the same stupid thing again and so if you've learned your lesson you should let yourself off the hook and i also think that's a good rule for forgiveness it's like if someone is transgressed against you your partner say in a marital relationship or a friend for that matter child anyone that's in repeated interactions with you and they do something wrong you know you might ask yourself well when do you let go and the answer is well when when they stop doing it you know when when they've learned their lesson and then you let it go but no more than that well any more than that is unnecessary right it it what is it gonna it it what it starts to do is to it it produces damaging consequences that aren't productive and i i think that's really useful it's like well have you have you learned your lesson yes well okay then you know with my son for example when we used to discipline him um we'd put him on the stairs kid quit that you're you're you're causing too much trouble go sit on the stairs he'd be angry about that and i'd count you have three seconds to get on the stairs and he'd say don't count don't count and he'd go sit on the stairs and then he'd get himself under control and um we used to let him up as soon as he would behave so the rule was sit on the stairs until you get control of yourself and then come and talk to me and tell me that you know you're ready to be a civilized human being and that's the end of it and that worked out fine because we could look if someone around you does something that isn't acceptable you can't just ignore it what the hell good is that especially if it's child if they're doing something that's disruptive and and would would make them unpopular with their friends or with any other adults you you want to put it on your rules right isn't that one of the rules that you have don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them yeah and that's something you would should talk over with your partner if if you're lucky enough to have one because you know maybe you're kind of arbitrary and everything makes you just like your children you know because you're touchy and volatile but roughly speaking you know if your child does something that you don't approve of what makes you think other people will approve of them and then you have to ask well do you want your child to be approved of by others or not and you know a cynic might say well you know you don't want to turn your child into a rampant conformist and crush all their creativity it's like yeah yeah that's not the point you you want your child to be unbelievably welcome in social groups you want everyone to want to play with him or her you want that and so then you have to modify their behavior very carefully and if they annoy you well probably they're going to annoy other people and like you want your son to be annoying that's not good yeah oh yeah and i i can't be the only one there folks there in the going yeah that's what i need to do i get it but we really tried it with the kids with humor you know because um there was a lot of exchange of jokes in our household and the kids were always in on that and we tried to teach them the fine line between you know funny and annoying or funny and mean because it's a really fine line and and actually the better you are at being funny the closer you get to that line but you have to attend very carefully and then there has to be consequences and you have to say no look that's that joke's not not funny anymore you've taken too far and and and well that that you know harks back to our discussion about how far you go with kids you you you go as far as you you can and be competent your child is so starving for your attention it's just uh kids will do absolutely anything for attention and so your attention is so valuable to them and you can spend that helping them become better children than hooray that's what you should be doing apparently so will guitarists yes well you should respond to your fans right i mean why wouldn't you they like you they're on your side and they're they're for you and and they'll tell you if you listen to them at least to some degree what what you could produce that they would be appreciative of and so of course you should care what they think of you now obviously you can take that too far hello folks roxy here hope you're enjoying the podcast so far i'm very excited today to announce our newest sponsor biodynamic they produce some of the industry's very best quality microphones and headphones and that's where the perfect fit right here in the trenches you're hearing my voice today through the great tg v70 microphone this mic is perfect for any home studio plus i get to use it on stage i have paired the mic with the legendary biodynamic studio headphones and they're called the dt770 pros these are amazing for analytical listening truly the most authentic sound experience i've ever had so whether it's listening to a podcast or one of your favorite albums i definitely recommend these treat yourself right with biodynamic gear the gold standard in high fidelity now let's get back to the podcast what do you feel about delaying gratification because it seems like with me uh playing on stage it just seems like immediate gratification you just want that and that's where that's what i've missed in 2020 is not being on that tour but what do you how do you feel about this delaying gratification if it's going to help you out more in the long run well it's a human conundrum isn't it it's it's it's this thing that you never quite get an answer for because you know you can forego gratification and save up for your retirement and then be run over by a bus tomorrow and it's like the spence thrift down the street who had three holidays in two years you know and and spent their retirement money they're laughing at you because you're dead and and so what's good is your money to you and so we're always caught in this terrible bind of how much for now and how much for later and well how do we solve that well we consult our conscience that's it you consult your conscience and listen to it you try not to lie to yourself you know because you know when you're burning up tomorrow for today and in a counterproductive way and and and and then also even if you do want a certain