Jordan Peterson Opens Up About Absence & Life Beyond Order

trump's an anomaly he's his own weird thing he certainly is a troublemaker by temperament to a fair degree and a trickster and he was very good at that i mean look he was a democrat so i don't really know what to make of him what was your reaction when you heard about the fact that the 45th president united states was being banned permanently in a very powerful virtual government called twitter i thought that companies who are doing such things have no idea what to police the content of what's being exchanged on their networks why do you think opposition doesn't want you to know what he's thinking a large part of the american population felt silenced they're scared he has the power of a demagogue that he could harness the crowd for nefarious ends they view him as a mussolini in the making how much of this has to do with your book beyond order rule number six abandon ideology i think that's something that we are struggling with as a nation well people struggle with it all the time because we're attracted to oversimplifications and it's no wonder because the complexity of the world is daunting and some of it's just a matter of not being taught to think well which is kind of where we are today though the less we think the more we can be controlled my guest today is clinical psychologist dr jordan peterson who's been on valuetainment two times before and he is back for the third we are very happy to have him his book in 2018 was ranked number one in non-fiction in us canada uk australia new zealand sweden the netherlands brazil norway slater for translation in 50 plus languages that book 12 rules for life that change millions of people's lives and uh finally we decided let's figure something out to bring him back on everybody's excited about his new book that just came out beyond order 12 more rules for life with that being said dr jordan peterson thank you so much for being a guest again on valuetainment good to see you i'm i'm looking forward to speaking with you so so how are things how you doing increasingly better increasingly better that's great to hear yeah yeah i'm i'm working quite effectively for three hours a day now up from zero and so three hours is a lot more than zero and i'm working every day for about three hours and i'm starting to expand that so i'm getting i've been diagnosed with sleep apnea very severe sleep apnea and so i now have a machine to deal with that and that seems to have helped a lot i i wasn't really sleeping at all apparently so that's relevant and it's been very helpful to have that addressed and i've adapted to the machine quite rapidly now it has has your wife adapted to the machine because it's pretty noisy if it's the one i think it is the new ones are very quiet okay good that's very very quiet non-obtrusive and and it's much better than not sleeping i got to tell you i've been watching you on camera the last few months just to see because you can tell a lot from someone's eyes that the fire looks like it's coming back in those eyes your eyes today seem very different than uh the last uh few months it's it sounds like your your energy's coming back up it seems like uh the equilibrium is coming back up if that makes any sense but just watching you the way you look right now you look great thank you i appreciate that so so you know uh obviously you know we missed you 2020 and 2019 uh with the whole catastrophic time that we went through with covet i mean it was a very strange time that we went through and there was a lot of times where you know you would turn to see what this person's saying let me see what he's saying about today's times what is she saying what are they saying it's like let me see what jordan's saying oh he's not here with us while you were going through your uh phase of you know recovery working on yourself getting yourself back to where you used to be how were you sitting there were you following the news were you following what's going on were you sitting there saying oh my gosh this is crazy i gotta say something about this somebody give me a mic i want to say something about this but you couldn't did you feel like you were silenced where you couldn't see it say anything or were you just not in a position where you didn't follow the news you didn't follow anything that was going on well in 2019 i was preoccupied with my wife's illness and and that just took me out of the public realm pretty much all together except when it was absolutely unavoidable because it was day-to-day catastrophe for months on end and before that it was my daughter for for a month because she had a serious surgery and so that i was out of public uh i was out of public eye and not concerned with public issues for about nine months then and then i got very ill and so i was watching what was going on with covet and of course it was affecting my family and i we were in florida for mo for much of that my parents were with me and my sister and some other family members and now and then some friends and so we were all affected by that just as everyone was but i never really felt that i had anything particularly intelligent to say about covid i mean it's it's a catastrophe um economically and and from the perspective of health but it i didn't feel that i had any insights that were going to be extraordinarily useful to people i think it was just as well that i kept my mouth shut during that period and besides that i was in no shape to craft a careful argument and put it in front of the public so well so if i had to miss a year i suppose this was a pretty good year to miss that makes sense if you had a messy year it was a good year to miss yeah my son had it my son and his wife had a baby and so that was a blessing in the midst of all this catastrophe and so when i did want to focus on something that was outside that was available right there once i got back home so you know that was that was the positive part of the year for us or at positive part of the year you said when your wife got diagnosed with cancers that if i'm getting debates right i don't know maybe off april of 2019 is that the right time well she was actually diagnosed in 2018 but we were told to begin with that it was a common and easily treatable very slow growing tumor and then it turned out to be uh not that at all it turned out to be something that was virtually was fatal in virtually all cases and very rare and so it was and and then she had a tremendous amount of surgical trauma that lasted for months that that was also life-threatening on a day-to-day basis i want to show you something i'm going to show you a video of yourself we you and i were together in las vegas at the same event where i had the late kobe bryant at with the president bush and jordan peterson and uh billy bean if you remember that event we're at mirage there's about 7 000 people there i'm asking you a question about your kids and this was your answer and your reaction and i want to come back and ask you this is to give you the dates so we can date this this is july 31st of 2019. so watch the video and then i want to get your reaction from it sure little children pay you back immensely if you have a good relationship with them you know if you're on their side and encourage them because they're an unconditional source of joy and love powerful you know the the other thing i noticed that you should that that you should all know is that as you get older your family the family you've produced becomes more and more important you know so we teach young women in particular that the fundamental goal of their life is going to be their career and you know first of all most people don't have careers they have jobs and those are very different things but you're not a very happy camper so to speak if you're 45 and you have no one and it doesn't go upwards after that that was july 31st 2019 when i interviewed you and i walked away you know you and i had sat down together once before in dallas when he came to the office and we had a great conversation together i walked away after the interview i said you know this guy's dealing with something there's something very heavy that he's dealing with right now and you know even upcoming to the event you said you know your wife was going through challenging times and you still made the event up until the day we didn't know if you were going to make it or not but you were able to make it and i was very impressed the fact that you made it but give you one of the very few events i did that year and we were very grateful for it and you positively impacted a lot of people's lives many people made some major decisions in their lives after that even based on the words that you shared with them but can you can you kind of you know let us know where were you at what were you thinking about on july 31 2019 well i mean i was i was thinking that there was a high probability that i was going to lose my wife so um that seemed virtually certain and so that was and i watched the consequences of that for my kids and and her family and you know it brought home to me and i had been traveling around a lot as well and seeing people who were lonesome and hurt because their family structure was not what they needed it to be and so i was also seeing a lot of that and carrying that around in some sense because i've seen a lot of misery in in people as a consequence of all the public lecturing i've been doing and also just walking around because people come up to me all the time and tell me about their life in a very uh open way very rapidly and and so all of that was affecting me um and i had my own health troubles at the time as well so but i think another part of what was affected me was that while that was happening i had a tremendous outpouring of support there was a tremendous outpouring of support from me and my family from our extended family who we almost always had someone from our extended family tammy's sister or my sister my mother or tammy's brother with us they stayed with us for weeks on end and my friends as well and my friends have been unbelievably helpful to me they've gone way out of their way to help me during this time some of them went to russia when i was there and uh came down to florida to stay for long periods of time and then also the same thing happened on the public level we had hundreds of letters well tammy was in the hospital my sister printed those out in color and put them up in the hospital room and that was really helpful and i think it affected my last book too because the book has a more communitarian ethos than the first one i'm i've become much more sensitive to the the cooperative role that people play in making each other better and because i do believe that each individual in some sense is obligated to to work towards their own salvation so to speak and you can think about that agnostically if you want you you need to do good in the world and it's the most rewarding possible thing to do and your conscience tortures you if you don't do that and that's very unpleasant and so everyone in in the deepest part of them they're highly motivated to to make things better and that's that is something you do individually but it's also something that you do with a tremendous amount of help and you can also be helpful to others and i've seen so much of that so so many people were so helpful to us that it just shocked me and that includes the public who the members because i didn't know for example when i came back in november because that's sort of when i started re-entering public life to some degree i had no idea how i would be treated you know and i was ambivalent about the morality of my illness because you know what's been broadly reported was that i developed a dependence on benzodiazepines which is true but i was also extremely ill before i took them which is why i took them to begin with and i still don't know why that was exactly i haven't figured that out or or know if it's going to go away but it's certainly been the case that people have been unbelievably helpful and and so all that was in my mind when i was talking on stage it's always in my mind i suppose yeah and obviously the tour you did you know we're talking about 160 cities i don't know how many countries you went to 500 000 tickets sold