12 Rules for Life Tour - Melbourne, Australia.

[Applause] man that's a lot of australians well thank you very much for coming out it's really quite something to see all of you here as dave said this is the largest venue that that we've spoken at i i had a couple of debates with sam harris one in dublin and one in london that were in larger venues but as far as speaking specifically about 12 rules this is oh damn near twice as big as the next biggest auditorium i think we were at the apollo in london and it held 30 it held 3 000 people and so that was good but this is this is really something um there must be quite a dearth of things to do in melbourne tonight [Laughter] no seriously though um it's remarkable to see all of you come out to engage in what i believe to be fundamentally a serious conversation about psychological and philosophical and perhaps certainly ethical perhaps even religious issues and you know who would have ever guessed that there was a mass market for that you know so and apparently there is and maybe we're smarter than we think we are and i have a suspicion that that might be the case one of the things that i've noticed about the intellectual dark web types you know that's a name that eric weinstein you might be familiar with him came up with and it wasn't like we all got together and built a little fort out in our backyard and you know called it the intellectual dark web um he just happened to coin the term and um and a number of people were included for one reason or another and i i've spent a fair bit of time trying to understand why that coinage stuck and what it might be that united this very strangely diverse range of people and i think it's really three things one is that each of them from joe rogan to shapiro um the same with uh with with uh sam harris are all people on dave are all people have their independent media platforms right they're they're not part of a corporate structure they're not beholden to anyone they're financially independent um and and they've built that themselves and and so they can say what they want and so that's kind of cool to see that happening to see the technology that that enables online video which is really a complex form of broadcasting and also online podcasts which is a complex form of radio um enable that sort of independent journalism as and to see people able to um not precisely exploit that but make use of it that's that's a very good thing and i i'm thinking that that might be a real positive uh outcome of the social media revolution i mean there's lots of downsides i think twitter is a downside um it's it's a pretty rough platform and the commentary on social media platforms can be pretty brutal we really haven't figured out how to regulate it well yet so that it's civilized not so that it's censored right because that that's a mistake censored and civilized aren't the same thing properly regulated is civilized and we don't know how to do that but youtube and podcasts have opened up a huge market for intellectual material in a manner that's never really happened before and you're also seeing this happen with audio books you know the audiobook market has absolutely exploded in the last five years about a third of books sold now are audio books and so and and that seems to be because people having become accustomed to podcasts are downloading um audiobooks and listening to them in their cars or when they're exercising or when they're doing housework or you know and it's one of the advantages of this new media type is that you have it on demand and you can play it at your leisure or when you're working for that matter and so you know i have all sorts of working-class guys come up and talk to me after the show long-haul truck drivers and those sorts of people who have a lot of time you know obviously they're concentrating on what they're doing but they have they have spare time to listen and they're listening to you know three-hour joe rogan podcasts on all sorts of abstract subjects and and my lectures as well and it's really something to see that happening and so that's one element of the intel intellectual dark web that's that's interesting and tied in with the new media revolution because it really is a revolution to have video on demand like that and to have it so easy to produce and to have it permanent and to have it distributed everywhere in the world and to have it subtitled in all sorts of different languages and to have it essentially free of charge and able to be produced in a day or two i mean it's and and and then it's permanent like a book it's really something new and and then the same with the audio version and i do believe it it may be the case that more people can like a lot of people are intimidated by books for all sorts of reasons i mean highly literate reading is a relatively rare skill like it's it's not overwhelmingly rare but it's relatively rare but listening man people can listen you know and so all of a sudden this complicated information is available to people who can listen and maybe that's 10 times as many people who are likely to read or maybe it's 50 times as many people who are likely to read so god only knows what the consequence of that is going to be that could be a real education revolution and hopefully we'll be smart enough to take advantage of that carefully over the next 10 years and find out if that is the case i'm optimistic about it because it one of the things that really is cool about the internet is that you know if you want to learn something you can pretty much type in your question whatever it is and somebody will have put up a youtube video that tells you how to do it and you know you might have to sort through two or three of them before you find someone who's done a very high level job of the explanation but they've done it and often you know they run an ad maybe and monetize a little bit but mostly i would say it's it's an altruistic gesture and so that's really something and the other thing the intellectual dark web people have in common is that um well they're opinionated and and and and fairly tough-minded but more importantly they don't think their audience is stupid and that's really something and and and i think they're right i'm not going to assume in instantaneously that that's a consequence of something particularly moral about the people who make up that group i think it is a testament to