amount of immediate gratification you talked about your tour okay so you go on stage and you get that immediate gratification but you have a structured and ritualized day around that and you have to be on the bus like you can't be in such bad shape that you can't get on the bus and you have to get some sleep and so you know you're delaying gratification all the time there in order to make the times you do get to be gratified sustainable and repeatable across time and i think you if you're honest with yourself you know when you're doing that you're sitting there playing a video game or or maybe you're on twitter or whatever it happens to be and you know you start to get uneasy because you know there's something you should be doing you're not playing the game you set up by the rules you established and then then you get uncomfortable with yourself and then you brush that off it doesn't matter i can or i can get away with this or i'm not going to pay any attention and then that just makes you feel guilty and stupid which it should because you know you're doing things that aren't good and you are stupid so you should feel that way i don't think delay of gratification for its own sake is a good thing and if you can find a way to be happy it's like more power to you but but i also think that almost all the time people find happiness when they're pursuing things that are worthwhile rather than when they're pursuing happiness well you say that a lot or at least the conveying message in a lot of the books that you write and a lot of the lectures that you uh put on and videos that you make make a plan you tell people you say it's important to make a plan now otherwise other people will make plans for you so you know there's there's not no plan you know if you're not if you if you're not the captain of your own ship let's say well then you're just acting out the plans of well all the people that advertised you on the internet for example or who manipulate your attention in one way or another while you're engaged in impulsive gratification so so no it's it's better to make a plan even if it's a bad plan and that's that's something that's really useful to know too make a bad plan implement it well that's the best you can do right now okay so you implement a bad plan what do you learn well you learn exactly why it was bad and that's really useful and so then you make a slightly better plan and that's another part of being a fool voluntarily it's like well i'm willing to take this risk and do something should i do this and this i've learned as a consequence of being a clinician i really learned this because you might ask yourself well what if i don't know what to do should i just wait until i know and what i've observed is that's not a very good strategy you should take the best stupid plan that you have and implement it and then it's okay to be the fool it's okay to be the fool it's necessary well look every time i've done something new in my life and i've done that you know starting to be a graduate student and teaching instead of being a student then being a professor instead of a graduate student then entering the business world and speaking to managers and corporate types which i did for decades and and expanding my clinical practice and then going on youtube and every time i've done something new i didn't know what the hell i was doing when i started and i felt like a complete fraud but not a fraud right an imposter and i in some sense i was because i i should have had more expertise to than i did to be doing what i was doing but you have to start somewhere and you know people are actually very forgiving of that as long as you're not arrogant about it if you're a beginner yeah well if you're a beginner and you say look um i'm doing my best but i'm stupid and here's a bunch of things i don't know generally speaking the competent people who are in that domain will help you now if you put on errors and you pretend to knowledge that you don't have and they can see that because they actually know well then they're gonna they're not gonna help you because they're not gonna trust you but if you're a genuinely blind beginner then anybody with a decent heart who's real is gonna help you because they were blind beginners at one point too and in all likelihood they found someone to help them so i would say the young people out there um in tv land so to speak like make a plan man and and if it's bad don't worry about it but stick it out and learn and then you'll make a better plan and and maybe reach out to help from from people higher up and they will pass the torch onto you whatever it is the torch of rock the torch of knowledge what you know they will help and you you are right because i do get that a lot from people that uh whether they dm me and stuff they'll ask advice and i will do my best to always uh return why why do you do that because i really want people to live for me i want people to experience the same sort of joy that i've been able to experience doing what i get to do for a living and so why do you think helping other people with that is a positive thing for you i don't know so much i i just know that i i i just feel that perhaps don't follow in my footsteps but but know that it can be done because if people try to do things the exact same way i did i guarantee you it's going to be very hard to to make it to any sort of point because i've i always say you know how did you get the alice cooper gig and i said i was at the right place at the right time but i was in about a thousand wrong places at wrong times before that yeah and that's standard that's exactly standard yeah every wrong turn that i could do i get and i don't know if my sort of pathway to wherever i'm going because i still haven't got i don't feel i've gotten there yet at all um is is based on that don't follow in my footsteps but look at my footsteps and see that they can actually get to a certain point you know well being in a lot of the wrong places at least puts you out there in a lot of places and virtually everybody who's successful has had a success you know in one place that they've they and that they've the success is embedded in a landscape of non-success it happens all the time well i put up a bunch of answers on the website quora