you went all over the world like you were on tour regularly traveling going all over the place what was tougher for you was it tougher for you to come out and tell the world what you were struggling with or was it tough to come back from that because your image when we think about the image of jordan peterson it's it's values it's prince of principles it's what many men uh uh see an example like you know i want to be like this man one day that i want to be able to follow a strong example of somebody like him uh uh was it tougher for you to come out and tell the world i'm dealing with this addiction or was it more when i come back how is the world going to receive me are they going to welcome you which one was tougher for you oh i i think they were both almost insufferably tough you know i mean and i wasn't really in a position to defend myself in some sense because i didn't know exactly what had happened to me i still really don't know um you know but i'd already decided at that point long before that point that the way to deal with complex issues is just to say what you think about them you know i wasn't trying to craft a message that would ease my re-entrance into the public life again i was trying to pick up the pieces of my life and move forward but i wasn't i thought how to handle everything that happened i just said what had happened is to the best of my ability and that is what i try to do i'm not trying to craft a message for a particular purpose i'm other than maybe i'm trying i'm hoping that i'm trying to make things better that's a purpose but it's kind of abstract in some sense but what i'm doing apart from that is just trying to say what i believe to be the case at the moment and i've really been thinking about that a lot lately too because like i have a formal technique for my lectures hey so when i sit down to give a lecture i i sit down for 20 minutes beforehand i have to be alone and i have to go into kind of a reverie and and so i relax and then i think okay well what problem am i going to talk about tonight and i don't mean that i'm going to supply an answer i'm what i'm going to do is to try to push my thinking about the answer to that problem and the problem itself how it should be formulated farther than i've managed to push it so far and then i think well here's the ideas that i can draw on to walk through that prop that process of problem specification and analysis and then we'll just see what happens we'll see how that goes and and so then it's it's it's spontaneous thought that's happening on stage um you know i use pieces of things that i've already thought up but that doesn't matter they're combined in an original way to the degree that i can do that in real time and i think the reason that that engrosses the audience is partly because it's it is a genuine approach attempt to further an exploration of truth at least insofar as i can formulate it and so and then it's also in some sense like a story because i can lay out an argument from start to end and everyone can follow along with it and then i've been trying to figure out what i'm doing in podcasts or what podcasts are good for and i think it's exactly the same thing in that they're a real revolutionary replacement for standard mainstream media journalistic interviews for example you know when a podcast really works you and you tell me what you think about this i mean my experience is that when a podcast really works you have two people who are uh exploring a set of concepts mutually and they're they're engaged in a genuine process of the exchange of ideas so it's dialectical thinking it's real-time dialectical thinking and i think of it as it's it's a manifestation of the logos all things considered and that's compelling because it's so useful and so it's compelling because something might might good might come out of it in terms of clarification of a problem and maybe the generation of a solution but it's also useful as an example conversation and so well i was hoping when i came back to public life that i could continue doing that and and so far that seems to be working and i'm starting to write again and although that's slow because writing is very i find everyone i think finds writing very difficult uh but it's coming along and the book has been received very well so by the public uh the critics the the mainstream critics are it doesn't really matter i guess in some sense what what they think they think what i would have predicted they thought and and they also seem to generally speaking have a fair bit of contempt for my hypothetical audience which i find quite dis quieting you know i mean the the correct the caricature of my audience is angry young white men which isn't true it's simply not true my audience does skew somewhat male but the rest of it's just a caricature but even if it was the case i don't see how trying to help those people those people the basket of deplorables let's say i don't see why that's an immoral endeavor and i really understand the hostility that's being generated in relationship to maybe to the to dispossessed to the dispossessed young to dispossessed young men in relationship to the the mainstream media for this kind of contempt well i'm not contemptuous of my audience i'm i'm thrilled that i can be of use and i'm trying all the time to figure out how i can be of more use you know when i stop when someone stops me on the street that happens all the time they're usually shy and tentative about stopping me and usually very very polite almost invariably so it's never a real imposition and i always ask people you know they say if they say that they watch a lecture and it helped i always asked them why you know what helped and so i had three guys this week tell me they said well i was comparing myself to what other people had achieved and always coming up short and that was hurting me it was making me envious let's say and disheartening me but then i learned to reward myself for small improvements over who i was and i thought well that's really important you know because you you are comparing yourself to the right person then and now you're rewarding yourself you're encouraging yourself for taking the steps that you can that you can take it's really important to do that right and you know now i know that that's important to my listeners and so i'll try to formulate that concept more accurately and communicate it more clearly it's a great privilege it's a great privilege to be able to do this the with the podcasts and the books and it's so it's great it's great jordan let me ask you this are you would you consider yourself happy today no when's the last time you were when's the last time you were happy i was happy a little bit last week for for a couple of hours i'm in too much pain and to be happy still i mean it's not like i don't appreciate what's good about my life i do appreciate it and i i remember it consciously all the time and my wife and i remind each other about it constantly um and so i see that all very clearly and i can see where the sources of happiness could lie but i'm still i have a lot of neurological damage by all appearances and it produces quite a lot of pain and so i'm i'm overcoming that i think bit by bit like i have a very structured day so i get up and i have a sauna and then i walk for six miles and then i exercise for an hour quite intensely with weights and i dance a little bit to music because while i'm trying to regain control over all my extremities and um that's all working quite well and then i have the podcasts and so forth and so i have a well-structured life but it's still not to the point where i would say i was happy i'd like to get there healthy really is really what i'd want healthy and fully functioning i'm running at about 50 now and it was down to about five for a long time what's the 50 is a lot better no no no and that's great to hear what's the longest like if you if you were to if you were to put uh outcomes of life like you would say priorities okay happiness i'm living a happy life fulfilled life healthy life how would you rank those three for someone like you oh healthy is by far the most important but then i wouldn't use those criteria like i think um i'm very pleased if i can say things that i believe to be true i i don't think there's anything more rewarding than getting your speech right and and then also seeing what the consequence of that was and i've been thinking about that a lot too i've been talking to religious leaders partly on my podcast but also thinking it through because mainstream religious leaders are having a harder and harder time attracting young people to the church and that's i don't think that's a good thing um even though i don't attend church um but i was thinking that part of it is that that they're not selling a great enough adventure like the you know the thing about revolutionary movements like antifa or black lives matter something like that is they offer this unbelievable romance to young people you know they can get involved in this in this fiery cause and they can go to these romantically spectacular demonstrations and it's it's way more exciting than working at 7-eleven which i i have no contempt for people who work at 7-eleven you know like more power too you've got a job and some and that job needs to be done but that's not the point there you need an adventure in your life and these revolutionary movements offer that but i'm thinking too that you know i've tried i've written about this have pursue what's meaningful and not what's expedient and i would also say that it's useful to say what is true rather than to craft your word so that you get what you want and the reason part of the reason for that there's many reasons but part of the reason for that is that it's unbelievably adventurous you have no idea what will happen if you just say what you think and my experience has been that the consequences are absolutely overwhelming always constantly and you know when i go into a talk like this i don't have a pre i don't have an outcome in mind i don't want to make a fool of myself i don't want to say something stupid um i want to engage in an interesting conversation but but i'm not trying i don't have an agenda other than that but it's just to say what i feel in the moment as clearly as i possibly can it's so adventurous to do that and it's far better than pursuing a more narrow goal that might be wrong and so there's an adventure there that and i i think one of the things i love about the long-form video format is that it enables people to engage in the mutual uh exploration of truth a revelation of truth the discovery of truth and it's so interesting too that people find that compelling and exciting and watch it and want it and it's it's revolutionary i think and it's a privilege to be part of that you know you know why i ask you guys a question i ask you this question for for one reason like i think about when i watch you and michaela together right and i have a daughter i have a four-year-old daughter i have a seven-year-old son and a nine-year-old son right i mean a kid wants their mommy and daddy to be happy that's why they make him laugh that's why they win that's why they put grace they want mommy and daddy to be happy right i think okay what does michaela want of pops you know i bet michaela probably wants dad to be happy you know in the next phase of life so you know what two questions here on the topic of happiness what makes jordan happy and when was the last time you had the longest stretch of happiness what caused it those two questions i'm curious oh i had a lot of happiness i would say when i was on tour okay uh it was unbelievably exciting i had some health problems during that period of time too so sure there was a shadow there but that made me happy on a continual base it was unbelievably exciting and engaging i mean people are happy when they're pursuing something that they find meaningful deeply meaningful especially when that's going well on in a day-to-day level i find most of my happiness i would say um well in engaging conversation that's for sure but also with my family and you know that's partly why i said what i did say when in that clip that you showed earlier you know what makes me most happy right now is when my family gets together