their faith in the essential nature in in in the essential quality of human nature but i also do think it's a reflection of the medium itself because it's funny when i step into a television studio now like a classic television studio which happens from time to time and which is apparently going to happen with australia's q a on the 25th which should be quite interesting yes strangely enough i'm actually looking forward to that because i've been i've been feeling a lot better recently and so it'd be actually nice to have a conversation with a journalist when i wasn't feeling half dead and to see how that goes so um it'd be nice to have a conversation at one point when i was at the top of my game and so i don't know if i'm at the top of my game right now but i am definitely feeling a lot better than i have for a long time so um yeah yeah thank god for that man it's uh hopefully that will be reflected in some reasonable quality of discourse tonight and perhaps a tiny bit of wit but we'll see how that goes um so so uh when i step into an old school television studio it feels like 1975 in some sense you know the person i'm talking to isn't really there they're really a speaking device for the corporation and and they have to be because the corporation which is running high band you know high expense low bandwidth television where every minute or every second is extraordinarily expensive they can't really take risks they can't have free-flowing conversations on the off chance that something goes dreadfully wrong and it might right and and so everything is scripted and then you know you have 30 seconds to make your point and like there's just some things you can't say in 30 seconds you know you have to you have to compress them down to the point where they actually they're actually foolish it's actually foolish to try to do it but you know what else do you have whereas with these long-form conversations man you can actually have a discussion about something you can try to get to the bottom of it and so that's that's pretty cool and then and then it turns out that people will actually follow along like i was actually absolutely stunned by i had four debates with sam harris earlier this year uh two in vancouver and one in dublin and one in london and each of them lasted about three hours and we were going to do a q a for each of them but as it turned out while we were talking we got into the conversation and then we asked the audience to vote by clapping whether we should continue the conversation or move to the q a and it was overwhelming majority of people wanted the conversation to continue and so basically what happened was something approximating a 12 to 15-hour continuous conversation about the relationship between facts and values or science and religion you know and that's a fairly solid philosophical discussion and that isn't necessarily the case that sam and i are the two people in the world who would be most qualified to undertake such a discussion but you know we did our best and it was a pretty high level conversation i mean for me it was approximately the level i think that would characterize a pretty decent phd dissertation defense and that's fairly high level intellectual conversation and the audience was just with us the entire time and so that's cool man you know it it it could easily be that our relatively primitive initial mass communication technologies like television made us look a lot stupider even to ourselves than we actually were because everything had to be compressed to a very short period of time everything had to be scripted so it couldn't be spontaneous discussion you couldn't assume that your audience knew anything because maybe it was the first time they watched the show you couldn't assume that they remembered anything because you didn't know like if it was a series whether they had participated in the entire series you had to aim at the lowest common denominator and you couldn't assume much of an attention span but it turns out that people have an incredible attention span you know like i was just re-watching breaking bad and i don't know how many hours breaking bad is it's like what this six seasons must must be 60 hours i think something like that and it's so really it's a continuous 60-hour movie and that's a long movie and it's really engrossing and and there's all sorts of other shows that are perhaps of equal complexity and man people have no problem with them at all right they just eat them up so it turns out that well it turns out maybe we're not so stupid and so that'd be nice if it if if we weren't so stupid and i'm i'm kind of tired of everyone assuming that we are just like i'm tired of everyone assuming that we're some sort of cancer on the planet you know i don't i don't like that attitude about human beings i think it's i think there's something deeply deeply wrong about it you know this is something something that's just kind of an interesting historical tidbit back in the late 1800s there was a biologist named thomas huxley and he was the famous novelist elvis huxley's i think great grandfather perhaps grandfather and a very intelligent man that a very very uh gifted family and uh huxley was a great defender of darwin by the way too and he was commissioned by the english government to do a study of oceanic resources this was back in the 1890s and because the english at that point were concerned to some degree that you know maybe it would be possible that we would overfish and and cause trouble because of that and huxley did an exhaustive study and he concluded that there were so there's so much ocean and there's so much resource in the ocean that there wasn't a possibility that human beings with their rather puny technologies could ever do anything but put a small dent in the absolute overwhelming plenitude of the of the of of the of the of the water that covers more than half the planet and so that's only 130 years ago there abouts that's that's not that long you know that's two relatively old men ago it's not that long and you know you have put them back to back sort of um and so that that's yesterday in some sense and it really wasn't at all until the 1960s that we had some sense that we had developed technologically to the point where some of what we could do mechanically might start to have planetary repercussions say with you know we we saw that with air quality in cities