at one point which is a website where anybody can ask any question and um you know your answers get viewed by a number of people and almost all my answers were viewed by very few people but a couple of them were viewed by a lot of people and what the one that was most viewed is the one that i turned into these two books and so i made 50 answers and 45 of them were failures you know they weren't because some people looked at them and it wasn't obvious which ones were going to take off and that's being in the right place at the right time because you have to match what it is that you're selling has to match what it is that people are buying and you you can't predict that ahead of time and so that's another reason to put yourself in the game um you know it's a lottery in some sense but if you buy enough tickets there's some reasonable probability that you'll you'll win on one of them well you've always been sort of ahead of the game when it comes that because you maybe it's because you've been willing to try these new things like i said in 2013 you know way before youtube was a thing you you started it you and you put out you did it i can tell you another thing about that that i that maybe will be helpful to people i've also really tried hard not to be counterproductively contemptuous and i'll tell you what i mean by that you know among my academic colleagues because i've been involved in various business ventures for decades and with a certain degree of seriousness not as much perhaps as someone whose livelihood is dependent on that business alone but my clinical practice was a business and i have these suites of self-development tools online and and so on and so there is a business aspect and and many of my academic colleagues feigned a kind of contempt for the business world and they would phrase it essentially in in moral terms you know how can you work with the business school those evil capitalist types basically selling out marketing selling and all that filthy stuff that's associated with capitalism and then you know among businessmen i'd see the same contempt for academics it's like well they live in an ivory tower and what they do isn't applicable to the real world and i thought well look it's actually really hard to be a successful academic it's not easy to teach especially to teach well and it's really difficult to publish it that success rejection rate for most scientific uh venues is like 95 percent if they're high-end you have to work a lot to be successful like 60 hours a week and it's the same in the business world it's hard and you you can have contempt for people who sell and market and who sell out but the probability is pretty high that no one's ever offered you the opportunity to sell out and they won't because they don't have anything to sell and what good is it that you do have something if you don't know how to sell it and so and and it was the same with talk about talking to the press or or engaging in in more public interactions with the media i saw the same sort of thing again among my academic colleagues as well the press always gets it wrong it's like well no not always and maybe they're just not that interested in what you have to say and you have the skepticism about them to protect you from that and so i always said yes to things and i wasn't contemptuous of them and you know and then i'd enter into the business world and find out i just didn't bloody well know anything like i had no idea to begin with that if you have a good product to offer people you've solved about five percent of the problems you have to solve in order to make something successful and i completely underestimated the difficulty and necessity of sales and marketing and i have tremendo tremendous respect for people who are good at both of those things yeah no doubt networkers i mean you're talking about another thing you know it's not who you know it's not what you know it's who you know and that's contemptuous it's like yes it is who you know because if if i talk to you and you know 30 people who are really competent in something you're a great problem-solving resource man because you can say well go talk to this person and like make a rolodex well that's the old terminology keep your contact list updated and this is really true as you get older and older and you know maybe you rise up in a particular hierarchy the connection network that you have around you becomes of unbelievable utility so so and you should note that that's something of value your social connections and not be contemptuous of it you have to really look out for uh the the narrowing effect of casual contempt i say something similar to that when people ask me about being in a band and how can i get to to get in a band i say be friends and remain friends with the people you're playing with now because they will get you into your next gig in one way or another it's good to not have uh you know complete animosity towards your bands that break up because there will be i i've played about 100 bands 98 you've never heard of right but with those bands that i play with over the years i've managed to maintain friendships and so many of those friendships and musician relationships have gotten me to the next band okay you know i got into alice cooper on a you know recommendation from gilbee clark who i was playing with so and gilby was playing with guns and rose at the time but i had played with gilby back in the 80s in a band called candy so these things run deep man and you're right it's it's it you do have all those things that i think would think have negative connotations are actually positive and you can yeah well you you're content you're contemptuous at your peril you know i mean it's really it's a really nasty thing i mean i also see with my books the mainstream media critics in particular are often contemptuous of my audience or my my supposed audience you know when they say well it's you know young male in cells or something cutting like that and i think well even if it was just young male in cells do you think that like what those are untouchables or lepers or something like that they're supposed to be shunned outside the walls of the city and never spoken to and that that contempt is really a bad thing i i really think it's driving