so that's my immediate family my wife my kids and their and their spouses and there's no uh uh there's nothing buried underneath the rugs and everyone's joking and laughing and playing and that's and it's peaceful it's truly peaceful and that does happen i go to see my son quite often he lives just up the street from me uh fortunately enough and i really like his wife and her jillian is her name and jillian and my my wife tammy have really tried to make their relationship to perfect their relationship to get rid of any you know of the cliched mother-in-law daughter-in-law trouble and some of that was there to begin with and they both decided and i suppose we all decided consciously as a unit that we're going to get rid of all of that and just stop it and try to have a really good relationship and that really worked and so now i go over there and it's they're happy they're smiling it's they're it's peaceful there their their little boy is laughing he's playing with laughing and so we had some people over for easter dinner my son and his wife and a couple of friends of theirs and they had a little baby named florence and she was also the same age and she was playing with laughing so she would go and then this little my grandson elliot would go and then all the adults would laugh because these two infants were actually having a conversation with each other a proto-conversation with laughter that lasted for about 10 minutes and everyone was laughing about it and well there isn't anything better than that when there isn't all sorts of horror hidden underneath the carpets you know in this new book beyond order i have a chapter called don't hide things in the fog and it's about this it's like wonderful things can happen if you straighten out everything that's hidden in a family and and get it out in the open and um and then you you have the opportunity then for some real peace and some real joy and certainly that's at the moment where it's in those interpersonal interactions that i derive a lot of my happiness and that's been life-saving and then of course the this act of engaged intellectual conversation this sort of conversation that we're doing our best to have that's also and the fact that i can share that with so many people and the responses are so positive it's wonderful it's amazing i can't believe it i can't believe it it's so ridiculous well we enjoy probably just as much as you do if not more than you do you know the the audience enjoys it uh way more than you probably do because we're learning and we're figuring out our lives out but you know i'm going to a place with these series of questions i'm asking you years ago my dad told me something very interesting i was a 1.8 gpa kid in high school i aced math i loved math i loved numbers everything else i had no tolerance for it had no patience didn't have the happiest life you know we live in it leave it around we go to germany i live at that refugee camp for a couple years i just couldn't wait to get away from the reality so i want to join the army to get some kind of an escape i get out of the army and i'm thinking about being a bodybuilder to be the next arnold and then all of a sudden i start reading books and i in my entire lifetime i read two books one of them was that was then this is down the other one was a mice of man and i didn't even finish it it was in high school i was never reader i started reading a book and then the next one and then the next one jordan it got to a point that i just couldn't put books down and i wouldn't go out friday nights and i was a big party guy i was in vegas every other weekend for a year i was always at the nightclubs tuesday through sunday monday is the only day that i would generally take off or wednesdays i would take off but i was on going six nights a week and then my dad's like what's up with this reading i said that i'm just let me tell you this information is ridiculous can you imagine like what's in this booklet in this book i learned this in this book in this article in this one so you would never read why reading so much i said i'm obsessed he says let me give you a tip he says what's that he says in my life i have two people one of them is a guy named albert who is like an uncle to me sweetheart of a guy the guy you know just you love this guy uh he he would come to our house didn't speak english at the time i would watch kings of kings of comedy and bernie mac would be doing his skit and he is laughing so hard jordan almost as if he has to go to the bathroom i'm like did you just understand what he said he says i have no clue what he said but it's so funny i said you don't even know you don't know what he just said is i have no clue it's just funny so my dad says look at albert a happy simpleton okay look how much he's enjoying his life okay happiest guy to be around you go eat with them you give him good food he's happy people dance he's happy telling stories he's happy just a happy guy that's enjoying life he said now let me tell you about my brother younger brother my dad's brother physicist five guy couldn't stop reading books pipe cigar you know one of those thinkers he would read read read read read read and he couldn't stop like he would read physics books like he would read chemistry books on his own like you weren't it wasn't homework or anything just you go to his place he had all these weird books and he was doing mathematic homeworks on his own he said the moment you get caught with the reading with the bug of reading and learning and you get addicted to it you have to know that your mind is going to process stuff and the debate starts happening here and it's forever it never stops he said you lose a little bit of happiness when you go too much about wanting to get certain questions answered in life because it's never gonna end it's forever he says so if you choose to subscribe to wanting to become a lifelong learner be also ready to lose a part of that happiness and freedom that you once had when you didn't know everything now you and i may say i wouldn't want to live that life i mean what are you talking about i don't want to be controlled by other people i don't want to be naive where i just look at the media oh okay vote this way okay okay do this oh they're the bad people oh you're right they're the bad people i don't want to be that person but there's a part of your life you know is that the life kind of i want to live am i going to miss the freedom the special small things that used to make me be happy now i can't even enjoy the small stuff that i used to do you ever catch yourself asking oh man maybe i'm in too deep of being this worried genius and i've lost a bit of my oh yes absolutely simple well i certainly experienced that when my health broke down and the reason for that was that i i not only did i get sick my life fell apart because i couldn't do anything that i used to be able to do i couldn't listen to music i couldn't read i couldn't write i couldn't think i i i couldn't do any of the because everything that i had done was really was complex and difficult all the things that i engaged in and what i did realize was that that left me vulnerable on a certain front because if i lost my if i wasn't at in peak peak health let's say i wouldn't be able to do those things and so i mean that's why i'm walking now for example you know i said i walk six miles a day and i do that every day and it's very simple and i've played a lot of ping pong and i've always liked that but i never played that much but i liked that and there there is some utility in having things around that are rewarding and good for you that are less complex um i would say though that with regards to the conflict between let's say you know miserable wisdom and happy ignorance is that there's there's different forms of rewards to be found in different places you know you can think about this even in terms of personality one major personality dimension is extraversion and the reason for that is that we have a pleasure circuit and how active that is varies between people that's what causes variation in extroversion and we generally equate happiness with the activation of the circuitry that's associated with extroversion and drugs like cocaine and amphetamines activate that circuit but there's another personality dimension which is openness and openness is the creativity dimension and there's pleasure to be derived from that as well and then so that's philosophical exploration and and literary experience and i suppose when you go to a movie you experience a blend of those two things especially if it's a rather complex movie so there's different forms of engagement or pleasure to be found and some of them are more akin to happiness and some of them are more akin to to meaning and sometimes they come into conflict but but i think all things considered they they work best when they're when they're working together and i i do strive diligently to re and i think that this has really been brought home to me you know look i couldn't sit down i literally couldn't sit down for almost a year and i so i lost the ability to sit down i had fantasies for hours of being able to sit by a fireplace and just not move because i had this condition called akathesia which is i learned how how valuable it is to be able to sit down and now when i sit down and nothing is happening i i'm taking stock of that and noticing what an unbelievable gift that is and it is really useful to maintain your ability to see what you have that you've taken for granted because you can lose you can lose everything you can lose things you don't even know you have i have no idea that you could ever lose the ability just to sit down but you can uh i wouldn't recommend it so i'm more appreciative i would say of of simpler things than i was i'm more appreciative of other people than i was i'm probably more grateful all things considered than i was and hopefully that will continue developing i have no contempt for happiness you know i i tell people don't pursue happiness pursue meaning and i think that's true but if happiness comes along it should be welcomed and if you're ever somewhere where that's happening you should notice it and and be grateful for it and enjoy it and that's for sure yeah do you think sometimes uh the world sets an expectation of who you are and your constant compliments oh my gosh jordan let me tell you you changed my life oh my gosh jordan you don't even know what your book did to me oh my gosh oh my gosh oh you have no idea because of you i'm doing that because of you my marriage work because of you i have better relation my dad because of you i'm doing better my mom because of you because of you because of you sometimes that because of you it's a little too much burden of because of you it's like dude because of me don't do [ __ ] like because of me just let me be free for once like because of you like maybe i don't want you to say because of you look go go live your life you because of you you made the decision i'm just writing the book do you ever feel like you don't want that standard and expectation of you know putting you on the pedestal here and then you have to almost walk on water where you're not free do you ever feel that kind of an obligation or no that's not even something that crosses your mind i feel that obligation all the time got it and i i have people around right from the beginning of all this i've i've talked to my friends and my family all the time about what i'm doing so that i don't make a mistake you know so that we're trying to stop me from making a mistake so but i also especially when i'm talking to people one-on-one i don't want see if you're a clinical psychologist you don't want to steal people's accomplishments from them which is partly why you don't you don't give advice exactly so maybe someone is trying to decide whether they should get married and maybe you have an opinion but probably you shouldn't because as a psychologist let's say because except perhaps in extreme cases um the person has to discover that what they need to do for themselves so that they can discover it again in the future so that they can learn to discover things for themselves and you don't want to give advice because then if they do something good you can take credit for it and i i don't