for example and and the denuding of of of the countryside and and then perhaps the overfishing in relationship to the oceans which started to happen after world war ii but nobody had any sense really until 1960 that well maybe we had to take care of things a little bit better than we were because there was more of us we were starting to become a force that was to some degree a match for nature you know and and bloody well thank god for that you know because nature was more than a match for us for a very long period of time right our our species has come up through through through epochs eons of absolute brutal um privation and difficulty and and starvation and and freezing temperatures and and burning in the desert sun and lack of water and lack of of hygienic facilities and like just hand-to-mouth suffering and you know we've managed to organize ourselves to the point where that's still the lot of a substantial number of people on the planet but that's decreasing very rapidly you know the u.n now projects that by the year 2030 abject poverty which is defined as living on less than a dollar a 90 90 a day in in today's u.s money will be eradicated there won't be anybody in the world that poor and the cynics say well that's a pretty damn low uh barrier let's say but if you double it you also see that's decreasing very rapidly and if you triple it you see that's decreasing very rapidly and you've got to draw the bloody line somewhere you know and abject poverty is abject poverty and the fact that it's decreased by 50 percent in the last 12 years from 2000 to the year 2012 we've decreased the absolute level of abject poverty in the world by 50 percent right it was the fastest economic it was the most spectacular economic miracle in the history of humankind and you know you hardly ever hear about it hardly anyone knows about it it's like it's it's a bloody miracle there's more middle-class people in the world now than non-middle-class people and there are way more obese people than there are starving people and so that's something to celebrate you know i mean it's a funny thing to celebrate but but it's a it's a it's quite the thing to celebrate and the fastest growing economies in the world are in sub-saharan africa and and they're growing at five to seven percent a year so it looks like the economic miracle that's you know that took place in india and in china most of southeast asia is really starting to kick in in africa and it seems at least in part it's because of the collapse of the soviet union back in 1989 and the lack of overt pressure to have african countries pursue the most pathological possible economic doctrines that anybody could ever imagine they just stopped doing that has freed people up to start to become well if not rich at least richer and at least with the possibility of a continual rise upward you know the child mortality rate in africa now is the same as it was in europe in 1952. i mean that's that's really something you know and and uh um longevity rates have increased tremendously in africa and you know we're kicking the slats out of some major diseases polio is pretty much gone it looks like we're putting a pretty good dent in malaria that'll do great things for africa i think there's a real possibility with some concerted effort that we could get rid of tuberculosis in the next 15 years or so if we made that a target that would be something you know that's an ancient scourge of mankind we could certainly do without that so there and and there are intelligent people who are working hard on trying to eradicate these problems and they're doing it successfully and so you know i'm i'm not i'm not in favor of the whole there's something wrong with humanity and we're a scourge on the bloody planet and it would be better off if there were fewer of us and the whole planet would be thriving if there were none of us at all i think that there's something unbelievably dangerous about that attitude and i think it's it's ungrateful and unfair and unsympathetic and ungrateful and non-em empathetic because i really do see that like i know i don't know a lot about human history because god there's a lot of history to know about you know and the more you know about human history the more you know that there's just endless details that you have no idea about but if you if you do a reasonable overview you you do see that it's it's a bloody mess you know that it's it's it's privation and war and catastrophe and brutality and struggle and and strife and difficulty all the entire way through you know people striving against odds that are just absolutely astronomic astronomical and yet succeeding you know that overall the the story overall is one of i wouldn't say unbroken progress but it's decent progress and it's better now than it's ever been by a huge margin and there's every bit of evidence to suggest that it could continue to get better and better and better you know here's another thing that's really cool do you know that we're adding four years of life expectancy every year now so once we hit a year every year then that's it we don't die anymore but those last eight months a year they're gonna be they're gonna be tough to manage you know but four months a year is really something and so you know we're basically living longer and we're living healthier and we're smarter than we were because we're much more our nutritional levels are higher than they were because because we're not starving especially the people at the bottom end and you know we're educating people all over the world the chinese graduate more engineers every year than the us have engineers now that's terrifying because god always we've got all these engineers already and they're making gadgets at such a rate that you can't even keep track of the gadgets right you go online and like there's all these technologies and all these subcultures using them and you don't even know what the technologies are if you're fully informed you can't keep up with the new stuff that you might buy and it's not like it's trivial technology it's unbelievably powerful technology like i'm in awe of many of the young people that i work with because they're more comp they're they're savvier about the technological infrastructure that constitutes the web than i am because i'm old and it and it's hard to keep up as you get old um and you know they come up with tools to make difficult