political division to a great degree i think it lost hillary clinton the election in 2016 you know because she was contemptuous of the basket of deplorables many of whom were hypothetically the working-class audience that the democrats were actually supposed to serve and i see the same casual contempt between people on the right and the left now and i in in beyond order in my new book the first chapter in particular which is uh do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement you know it's an argument for paying attention to the people who to the people who aren't like you politically or temperamentally you know so the liberal types are more creative generally speaking that that's a predictor of liberal affiliation and i think the reason for that is that um more creative people like information flow so they like loose borders and that sort of tilts them in a liberal direction politically whereas the conservative types they're not so interested in information flow it doesn't capture them the same way and they're also more orderly and and and conscientious but you need both those sorts of people you need the entrepreneurial liberal types to start enterprises and to rejuvenate tired and desiccated institutions but you need the conservative types to run things efficiently and to keep track of detail and those are really different sorts of people and diverse there's where diversity really lies in temperament and and and it's hard for people of different temperaments to understand each other but they're they're necessary that interplay between the temperaments is unbelievably necessary and you should develop an appreciation for it and the way you talk about conformity it's another one of those things it's it's not a bad thing because you equate conformity sometimes with peace yes well look maybe fitting in isn't the best thing but not being able to fit in is a complete bloody catastrophe you know and with your children you don't want them to be drones of the system but you don't want them to be so peculiar and ill-behaved and erratic that nobody can stand being around them and so it's a you know this is this is another one of these paradoxical situations that we all have to contend with you have to be and should be acceptable to others desirable to others and that should drive you hard but then by the same token you don't want to sacrifice your essential integrity and and individuality to the demands of the crowd but you have to be aware of the virtue on both sides of those things and well i think that before you can be really different you have to be disciplined and and able to conform and then maybe you can get past that you learn the rules first and then maybe you can break them do you think that you'll go on another one of these book tours and the things that you're saying right now i could see this being a live show i could see this being a tour you know maybe not as big or because because i questioned myself will it ever be like it was in 2019 touring or you know years before are we going to get back to this point where we can meet in a huge social gathering without being paranoid and because so many of these ideas i can see you you know standing in front of a large audience and people really taking it in well i'd love to do it i i really i really loved the tour it was extremely intense which is another rock star thing that you did you did an actual 160 city world tour which is so yeah well and yeah well in all these venues i went to these theaters these beautiful old theaters they were places where all the people who i admired in the artistic community musical community particularly but some performing community as well they had all played so that was so fun to go backstage and you know in most of the theaters there's a wall where everybody who's performed and so that's so cool to see all that and there was hundreds and hundreds of famous names and all these great places and so it was great to see backstage it was such a privilege and to be able to experience that you know when i do have kind of a jazz improvisation form of lecturing you know i have these stories and concepts that i've worked on for a long time probably mostly through writing but also through practicing them in speech i can draw on them and then so i can kind of aggregate something original on the fly and pay attention to the audience at the same time and well you must know what that's like as a musician you know improv yes but we need structure as well yeah well absolutely but you know you get to the height of a performance if you're lucky where you're playing the whole auditorium because everybody in the auditorium is on sync with what you're doing and you can feel that you can you can feel that when you're when you're in the audience at a concert you know they say the whole place is rocking and that's exactly what's happening because everybody's on the beat and they're all in the same place and and can you feel that in a lecture absolutely man absolutely if you well but you you get that and i'm sure this must be the case for for musicians you get that when you're when you're also attending to the audience because you have to be reacting to them there's this mutual reaction yeah exactly and so and when that start when that kicks into the right groove and the whole place gets rocking that's when it's like a religious experience at a musical show and it really is like a religious experience that's that's uh that's exactly right and so a lecture can be like that if you're really communicating with the audience and and you you have to watch them individual audience members to be able to do that and you can't just be reading like or or even citing say stating something that's been memorized because it detaches you from the audience and you can't bring them into the groove whatever that is that's occurring what's great when that happens it's there's nothing better than that it's great when it happens and all the notes fall into place and i'm sure for you it's all the words fall into place but you know sometimes don't the words get jumbled and it comes across a little bit i missed a note here oh definitely well and there are notes too right because look part of the reason we respond to music the way we do is that our our