want to take credit for for um the accomplishments that people make as a consequence of um what would you say putting the ideas they encounter in my books into practice they put them into practice and good for them and so when i meet people in the street that's what i tell them you know it's like okay you did this this specific thing good for you and you know i provided some impetus and i'm happy about that and pleased to to do that but i certainly don't want the credit and but i certainly i do feel the obligation i think it is part of what made me ill i think it is because you know as a psychologist i dealt with people's innermost secrets for decades and but it was kind of limited right it was 13 people or so a week maybe up to 20 which is still quite a few people but it's not it's not an inordinate number of people it's a bounded number of people and and then i had my other work that i could escape into let's say and and i wasn't carrying it with me the burden of of of of the lives of the people that i was intertwined with but then all of a sudden i started to experience that the longing i suppose in some sense on a much greater scale and that that's been difficult to digest the misery and and that that's so common in people's lives and but even worse than that that the degree to which it requires almost nothing to rectify it in an important way you know people there's many many people who are starving for a word of encouragement and if you provide that they they run with it and but that and that's great but it also reveals this this terrible unnecessary lack it's like well why weren't they encouraged to begin with you know it and and that's a deep hole to fall down and you know because you can never stop answering that question once you start asking it and you know it has something to do with with the fundamental difficulty that everyone who's human has in valuing their own existence because of its imperfections and and finitude and it's a very complex question and then to see that played out thousands of times these brief encounters i have with people they're very intense you know people tell me things in those encounters that they don't tell anyone else or or they tell very few people or maybe they've never told anyone in their life and i can see too this young man stopped me on the street the other day and he was he was looking a bit beat up and he came up and he said he was very shy and he said well you you know your lectures have been very helpful and i said i asked him what his name was and that usually helps people set set them at ease and then i said well what what helped you and he's he he was quite hesitant he didn't exactly know how to formulate what he was doing but i could see that he was very scared to say anything that he had done well because his experience had been that he'd never been encouraged when he did something well and so you know you can really punish someone if they come up to you and say they did something good that was actually good and then you punish them or ignore them it really hurts them and that happens to children all the time and it certainly had happened to this young man so he's very hesitant to tell me what he had done that was good and you know he told me and i listened and i said look this is as far as i'm concerned that what you did was really good and he just lit up you know it was and that's great that he lit up but it's terrible that it hadn't happened to him before it's really terrible and then i see this tied in with like a cultural pathology that a variety of cultural pathologies that are manifesting themselves at the current time you know the idea that organized masculine activity is by definition some kind of power centered tyranny and the corollary that any sort of ambition on the part of young men to well any ambition towards achievement is somehow integrally tied up with tyrannical power it's so demoralizing for young men they don't know how to defend themselves against that and the idea and you know it's often leveled the accusation is often leveled by people who've never had a relationship with a male in their life that was actually fulfilling and worthwhile and then that all plays out in the public domain it's really awful to see and i can see it so it's hard it's hard it's hard to see that i mean i'm thrilled that i am in a position to do something about it it's so so great you know that's something else i can tell people now too you know because you say well what should you do with your life and like i cannot i've seen people who've accomplished anything that you can imagine in terms of accomplishments and i can say clearly that i've never seen anything as rewarding as the consequences of forthright speech the opportunity to be of genuine service to other people um there's way more reward in that than in in any of the things that people chase in a more finite and limited way you know jordan when you're going through that phase normally for a person to come out of a place we are that we've never been before we need some kind of a source of inspiration right so yeah and and we like to find someone to say well that's my hero like i have a painting in my office called dead mentors it's me in the painting with eight other characters in a vault we're having a conversation it's a debate between two books communist manifesto and atlas shrugs so it's a discourse they're having a debate having a discourse it's very interesting characters but you can tap into somebody you're like okay i can tackle who are the characters who are the characters in the painting let me i just moved to florida so so i got john f kennedy i got einstein i got the shop iran lincoln mlk tupac ironton cena uh milton friedman and uh one other character i'm forgetting great so so that's so good because look and you can surround yourself with these these great minds and and you can you can you can you can what would you say in some sense you can choose them as your peers voluntarily dead or not right it's a form of ancestor worship in some sense and i mean that in the most i mean that in the deep sense and you can do that's one of the advantages of that is education as far as i'm concerned is pick your peers and and yeah and this instinct we have to find someone to admire that's the deepest of religious instincts and it's unbelievably deep in human beings and you know and and we have this mimicry this capacity for mimicry that's that's an integral part of our cognitive architecture and uh it's the precursor to thought and we do identify you know you notice you notice you admire someone that is the instinct to mimic because to admire is then to want to be that and that's the action of the moral instinct it finds a target in the world and says well i could be like that but at first it says this person is attractive or this person is compelling it grabs you it grabs you and that's the instinct for further developments very positive thing it can be a very positive thing who'd you tap into was it a biblical figure was it a philosopher was it a leader was it a political leader when you were going through your moment the last 12 months who were you saying at least he overcame it i can here's what he went through was worse here's what was there anybody you would go to well there has been throughout my life all sorts of of intellectual figures figures from my own life as well i found many things about my father extremely admirable and and still do my mother as well and so i was fortunate to have people in my immediate environment who played that role for me and that that's a huge gift i have all sorts of intellectual idols um i would say and there are people whose work i've read deeply and that's been extremely useful to me um and then that shades into the consideration of religious figures at at some point um so and i've spent a lot of time studying religious thinking and trying to i mean what religious thinking isn't in some sense is the collective attempt to specify the ideal for for mimicry so you imagine that imagine that you know you you have those eight figures in your painting so imagine there's something about each of those people that you found compelling and admirable so then imagine that you could abstract out from that what was compelling and admirable and make one person out of that that was sort of the union of all those eight it was everything good about those eight people brought into one person well that's that's approaching a divine figure and and and when you hear christian statements for example like christ is the king of kings that actually means something technical from a psychological perspective what it means is that and i'm not speaking in religious terms here precisely although it shades into the religious is that a religious ideal is in fact the abstracted representation of what is admirable as such and it's a it's extremely useful to have that made into an abstraction to some degree too because it also means that you then have something that you're responsible to so let's say you and you've done this with your painting you have these eight people who you're now um what what would you say you're responsible to them you're accountable to them you're accountable to their spirit and so now your conscience can speak with their collective voice and it can tell you when you're less than you could be and then you can use that to guide you to manifest that spirit that's embodied in those eight people and that's a pathway to further growth and and it's something that we're we're hypothetically in all of our conversations when we're demanding from one another that we respond properly we're trying to evoke that ideal from ourselves and from other people we're constantly doing that that's partly why i love podcasts because that can really happen in real time like i just released a conversation with jocko willing today where i think that happened for much of the conversation and you know as i get healthier i'm hoping that will work better and to the degree that we're doing the right thing at the moment you know we're doing our best to manifest that abstracted ideal and the other thing that's so remarkable about that is that as long as we do it the better we do it the more compelling we're going to find the conversation the time will disappear we'll get absorbed into the conversation and we'll walk away thinking i don't know what was happening but that was worth doing and and you get that you get there as far as i'm concerned you get there with with truth that's the pathway spoken truth jordan who who are those names you said mom dad who else are some of those names that you uh you go to well you and carl jung was an unbelievably profound influence on me almost all the major psychotherapists i read them deeply carl rogers was real useful to me abraham maslow freud i read a lot of freud uh and then there's alexander schulze nitchen was a huge influence friedrich nietzsche i read most of his major works when i was young um and then a a large number of scientists uh jeffrey gray who's a neuroscientist i i i uh what would you say clawed my way through his work which is very very dense it was extremely useful he was a good model as a scientist my mentor at mcgill robert peel was someone who who taught me a lot about administration and about uh giving credit where credit is due and um being comfortable in your own domain of competence like bob who i am still in regular contact with bob and i had different skills and he was able to value my skills without ever feeling intimidated and and i could do the same with his skills and that made our partnership extremely productive and so that was very useful um uh are you are you familiar with uh robert green's work 40 laws of power art of seduction 33 strategies of war only only as names i haven't read i haven't read his books okay got it he he wrote a book his last book was laws of human nature and right after he finished his book he had a stroke and not a not the best kind of stroke he had a terrible stroke and his wife had to come and pick him up and he couldn't walk we did an interview one time with him we had to push him in the wheelchair to get him it took 30 minutes before we got ready to go through it and i i asked him a question i said how timely the fact and every time he was working on