things very simple very rapidly and there's just subcultures everywhere that are doing this at an unbelievably rapid rate you know when you go to somewhere like silicon valley and i've spent a lot of time in silicon valley and it's it has its problems but jesus there's a unbelievable collection of smart people there and they're working on things like they're working on things like mad and and and it's working you know you see someone like elon musk i mean what the hell do you make of someone like that you know i mean what did he do he made an electric car which is basically impossible and it works which is basically impossible and then he built an infrastructure so that you could charge the damn thing wherever you drove and that was basically impossible and then he made it cheap because if you buy an electric car and you factor in the price of gas the electric car is actually about as expensive as the gasoline car and so that was unbelievable then he built a bloody rocket which was one tenth the price or less that of a nasa rocket that you could reuse which was impossible and then he put one of his cars on top of the rocket and he shot it up into space and then this happened right this all happened and he's still alive and you know and then he went and blew it all by smoking pot on joe rogan you know because because well it's so funny you know we you know we like our insane geniuses like predictable and and and and safe and so we don't want them doing strange things like having a tiny puff of marijuana on a show famous for marijuana so so anyways you know that's all that's all good news it's all good news man and i learned a lot about this i worked for the u.n for a while like indirectly and and i wasn't paid for it by the way it was volunteer work i worked on this document which was the report to the secretary general on sustainable economic development it's quite funny because a lot of the right wing conspiracy theorists are having a field day with that man that i'm some sort of like closet globalist chill because i because i work momentarily for the u.n it's like well what what the hell are you supposed to do when you're asked to do something like that you know there was a document that was being prepared that was supposed to lay out some halfways intelligent vision of what things might be like if the international community cooperated for the next 30 years it wasn't it wasn't like there weren't brutal guidelines that were going to be enforced by jack-booted nazis it was it was just a proposal paper and so we had a chance to to to work on it there was only one canadian team and i got i got placed on that and that was kind of cool and so it gave me an opportunity to spend two years reading about economics and about ecology at the same time and so and what was so weird about that was the more i read the more optimistic i got and i thought well that isn't what i expected like i thought we were going to hell in a hand basket at quite the quite the rapid rate and you know i mean there's no doubt that we're doing some stupid things and i would say the stupidest thing we're probably doing is overfishing the oceans because there's just no use it's just there's just no use in that it's it's completely destructive it doesn't do anybody any good and it could be stopped but i know that your country for example is starting to put aside marine park reserves that are fishery free essentially and you don't need a lot of that before the ocean can regenerate itself because it's actually pretty good at that um one of the things that's kind of funny you know remember when that when there was that big oil spill in the gulf of mexico you know there were more fish there two years later than there were before the spill you know why because people stopped fishing so it turned out that the pollution was really good for the fish it's like yeah well that's why you have to do your research carefully because you never know you know you never know what's true and what isn't and so that was that was pretty interesting the same thing happened in world war ii by the way in in the north sea because the north sea had been fished out pretty badly and then during world war ii it wasn't all that safe to go out and fish in the north sea because you know you would get sunk by a submarine and that was not very bright so people stopped fishing and the fish came back very rapidly and fish do that because they breed quite quickly and so if you just leave the damn things alone for a while most of them come back but but you know apart from the fisheries which which is is really quite an appalling and and and pessimistic story although not hopeless um and people are waking up to it and and building these marine reserve parks for example a lot of the ecological news was surprisingly good way better than i thought it would be uh you know so for example there are more forests in the northern hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago so who would have guessed that i wouldn't have guessed that partly it's because marginal farmland has returned to forest so and because we've got more effective at at um at agriculture by a huge margin and uh there are more forests in china than there were 30 years ago and so that's something and it turns out when people burn coal which is you know kind of polluting they don't burn wood so you know they're going to burn something because they don't like eating raw inedible things and freezing to death so they're going to burn something and it turns out that coal is actually preferable to wood and so well and so these things are complicated and the the ecological story looked better than than i would have ever guessed even the overpopulation issue you know ever since the 1960s with paul ehrlich and the population bomb there was this terrible pessimism that we were going to breed you know like like uncontrolled rats until every square inch of the world was like covered with with some starving skeleton and that that was all going to happen by the year 2000 when there would be mass starvation and the the price of commodities would have blown through the roof when we would run out of oil and and all the uh all the commodities that we need to maintain a reasonably standard reasonably high standard of living and you know that didn't happen and not only did it happen is that rates of poverty went down and rates of hunger went down