speech has is musical right all the you know you don't like listening to someone who's just speaking in a monotone with no cadence or rhythm and the reason for that is that there's no melody and the melody carries the emotions and so when you're speaking you want to get the rhythm right and you want to get the melody right as well as the words and i think part of the reason that akira the dawn has been able to set my words to music is because i do speak rhythmically and when i write a book i read all the sentences out loud and i listen to them to see that they have a beat so that's the poetic element of the writing you know to the degree that i've managed that but you can tell if you have managed that because you can read the sentences out loud quite easily because they have a uh a rhythmic cadence that matches matches your capacity to generate speech and so if you do a good lecture you have to get that all that right the rhythm the the melody the the the explicit content and then also the attention to the audience and bringing them into the discussion and you can tell you know you look at someone in the audience when you're speaking just like when you're having the conversation we're having now you and i are both checking each other out constantly to see if we're understanding what the other person said and if we're on this if we're on the same wavelength and if it's working well we both get deeply engaged in the conversation and if you and i get deeply engaged it's fairly probable that the audience will too right we found that because really what we're doing is dancing you know you can see that on stage with musicians when when you know the singer and the guitar player or or whoever two musicians in the band just get into each other it's almost as if the whole audience gets into that into that moment as well definitely well and we're really good human beings are really good at in inhabiting other people's bodies you know and so when we're watching a movie essentially what we do is we we we see what the characters up to we we identify their goals by looking at their actions and as soon as we identify their goals we can make them our goals and as soon as we do that we can feel the emotions and the motivations of the character and so we're in training ourselves physically with the person on the screen and we can experience everything they experience when you do that in and you also see in music that dance because many musical pieces they'll be the guitarist will do one thing and then another instrument will respond it's like a dialogue between two people or sometimes it's more than a dialogue and there's often other voices underneath but there's a statement musical statement and then a musical response and then a statement and then a musical response and there's a speech-like element to that as well so well let me ask you because now i'm i'm really curious because i have these huge musical influences that i've looked up to since i was a kid i always say i i looked at the posters on my wall i wanted to become those posters and eventually i was able to make a living and actually playing with some of those posters you know some of those guys and on the on those on my wall so i have these huge influences cheap trick being one of them the beatles being others you have and i think some of my playing and my songwriting reflects that i know as a psychologist you know carl jung he's a big influence on you nietzsche uh nietzsche is a big influence do you feel that those two are uh big big influences or do you have more and do you feel that perhaps when you're speaking do their styles come through even though it's different do they come through a little bit lovely if they did you know i mean you'd i'd certainly hope i'd certainly aspire to that um jung and nietzsche were geniuses of sort of unparalleled proportion and so to think that comes through is would be what presumptuous that's up to other people to decide it's certainly something that i would aim at though i mean that's the thing about picking your role models isn't it is that you get to pick who you would like to be be like like to become and really in some sense that's if you're really being educated that's what you're doing is you you find these people and we're so fortunate because they can be people who are already dead and we have their records of one form or another sometimes actually records you could say well i'd like to be like that and then you mimic it and and and and learn from doing that and maybe you can add something original to it if you're if you're fortunate i mean i've been deeply influenced by many many many people that i've read particularly but also who mentored me my my my mentor at mcgill robert peel who's still alive and still a very close friend taught me a tremendous amount was a great source of encouragement most of what i've learned i would say intellectually has been a consequence of books on my website there's under books there's a list of recommended books there's about a hundred of them there and so i've and you know i tell people if you want to be educated you could go read that hundred book list now that doesn't mean you're going to know everything about everything or even anything about everything but you're you're you've got a good start if you read those books you'll have a good start some of them are extraordinarily difficult and others aren't and i've been overwhelmingly influenced by by what i've read uh dozens of almost all the great clinical psychologists have had a profound influence on me and that was also something i was never contemptuous about a particular like a school of psychology i learned a lot from the behaviorists really cut and dried scientists right they weren't into dream analysis or any of that mystical stuff they were hard-nosed scientists and everything had to be defined exactly and simplified and brilliant elegant concise practical thinking every term defined i really liked carl rogers he taught me a lot about how to listen abraham maslow about values freud because freud delved into dreams and was so interested in pathological family dynamics and over dependency and you see that play out in clinical practice all the time i loved jung because of his unbelievably expansive imagination and his his