the book i said how you doing he says you know what i'm sick and my mom's calling me telling me how's the book i said mom stop asking me about the book i don't want to tell you about the book you know the process of writing a book for somebody as technical as you you're not writing a book like here's the you know seven keys to success work hard you know all this other stuff that maybe you see you know you you kind of your your brain is uh you know trying to get everything to be perfect i remember one time i asked you a question about how do you research and how do you write you said you're right then you rewrite then you rewrite i'm like how many times do you write so so many times i have to write something on and rewrite i'm like wow very detailed a process you go through how heavy is it on you when you write a book i i think the only thing i've done that's as hard as writing is clinical work it's the only thing that requires as much attention it's unbelievably engaging but it's unbelievably difficult and well i suppose to some degree it's as difficult as you make it but i'm always trying to answer questions that i genuinely have and i'm really trying to answer them and i i i also so i have a writing guide online for people who might be interested you can find that and it it's an actually step-by-step guide through what you actually have to do if you want to write it's not just hints about what constitutes good writing it's a practice manual we're building a piece of software called essay app that's designed to help people write better and therefore think better but i mean i have an analytic approach to writing to some degree because i i i can write but i also know what i'm doing when i'm writing so imagine that a piece of work can be analyzed at multiple levels simultaneously did you did you select the right word did you select the right phrase did you organize the phrases into the proper sentences are is each sentence as tightly written and carefully argued as it possibly could be are the sentences arranged properly in each paragraph are the paragraphs arranged properly in each section are the sections arranged properly within each larger unit does it cohere as a whole is it appropriate for the time and the place and the audience do the sentences sound poetic when you read them aloud do they have a rhythm i'm trying to answer all those questions not at the same time but i i try to answer all those questions with every single word i write and i would say i write every sentence at least 10 or 15 times and i mean literally i take the sentence i put it on a separate page and then i rewrite it multiple times and then i pick the best sentence and then when i do paragraph editing i take the paragraph put it on a separate page break it into its sentences rearrange the sentences in in multiple variants and then select the one that works the best and i do that over and over and so that well that's that's so it's demanding because you the the more you get every single one of those things right the more impact the work has the clearer you've made the problem and the more also you the other thing each like these are books that i've written even though there are collections of essays but each essay stands in relationship to the other essays they're not independent units they they they each add something to every other chapter and so there's a meta meaning that emerges that's a consequence of the relationship between the essays and i'm thinking about that as well when i'm writing and trying to organize the essays and and it's great for clarity of thought and i one of the things i loved about my conversation with jocko willink um because he's this very masculine very tough man very admirable person but you know on the physical end of things at least that's what you'd think but he got an english degree after he was a navy seal and he did a 20-minute spontaneous proclamation about the unbelievable value of literacy to him practically speaking you know he said well he has to write out military strategy he has to decode orders coming from above he has to write up commendations for his men he has to produce battlefield reports he said he's noah he's nowhere at all as powerful as he could be without being literate and literacy is the key to competence in a way that is just not properly communicated to young people you're deadly if you're literate at everything and it's because you you can think and you can speak i mean what do you have that's more than that not there's nothing we have that's more than that and writing sharpens your thinking we're excited about this app i'm you know i i i'm really it would be wonderful if we managed to contribute something to make the process of writing work better for people so that they can think more clearly so what it does is it helps break down what you're writing into all these different uh sections so there's like a sentence level of analysis and a paragraph level of analysis and so forth so that you can concentrate on one part of the writing process at at once instead of trying to solve all the problems at the same time which is so complex it'll just bring you to a halt so for example you should write a really bad first draft with no care about grammar or any of that just get your ideas down doesn't even matter the order but get the first draft down and then so you don't add it to begin with you produce and once you've produced you can add it and then re-edit and re-add it and so forth but just separating those two things is extremely useful it's interesting you say this because uh what's the story about you when a guy on quora asked you a question about rules of life and you came up with 42 you posted it there and you got more shares and conversation and it was you know talked about and that kind of led to the whole idea about your 12 rules of life and beyond you know yeah look what came out of that yeah yeah it's it's staggering you know i mean i spent about well i spent about half an hour writing those but i spent like god only knows how long sure doing the background thinking that enabled me to write them and yeah the the consequences of that were just powerful creative thinking just led to uh what it led to today so joan let's talk about some of the stuff current events on what's going on today um so you're not around you you know you're you're you're recovering you're going through what you're going through you're in russia you're in florida news comes out trump's being banned permanently by twitter jack dorsey announces that then it's facebook they don't say permanently but they're kind of taking them down for now youtube says for now but we'll see what's going to happen in the future the only one that used the award permanently is dorsey on twitter okay and you know you've been in the space of creating content for a while some of the stuff you've said it's upset a few people you had one legendary interview that uh uh did very well where the lady was trying to spook you and then next thing you know it backfired on her and you asked her a question and he said gotcha and that kind of led to you know all these different things and even some of the things that was going on in toronto when you were a teacher there were some challenges there were trans gender whatever was going on and you came out and spoke up and there was some kind of a a debate that came up from that but uh trump being banned alex jones a few years ago twitter youtube infowars they're coming after they're doing this okay what was your reaction when you heard about the fact that the 45th president united states is being banned permanently in a very powerful virtual government called twitter well i thought that the companies who are doing such things have no idea what responsibility they're taking on because now they've announced their willingness or maybe even their responsibility depending on how you look at it to police the content of what's being exchanged on their networks well that's a rabbit hole that you in all likelihood don't want to go down so you see attempts to censor emerging quite constantly now and it's it's it's very dangerous it's very dangerous it's very upsetting that this happened to the president to an elected president what's what's the you're you're someone who's well read you've read history what has been the consequences of silencing someone that has a big following who ends up paying a price long term is it the individual that silence a trump is it his following or is it the silencer who eventually created more enemies that backfired on them long term who ends up losing long term well everybody does i would say because the classic defense for free speech is that you know if you limit someone's free speech not only do you limit the rights of the person who's speaking but you limit the rights of those who could have heard and it seems to me that people i believe that people have the intelligence to make up their own minds and that they should have the information presented presented to them my experience has been that people have people are far more intelligent and perspicacious than than we generally assume they they come to the right conclusions the right conclusions who's to say but you know i i don't think there's anything more important than freedom of speech so maybe maybe maybe let me ask the question a different way let me ask a question a different way so we have a lot of different issues that's being talked about right now things are interchanged and obviously we've kind of known what direction we're going we have joe biden as our president i'd rather hear what trump is thinking than not i'd rather know than not i'd rather see what's happening out in the public than not i don't know what's going on underground now i don't i have no idea and i know that and no one knows what the impact of this has been on all the people who supported trump what are they supposed to conclude precisely from this i'd rather these things were out in the open i don't think that these companies had the right to do what they did they had the right legally they had the right um obviously because they did it and they got away with it um but you know there's a technological problem at the bottom of it too we have all these new communication technologies and we don't really know what the rules are none of us do including the people who run the these social networks it's not like they understand what they've created how could you no one can understand them what you've created you know i was just talking to michael malus the other day about 4chan 4chan had some effect on the hillary trump election it's possible that 4chan tilted the election in favor of trump because the margin was pretty small but in any case 4chan in some sense doesn't even exist there's no centralized authority there's no administrative bureaucracy every you can post there anonymously and your posts disappear but we don't know anything about how to regulate uh an at a communications apparatus like this or even how it should be regulated in principle or even what it does or what it is and so i have some sympathy for the giant media corporations because they're dealing with intractable problems but i still believe that the censorship road is well it's likely to lead to a place that people don't want to go so which is what well part of its second guessing you know you you want to be able to say what you think and if you have the voice of a hypothetical sensor in your head i mean i've experienced this already i've had guests on my show like abigail schreier who wrote a book on um on on the trans issue trend surgery in particular gender reassignment surgery and i was very nervous about having the discussion so there was the little sensor inside my head already operating and when enough sensors operate in your head then you can no longer think and if you can no longer think well then you can't see and you're blind and you stumble into holes and and everyone stumbles into holes and that's not good and you know it i've said over and over that if you're discussing something that matters the probability that you're going to offend someone is rises to virtual certainty if if the discussion you're having about an important issue is not isn't of sufficient potency to offend someone then you're not saying anything at all well then how many people should you offend or can you offend before you're properly banned you know you can say well a line was crossed because the president of the united states fomented armed insurrection well had the situation be not clear he would have been impeached so there's ambiguity around the circumstances well a line was obviously crossed well what line exactly and who's going to decide when it's crossed exactly and this is very troublesome but it's a problem we all have like it's not a problem in some sense it's not a problem that jack dorsey has or or uh or mark zuckerberg they're they're facing the same set of issues that the rest of it are facing i mean they have more authority over their platform obviously but it's not like there's a bunch of us out here who have the answer and they could just come asking we're all facing this mystery which is what our technological transformation of our means of communication what it means and what we should do with it it's very complicated what should we do with what should i mean you're trying to answer that question all the time what should you do with your podcast what should you do with your youtube channel it's complicated you have an unlimited bandwidth and you have the opportunity to do every anything you want and share it with hundreds of thousands of people okay what should you do you know you have enough money and so you know because one simple answer to a problem is well i'll do what makes money it's like okay well now you have the money okay now what you should what should you do well it's complicated it's really complicated and and so we need to talk about what we should do and we are in fact doing that so that's right it seems to be working so so so let me ask you this today you know i feel like every decade every era there's different set of problems i don't even think it's an era i think it's decade like you know maybe oh sorry i'd like to sit down with trump and and talk to him like i'm talking to you because i don't know i'd like to know what he's thinking and i think everybody should know what he's thinking and it isn't obvious to me that i could do a youtube interview with donald trump and have it aired and that seems to be a problem because don't we want to know what he's thinking don't we want everyone else to see what he's thinking you know whether you're a foe or a friend well we should know and i've been inviting politicians onto my show it's like come on for two hours and let's have a talk it's not sound bites it's it's an opportunity for you to reveal yourself can you will you what happens when you do has your camp ever reached out to him or no not specifically to trump i've been reaching out to other politicians i have um um mike lee senator mike lee from utah i think we're releasing that next week and he's the most conservative senator and he comes about his conservatism honestly he's a senator from utah and you know he acquitted himself rather well over the two two and a half hour period i'd like to see every politician do that that who are you like there's enough time there for for everyone to reveal their hand and i think that's to in everyone's best interest and i believe there'll be more uh political leaders on my show in the future that's we're pushing in that direction as hard as we can many many politicians are unbelievably leery of of long format they don't understand it they don't understand youtube they don't understand podcasts they're still stuck in 1970 technologically speaking and you know they're worried about misstepping but you can misstep by omission too and youtube the long-form podcasts allow politicians to bypass the gatekeepers the media gatekeepers completely and just talk to their constituents well that'll revolutionize politics if people actually start to engage in it i think at least it has the possibility of that happening uh if you were to sit down with trump what would you be asking him right now i'd ask him what he thought about what happened on in in in the capital in the day of the riots what's his story about that he's addressed that what did he think yeah but i'd like to i'd like to go go after it in depth um i'd i'd like to ask him about um who he thinks think he thought he appealed to and why and and what he did that he thought worked um i'd like to ask him what he thinks about the the accusations of that pertain to his reprehensibility his character and and what he thinks about that and how how he would respond to that but i'd like to find out like i wouldn't be interested in hurling accusations or or i'd like to find out what he thinks because god wouldn't he like to know what trump thinks i'd love to know what he thinks we need to know because half the population voted for him why do you think why do you think opposition doesn't want you to know what he's thinking what what do you think they're scared of i think they're scared of all sorts of things i think they they're they're they're scared of the possibility that he has uh the power of a demagogue that he's a a populist that that he could harness the crowd for nefarious ends uh they're concerned about his respect for democratic norms and and the standard um what would you say his respect for the authorities of the state you know they view him as a as a muslim in the making let's say and so that's their fear and you know there are mussolini's in the making and trump was a populist and so that's where that fear comes from um there's also fear of course because some people think one way politically and a lot of this is temperamentally based and other people think another way and it's hard for them to communicate across the divide um so that's some of the fear but you know it has to be addressed because you you in the u.s there's this problem that 50 of this problem this situation 50 of the people voted for trump that can't just be swept under the rug you can't sweep something like that under the rug like at all and so what what's going to be the consequence of of stopping him from speaking why would you think that all the consequences of that are going to be good i don't think they're going to be good i mean certainly a large part of the american population felt like they were punched by the large media companies the large social media companies you know because they were affiliated with trump and all of a sudden he was silenced so all those people feel that they've been silenced well they have been well you might say well those are precisely the people who should be silenced just really is that what you think you think 25 of your population should be silenced do you what does that say about you and what are you going to do with those 25 you have to live with them christ you're probably related to a bunch of them so it's not a good solution i don't think does it backfire on them it always backfires i mean if you assume that how could it not backfire if if if investigating something complex is worthwhile how could failure to investigate it not backfire it's not like the conditions that gave rise to trump are likely to magically vanish you know and now it's possible that if biden does a credible job or even a great job and i hope he does that that political temperature will lower and and this will become a non-issue essentially if we're lucky it'll just fade away and trump is getting old too you know there is that blunt fact and so maybe we'll just move on to other things and it's possible that that might be the outcome we should hope for but what do you mean well that we get on with the next thing you know do you think that's a good thing because well i don't know i don't know i really don't know i mean i wish biden well i hope he does a good job because he's your president and wouldn't it be good if he did a good job you guys need a good president um and maybe there are things that we should be focusing our attention on right here and now yeah i just think i think you know like the topic of jfk assassination right so the jfk assassination topic till today people want to figure out what really happened the debate still steers it up every november 22nd people oh well this is what happened no that's what happened oh this is what happened no it's really this is what happened no not now we have the real story movie after movie after movie after movie after movie we don't have we don't have any way to go get a hundred percent definite you know definitive answer everything's going to be 82 92 63 we're not going to get 100 right trump is around right now there's a lot to learn about what happened and i'm not even i'm not making it like when you're saying let's move on i don't mean move on like you know well he's going to die and move on not talking about that i'm talking i don't i don't think things should be brushed under the rug and i i don't think that usually works i've never seen it work yeah i think there's so much market research right now for us to find out about what's gonna happen if we don't figure out what really happened and the amount of power clarence thomas today came out and he said he made some comments about section 230 i don't know if you read that or i don't know if you heard about that uh what he thinks about section 230 you know the common carrier rules on twitter you may want to look it up because he kind of commented on it today and it's creating frenzy when dennis prager and i who's a good friend of mine i think he's also a good friend of yours when you're done under a fair bit of censorship pressure which i'm happy about yes and you know his wife sue is a lawyer when they went up against youtube they ended up losing because the court finally said no they have the right because the same rules that apply to government doesn't apply to a private company because if they don't want to a you know they want to do whatever you want to they can do it they're not a government they don't they don't go based on the same rules of freedom of speech they can do whatever they want to do the government can't the government's got to allow you to speak right and so i was speaking to a guy this last week who bought metacogan you may not know merkovan i don't know if you've been following nfts or not meadowcoven is the guy who's a crypto billionaire who bought people's every days for 69.3 million dollars and we're talking about where do you live right now since i live in um i live in uh uh uh singapore so why do you live in singapore you're indian why why singapore why not us he says well i lived in canada i lived in a few different places uk but i chose singapore i said why not u.s he smiles and he's not a energetic speaker like the way he's not like that he's very you know calm the way he speaks he says i didn't want to go to u.s because u.s it's all they have fingerprints on you and it's like a web they're going to figure out a way to get the taxes on he says listen i live in singapore zero in capital gains taxes i said zero is a zero you don't pay any capital so why would you pay capital gains taxes you know our ordinary income is 10 or 20 no regulation i don't have to you know tell the government what i have and hey here's how much money i have i don't want to tell anybody what i have so i can keep it to myself it's my business if i go to u.s i have to tell everybody what i have et cetera et cetera and i'm sitting i'm like singapore okay interesting you know trump here he's going through what he's going through this guy's over here living free and then he says you have to realize that nowadays twitter facebook youtube these things are virtual governments and they are controlling america america is no longer what america used to be america's a whole different america so for us if we don't get to the bottom of this today i think a lot of people who have a voice are going to be bullied for decades and i think we got to get to the bottom of it while you know we have the ability to sit down and trump's got to be interviewed properly where someone's going to learn the other day his daughter-in-law interviewed him facebook took the interview down i don't know if you saw that when the you know laura does the interview so it would be very interesting to see someone like yourself interview him yeah well i'd i would love to do that i think it would be well how could it fail to be