unparalleled uh creative intellect and nietzsche because of his way way with words he he was he god you know nietzsche bragged at one point he said um i can write in a sentence what it takes other people an entire book to convey and then he said no that can't even be conveyed in one of their entire books and right so he was a rock star oh yeah well he had this unbelievably egotistical statement which he immediately topped by even more egotistical statements the thing about nietzsche is it was true like he has sentences that that just they just unwind in your mind like a like a stick of dynamite so he was prince basically you're saying you're saying that he was prince yeah well exactly exactly in his own philosophical world and it's great to find people like that and and to be humble enough to to admire them and you know that's well that's part of the pro problem of being cynical and contemptuous of history too it's like well man you could learn just think you could model yourself after the great people of history but you'd have to admit that there's such a thing as great and you'd have to admit that people who came before us could be in that category and then you also have to admit that you're not in that category yet and maybe never will be which is a hard thing to admit you know and and disheartening but if you do admit it then all of a sudden hey look man the the world is open to you really it is the case you you have to be aware of casual contempt it's a terrible mistake what have you if you accept the possibility of failure i think it helps you with success i think if you can accept the fact that you can definitely fail and fall flat on your face it'll help you get to your goal i i've got well that's another issue that's so complicated when you're raising children you you don't want your children to fail but you don't want them to be unable to tolerate failure because if you try many times you're going to fail you could take homer simpson's advice and just stop trying as a consequence right what did you learn bart never try you know no so you you want to you want your children to do things that are difficult enough so that they don't succeed sometimes and and and still be able to tolerate that um the thing about failure though my my experience with failure so far has been that i never really did fail at anything i actually tried now what i mean by that isn't that i necessarily got what i was aiming for but i usually learn something that was extremely valuable that i could then use for something else and and i i think that's look you can get unlucky and and you know you can fail so hard that you can't recover that happens um i mean look people die right and sometimes they die because they fail at something it's it's a it's real and it doesn't always make you stronger you know to fail sometimes it just wipes you out so it's a real danger can't always be a fortune cookie everything i say everything that you read can't always be helpful advice sometimes it does suck yeah and sometimes it sucks and there's very little to be derived from it too well you can tell that as i said because people die sometimes the news is so bad that you don't recover from it and but but that aside my experience has been and i've watched lots of people too is that if you put your heart into something and discipline yourself in the pursuit of that goal you'll gain all sorts of things that you can bring to your next to your next venture and so most dedicated effort isn't wasted you so that's a kind of optimism i would say we're so glad to have you back um i know it's been a tumultuous year uh for you and it's great to see that the new book beyond order 12 more rules for life is uh out now and it's coming like i said to get real quick with the books um there's some rock and rollers books go-to books all the time and i saw that a few of them were on your list but one of them wasn't but i i saw you george orwell you have 18 1984 on there you have uh brave new world uh atlas huxley i think as well um or wait that was out yep elvis huxley and but you did not have what oh there's there's it is right now vic our producer is putting up that list and and there's so many people that visit the uh book list every single day but also one book that was left out i feel and i just wanted to maybe put it in a suggestion box but what are your feelings because it is a very rock and roll uh sort of book uh and maybe you can guess what i'm going to say or you know what it is no no i don't i don't know anthony burgess ah anthony burgess uh however you want to say it uh that would be a clockwork orange now right burgess also wrote on music directly about music and you can you can tell that too uh well remember clockwork orange has a brilliant musical score by philip uh no by uh oh you talk about the cubic the stanley kubrick movie yeah that kubrick movie yeah it was put to synthesize classical music um transgender composer um i would say maybe the first famous transgender person a wendy carlos wendy walter carlos damn um your research staff is better than mine the music that was set to clockwork orange which is brilliant she or he he to begin with she later um uh produced a synthesized version of the bach brandenburg concertos which is great i think the brandenburg concerto is a very complexly layered brilliant piece of music uh multiple pieces of music and if you use a synthesizer with each change in musical phrasing you can assign a slightly different tone and so it adds a level of complexity to the an already incredibly complex piece that acoustic instruments couldn't manage you know the acoustic instruments they have their great advantage right because you can make them sing and you can bend and distort them in this way that's almost alive i've read actually that we process musical instruments perceptually using the same systems that we use on living organisms so for us musical instruments are actually a kind a kind of living thing at a very deep neurological level and you can kind of see that with an acoustic instrument because and great great musicians are so good at this they they'll take a note and bend and distort it almost to the point where it's dissonant and uncomfortable and they just play with that edge of of consonance and dissonance