anything but fascinating at least for me hopefully for people who are viewing it you know it's a complicated it's a complicated problem but my sense is that you tell people what's going on and let them figure it out you can't hide it anyways if it's real you can't hide it it comes out you can't hide reality it always comes out and usually if you try to hide it it comes out in a much worse form that that's my experience as a psychologist i've never seen anyone successfully hide anything in their life not really it leaks out in all sorts of ways they don't necessarily even make the connection but but they can discover the connection later and be very sad about it how much of this has to do with your book beyond order rule number six abandon ideology think that's something that we are struggling with as a nation especially america well people struggle with it all the time because we're attracted to oversimplifications and and it's no wonder because the world the complexity of the world is daunting and if you have a ready-made answer for for almost everything then that simplifies the the landscape substantially some of it's just a matter of not being taught to think well you know one of the things you learn if you're a social scientist a research scientist is that you generate if you're looking at a complex phenomenon like male aggression let's say well what causes male aggression well the first thing you do is generate like 20 possible reasons you don't limit yourself to the one you like you know like maybe i'm not that happy about tv and so i think well tv violence probably makes men more violent it doesn't by the way there's there's very little evidence that it does there's quite a lot of evidence that it doesn't video games because i don't i think they're a waste of time so they probably increase male aggressions like well no they don't as it turns out um alcohol that definitely increases aggression male aggression and female aggression for that matter so alcohol is a major contributor is it sociological is it cultural do you learn it is it biological you generate all sorts of potential reasons and you might also say well many of those reasons apply not just one and then you test them and then and then the next thing you do maybe you say well i want to decrease male aggression well you don't assume that you know how to do that and that if you do what you think you know that it will work that's all ideological thinking the real world is way too complicated to be uh pushed around by that kind of thinking and poverty well what causes poverty well what do you mean by poverty well you could you could think for two weeks about what poverty is and you still wouldn't come to the end of it do you mean low ed lower education do you mean lower intelligence do you mean lower conscientiousness do you mean drug and alcohol abuse do you mean lack of money do you mean absolute poverty do you mean relative poverty you calculate that neighborhood by neighborhood or state by state um do you mean poverty of hope do you mean lack of plan for the future et cetera et cetera and all of those questions so you decompose so you think well poverty is caused by lack of money it's like really that's your that's your theory is it well you know it's not good enough that theory it's not even close and so part of that chapter is just an attempt to explain that most things that are truly problematic are so complex that no ideological solution can possibly suffice it's just not a good way to go about the problem and then there's the other problem too which is that well one of the terrible temptations of an ideology is that once you parse out the world and have your reasons why problems exist so let's say poverty exists because of capitalism which is a completely idiotic theory i mean poverty exists because people are born with nothing and it's hard to acquire goods so that the default state is poverty so it's not caused by any sociological system so it's it's foolish to begin with but let's assume that you think that poverty or at least relative poverty is caused by capitalism well then you have a convenient enemy you know it's everyone who's a successful capitalist is now responsible for poverty and then they're bad and you're good and that's unearned moral virtue and that's unbelievably attractive to to acquire unearned moral virtue you know or so or maybe you're maybe you're uh you're someone who's inherited your wealth and and then you think everyone who's poor is just lazy and if they'd get up off their asses and get a job that would solve the problem it's like well that's convenient for you but it's a very shallow analysis of the problem so it's not helpful to think that way unless what you want to do is not think which is which is kind of where we are today though if you think about it you know the the less we think the more we can be controlled it just just a crazy question for you strategically i don't know if you think and say as a you know you know how jaco likes to read about war and his main you know that's his interest because of what he did he's a pretty deep thinker his mind goes in very deep places on topics but if you were to think like a strategist for a moment here what are what are democrats not the left what are democrats trying to accomplish we know what the left is trying to accomplish like i'm not talking about aoc sanders what are democrats trying to accomplish right now like what's their moment look if you look at jonathan heights research one of the things you conclude a psychologist from from new york university um he's looked at temperamental predictors of political belief okay and the liberal types the leftists are concerned with fairness broadly speaking it's what they orient themselves around and a fair bit of that seems temperamental the conservative types this isn't heights uh taxonomy precisely but the conservative types are more concerned with order and and justice and tradition and those are all values you know like there's utility in fairness there's utility and justice there's utility in tradition while the devil's in the details but broadly speaking it's the issue of fairness so for example i was talking to russell brand last week and he's a lefty by temperament and intellectual proclivity and i told him about all this research showing that if you look around the world that um the incidence of absolute privation has plummeted dramatically in the last 40 years well really the last 200 but it's really been decreasing over the last 40 since the soviet union collapsed um so for for example now the typical sub-saharan african has access to more calories than you need to to maintain yourself so enough calories but also as many calories as the typical person in portugal had in the 1960s so in the poorest area on earth there's enough food no one starves anymore except for reasons of distribution and and political oppression it's great that that's the case so absolute privation has decreased substantially and you think while people could be partying in the streets because of that and there's reasons that they aren't and but you know russell russell's concern immediately was well what about relative deprivation you know on average people are much better but there's a huge range so some people are way better off than others and some people are in a state of you know very they're just barely clinging on to the edge of the world and of course that's a problem so you could imagine that the benevolent conservative types it's just an example are pushing to have absolute privation decreased and they're saying well look how well that's going but the lefty types think yeah but you still got a distribution problem and it's true and relative poverty absolute poverty is a catastrophe but relative poverty is also a problem look when you're walking down the street you're a wealthy man you're not happy to see homeless people so you know i've not met anyone who would say well who cares about homeless people it's like that's the price we pay for progress or whatever no if you could wave a magic wand and all of a sudden things would be different well then the homeless people would have enough of whatever it is that they need but you don't know how to do that and it isn't as simple as well they need more money well so the lefties are more concerned about fairness and there's there's a point to be made there no fairness isn't everything and that's the counter-argument so so what are they up to well then i would say what are the democrats up to and i would say they don't actually know because one of the things i was stunned by when i went to washington and and i spent some time there talking to congress people and watching and i was stunned there's virtually no formal policy making apparatus in the in the political parties in the u.s so what are they up to they don't know and they don't know how to communicate whatever it is they're up to and so what happens this is what's happened to the democrats and conservatives who are listening should know this is that most of the democrats are moderate centrists the overwhelming majority of them are moderate centrists and most of them moderate centrist conservatives would be perfectly happy with if they had a discussion with them you know would there be some minor sticking points but they'd share much more in common than they would have in variants well so why do the radicals have such a disproportionate voice and the answer is simple they have a compelling story and the centrists don't and then you might say well that's the centrist democrats problems it's like okay what's the centrist republican story they don't have one either and no real apparatus for generating one it's stunning how much of a lack there is in that particular domain i mean formally speaking no policy generating organization and no communication strategy i couldn't believe it it's unbelievable where would you put trump at trump's an anomaly he's his own weird thing you know he's a trickster and he was very good at that i mean look he was a democrat temperamentally for most of his life you know now so i don't really know what to make of him he certainly is a troublemaker by temperament to a fair degree and a trickster that's part of the reason you know i saw this t-shirt in florida that really had a big impact on me when i was down there last year it said um trump in 2020 because [ __ ] you twice and i thought yeah there's something to that and trump tapped into that and maybe he tapped into that because that's genuinely the way he feels you know he's he's he he also is not happy with the contempt of the educated elite which was definitely something that working-class americans who supported trump were reacting to and i can certainly see that because i've seen among the educated literati you know who who parody what they think to be my audience i've seen them deliver virtually nothing but contempt for my attempts to help that you know angry white young male section of the population they just have nothing but contempt for that and a lot of trump voters were responding to that and trump tapped into that extremely well and i thought you know i thought the dem hillary lost because she abandoned her democratic first principles i thought she abandoned the working class she decided she'd go with the identity politics types instead of the working class and i believe that sunk her and rightly so she deserved that royally and i think the working class deserves a voice and they need a voice they need dignified work and a place that's not just handouts it's not a solution people need to be engaged productively especially if they're conscientious because their conscience will eat them if they're not i wonder if they're taking the topics like sitting here saying let's see which one of these we can win and which one of them we can't win you know i want to yes they certainly do some of that and they should they should that's actually a really positive part of the political process in the democracy it's like well those politicians they're always pandering to the polls well you can do that stupidly but like yeah you're supposed to pander to the polls those are your people and you know the wise political strategists that i'm in touch with they look for issues that can be addressed positively where there is concordance across both parties and that's where they they push say well we seem to both agree on this that this is useful so let's do that and that requires goodwill across the political table and hopefully there's enough of that so that those sorts of things can be managed you know i'm happy i would say with biden's infrastructure goal i think it beats the hell out of identity politics and i from what i know of interest infrastructure development it's generally generally a wise investment calculated in terms of return on investment you know if it's done without corruption and and addressed intelligently so that's how it looks to me are you following what janet yellen is trying to do with uh uh get corporate taxes to be the same across the board with g20 where everybody has same corporate tax rate to eliminate tax competition those are her awards yesterday are you aware of that or no no i didn't i hadn't seen that emerge yet no what what do you think about you know competition there's competition in different levels right okay here jordan peterson be on order where's the competition on this new york times ranked fifth rank sixth ranked first ranked second ranked tent you're not an atom it's competition right so we gotta write a better book so we gotta put a little more time and research to write a better book because there's so much pressure i wrote 12 rules of life everyone's expecting for the second one to be better i got to go compete okay well you know movies competition health competition marriage competition there is a small business i got a small business if i don't have better customer service and the right reviews uh uh online you know uh jordan if you can yeah if i don't have the right reviews online well i may not have people come to my restaurant and i'm gonna lose customers okay great and you know competition and relationship friendship well i got to bring value to this relationship as well or else eventually this guy's thinking is going to a different level and i may bore him eventually because i'm not elevating my level of thinking i kind of got to bring value to this relationship as well in every single thing competition plays a good role in us bringing value these guys are pitching the idea of meeting with g20 and telling them that guys why don't we all come up together with the same corporate tax rate because u.s has the current you know one the highest if not the highest they used to have the highest at 35 trump brought it down to 21. now they want a picture to bring you back to 28 to be the biggest highest i believe in the world europe is like 9 10 12 they have low corporate tax rate a lot of them don't even have it us gotten away with having it why why is uh why why are they so obsessed with trying to create competition for us but eliminate competition for themselves what benefit does that do for everybody well i i suspect that they're trying to ensure that large corporations that are based in large part in the u.s and that benefit from let's say the u.s infrastructure aren't able to escape their corporate tax burden by shuffling their resources off to come countries with a lower tax rate that would be the goal i mean if it was just a positive goal i mean people are complex in their motivations and you know maybe who knows how much of straight anti-capitalism is also motivating that or irritation at corporations etc etc um but if you were looking for like a straightforward relatively value neutral motivation that would be it now i i don't have an opinion about that at the moment because i don't know enough about tax policy to formulate an intelligent opinion i mean your point you is a temperamental point at least to some degree you can see the value in competition and so when you see that being eliminated you you see immediately what the disadvantages of that might be and fair enough it's a good rule of thumb how it applies in this specific case that's a really complicated problem and i i would the way i would try to address it if i had to was i'd find three or four people who had spent their whole life studying this sort of thing and i'd go interview them listen to them you know build up a certain amount of knowledge if i could manage it and then maybe risk an answer i mean it isn't obvious how to tax corporations you know because on the one hand you say well look if you tax them too heavily they're gonna go somewhere else or you're going to stop people from producing corporations which you definitely don't want to do obviously there are levels of taxation that are counterproductively punitive clearly and then you might have a discussion about what the benefits are of taxation in general and people have a wide range of opinions about that and validly so um but the devil's always in the details that's partly why i wrote chapter six it's like look these problems are complicated you have to take them apart in detail and and be aware of presuming that your ideological presumption is going to accurately reflect what the world is going to do very unlikely it's very very unlikely i don't know what the corporate tax rate should be i don't know i i have a corporation amount i actually actually have several of them and you know it's in my personal financial interest that the corporate tax remain low does that mean that i'm in favor of a lower corporate tax rate well it does in that regard but then i would say i also don't know enough about about it in general to make a generalized conclusion we've had a lot of economist on and we've interviewed a lot of guys to see you know what their thoughts are to kind of uh see this thing but you know when it comes down to taxes as complica as complex as it is um i think i think even the average person needs to spend more time studying taxes it is a form of control it is a form of uh it's like working at a company if you're working in sales what's the first thing you need to know you need to know your company's compensation structure if i sell 20 000 computers to you know uh walmart's customer service and i'm working for dell i probably gotta know how much i want to get paid if i make sell twenty thousand i think some of the way the comp structure is being set up is you know eliminating competition for themselves that's my bigger concern long term because if incentive and innovation goes away the way it is today what the hell am i creating anything for like there's got to be some form of a form of well that that's that so look i mean my my answer to that would be if this seized me as an object of interest you know and i felt that i wanted to know more about it that it was an important topic i would do what you have done i would go find people to talk to and and explore it and all of the avenues and there's many things that are valid to be said about that particular issue and it's worth exploring and then if i had the opportunity to guide people through that process that would be good too so because then at least in principle we could all be more informed about it jordan final thoughts about your book beyond order final thoughts if you can tell us a little bit about your book here how different is this from 12 rules for life well i would say there are i have a meta theory i suppose it's not precisely mine but it's one that i've adopted um the taoists taoist philosophy is based on the same set of presuppositions it's useful conceptually to divide the world into things that you can control and things that you can't and that's roughly order and chaos so order is where you are when the things you're doing are doing what you want them to do you're comfortable there that's explored territory that's the family that's the state that's that's tradition that's explored territory um where you are when what you're doing doesn't work well that's upsetting and unexpected and chaotic and that's the domain of of nature roughly speaking symbolically speaking the first book was about how to deal with an excess of chaos because it can swamp you and the second book is how to deal with pathologies of order and i would also say you know conservatives are more concerned with an excess of chaos in managing it liberals are more concerned with an excess of order but they're both right order can go dreadfully wrong i mean that's what we're talking about when we talk about the decisions of facebook and twitter for example to censor you know we're concerned about that that's a pathology of order but the untrammeled world can go terribly wrong as well which is why we erect complicated cultural structures to begin with and so each book focuses broadly on one of those two domains and hypothetically they make a nice matched set as a consequence so i tried to the first book tilted more towards individuality and anxiety chaos um and disorder and but the second book tilts more towards communitarianism and um the pathologies of tyranny and how that might be addressed they both concentrate fundamentally though on solutions at the individual level you know i'm a psychologist not a sociologist and i'm primarily interested in the level of the individual what can you do regardless of the pathologies of the state or the catastrophes of chaos what steps can you take to increa improve your practical understanding of the world and to make your way more effectively even in your own terms and so that's the aim of both books and i'm very pleased that people have responded very positively to the newest book as they did to the previous one but maybe somewhat more and that surprises me because it was written under a lot of duress and i wasn't sure at all that i had managed anything of any quality um because i i wasn't acute enough often to be able to make that distinction but i'm very pleased that like the public response on amazon i think there's there's several thousand reviews now and they average out to five stars out of five and so and most people have said if they compare the two books that the second one is better so i'm very pleased about that and and grateful to my readers happy about its reception and i do hope that it's helpful that's what the goal was that's the goal man it's like make things better well that's definitely doing that you know and you're not holding back in the book for the person that reads it you're kind of going here's what i'm going through here's what you're not at all holding back it's a different read than the first one uh on the cover of it new york times quote i love how that's on the bottom it says the most influential public intellectual in the western world right now new york times specifically from new york times dr jordan peterson thank you so much for your time folks if you're watching this you can get the book we're going to put the link below for you to go out there and order the book uh i am looking forward to our next interaction but until then all the best to you thank you very much for the discussion and thank you to all of you who are watching and listening uh it's much appreciated and good luck to all of you no matter when i speak to him this man makes you think you know the way he processes issues and how he's thinking and processing out loud so he's kind of well i would do it and just kind of follow him to see where his mind goes and where his brain takes him but if you enjoy today's interviews there's two other interviews i did with them that are just as fascinating as this one one of them i did in dallas was the first one we ever did when he talked about how he makes decision if you've never seen this very interesting the other one is the clip that i showed where he was emotional we did that interview in front of seven or eight thousand people if you've never seen that one click over here to watch that interview take care everybody bye

Channel: Valuetainment

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Rating: 4.9231572 out of 5

Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, jordan peterson, jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson best interview, Jordan Peterson Emotional Interview with Patrick Bet-David, Jordan Peterson - UNCENSORED, 12 rules of life, jordan peterson goes off, who is jordan peterson, jordan peterson debate, Beyond order: 12 More Rules for Life

Id: 8LkmX31PySA

Length: 104min 26sec (6266 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021