and that's well that's part of the way they show their expertise and their willingness to go you know out to the edge of a boundary and that's very exciting in a concert too to hear someone do that they put that rough edge on something it's just about breaking in some sense right there oh yeah it's just about ready to fall off the tracks and then it comes back on that that's the mark of a good solo i watched um um white stripes um who who's the who's the main jack white jack white he had had a documentary about one of his tours and he showed how he set up his stage which i thought was so interesting he had this old beat up guitar that was barely hanging together uh that the termites in the wood were holding hands and that was the only reason it wasn't collapsing and he could hardly keep it in tune he had to tune it all the time while he was playing while he was on stage and then he put the instruments on the stage that he would run to in difficult to get to places to put these obstacles in front of them to make it more difficult on stage but the consequence of that was that he really had to pay attention and there was this interesting distortion and trouble that sort of ran through the music which i thought was you know brilliant and unexpected and extremely interesting and you hear that in tom waits too because every time i hear a new tom waits album i think oh jesus you've finally gone too far it's just too much it's too dissonant it's too harsh it's too it's it's nails on the blackboard it's and then i listen to it three or four times and i think oh my god you know it's so bloody brilliant well if you want to hear some dissonance uh i'm definitely inviting you to the next show we do in toronto actually when when the alice cooper band plays toronto we love that town it's it's quite quite nice and uh i don't know if it's still called the molson theater the outdoor yeah that's a great place for music eh it's a great great venue yeah i saw allison krause there and that was really fun and a variety of country music folk at that particular venue and also uh who else has played there that i saw um now that now that's going to run out of my mind because i want to call it to mind but yes that's a great place to listen to music it's lovely to do that outside and hopefully we'll get lucky and we'll do all that again soon yeah and who knows at one at one venue because we get we do get to play a lot of those theaters that you were talking about uh with alice cooper as well so um hopefully our paths will cross jordan peterson it's been more than a pleasure having you on i want to talk a little bit about the book and just where people can get it right now because i know that you have some socials on there vic our producer can put up all those social media uh tags right there folks if you want to check out jordan b peterson the b is for burnt uh barrett bernd i have some norwegian friends that say the same thing i know that um i know that day but i wanted to leave with one of your quotes from your ted talk and this might have been your first ted talk because i think my take away from it was it's really important for everyone to hear follow what you're interested in it will confront you with adversity but will change you from a citizen to an individual and then the doors will open again am i close in saying that and was that you that sounds like something i might say i'm okay i love that because it is hopeful at the end of the day you do with your books and and your knowledge you are giving hope to a lot of people that need it well i wouldn't that be lovely if that was the case i i'd sure be uh pleased if that that happens because you know a little more hope would be a lovely thing and a little more encouragement to people i think we're bombarded constantly by i think really anti-human messages you know about our guilt for the destruction of the planet and our the horror of our existence as a species and our contemptible nature and all of that and you know fair enough fair enough we can be destructive and but we have a hard lot to bear and we do pretty well given everything we have to put up with and i think it's much better to encourage people than to discourage them and to say like you know there isn't anything wrong with your ambition as long as it's allied with care for other people and honesty and more power to you and you know you can bring out the best in yourself and others and that'll make the world a better place and and i believe that and and it's it's very uh it's a very positive thing to see the effect of that kind of message on people and it looks to me like people are starving for it and that's unfortunate you know well i hope the new book beyond order 12 more rules for life does spread more of that and uh you're able to promote it throughout 2021. jordan uh thank you so much for being on in the trenches um hang on for just one second and uh everybody here that's been able to see this uh very special episode for me of in the trenches hopefully it was a special episode for you i want to thank dr jordan b peterson for being our guest today go out and check out uh beyond order 12 more rules for life thanks again jordan my pleasure and thank you for having me on your show and and for take stepping out of the the trench to talk to someone who isn't a musician it's been so much of a pleasure and hopefully we can do it again sometime thanks for talking alice thanks for talking rock and roll thanks for talking kids most of all thanks for talking knowledge i'm ryan roxy until next time enjoy the ride [Music] the trenches with ryan rock

Channel: Ryan Roxie Official

Views: 23,156

Rating: 4.9496613 out of 5

Keywords: ryan roxie, in the trenches, alice cooper, alice cooper welcome to my nightmare, jordan b peterson podcast, jordan peterson debate, jordan peterson, jordan b peterson, jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson gender, jordan b peterson debate, jordan b peterson interview, jordan peterson gender pronouns, jordanpeterson, jordan, peterson, 12 rules for life book, jordan peterson red skull ben shapiro, marvel comics, beyond order 12 more rules for life review, captain america 4

Id: TSfS8u9EOW8

Length: 93min 22sec (5602 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021