even though the population went way up and so there are more people who are hungry now than there were 50 years ago but there are far fewer proportion of people who are hungry and that's really something and so the overpopulation doom and gloomers were absolutely wrong wrong wrong wrong and we're going to peak at 9 billion that's what it looks like all the projections indicate something around 9 billion and that's only 2 billion more than we have like it's not nothing it's still two billion people but we're but at the rate at which we're improving agricultural output and with regards to efficiency of agricultural output there's no evidence whatsoever that we're going to run out of food and you know a country like uganda this is quite interesting if uganda which is a very big country by the way if it was utilized properly it has a water table underneath it and plenty of water if uganda was utilized properly it could feed all of africa and so it's not like we're making full use even of the um agricultural capacity that we have available to us and so there's no we're not going to overpopulate the world and leave everybody like starving in on on like easter island with nothing but giant heads and no trees that's not going to happen and in fact i have a sneaking suspicion that within 100 years one of the biggest problems that we'll be facing is a declining population and that that'll be worrisome i mean we won't be concerned about that at the moment but um that whole doom and gloom scenario just seems to be to be wrong and you know there are there are fewer wars than there were by a large margin the overall rates of homicidal behavior in the world have plummeted the rates of death by terrorism over the last 50 years have plummeted um there's there's a lot of good news there's way more good news than there is bad news and that's there's no wars in the western hemisphere there's a piece of good news you know that's a remarkable thing so and you know and it's been it's been 70 years since world war ii and we've had thermonuclear weapons since then and of course everyone's terrified of those bloody things and and no wonder and maybe that's for the best because we maybe we needed something to really terrify us you know it's certainly possible but even though there's always the possibility of a mistake and there's still the possibility of a nuclear outbreak we haven't used them and we haven't had a third world war and almost all of us here have lived in what you got to think man comparative peace and prosperity if you compare it to any other time and place anywhere else in the world at any point in history which is not perfect because you know you're still getting old and you're still gonna die and and we haven't we haven't what we haven't defeated all the diseases that that beset us but god it could be a lot worse and we seem to be making it a lot better and so and so look this is what happened to me you know when i wrote my first book which was maps of meaning um i was looking at something that was really dark it was really dark i i was interested in totalitarianism and i'm still interested in totalitarianism i don't care if it's what on whether it's on the left or the right it doesn't matter to me it's this it's this totalizing view that's predicated on the assumption that you can take a set of a few simple axioms about the way the world is and always was and then you can decide how society would be structured and then you can force people into acting that way and the utopia will come i'm not fond of that sort of thinking i don't think there's any evidence that it's viable partly because the world's too complicated to manage that and you just can't get your axioms right and besides things shift around on you and even if you're right today something's going to turn on you tomorrow and you're going to have to update your model a bit and if you don't well then all hell is going to break loose so but you know i was interested in totalitarianism partly because because for psychological reasons i was interested in why people were so committed to belief systems that they were willing to put everything to the torch essentially so mostly i was concerned about the ideological struggle between the western world and the communist world particularly the soviets but not only the soviets um and and i was curious in a sort of post-modern way because you know you might say well you know the marxists they have their viewpoint and you know inequality of income distribution is a problem and maybe things should be fairer and maybe the fact that there are relatively poor people in the west and relatively rich people in the west is a consequence of oppression and maybe something could be done about that and the western way of looking at the world is just an arbitrary set of rules and the communist way of looking at the world is another arbitrary set of rules maybe you could even say that about the fascist way of looking at the world although somehow people are much less likely to agree to that which is quite interesting because it it means that by and large we have come to a collective decision that there are some forms of arbitrary games let's say set up on axiomatic structure that are wrong you know and it's a very rare person who thinks that what the nazis did was was justifiable was right in any in any fundamental sense and that's interesting you know because it means that collectively we have come to a decision that there is a difference between good and evil if you assume that what the nazis did was evil which i think is a fairly reasonable assumption i don't i don't know what you would do with the word evil if what happened in places like auschwitz didn't deserve that epithet you need some other word that was just as dark to describe what happened so you might as well just use evil because everybody knows what it means so we have come to a conclusion that there are things that we shouldn't get up to you know and that also implies that we've come to some conclusion about what constitutes good some general sense that whatever the opposite of what let's say the nazis did and i would say also the collectivist communists whatever the opposite of that is whatever that might be that's good and that we should be pursuing that and so that's a good thing because it kind of pulls us out of the moral relativistic problem not not exactly because it's not defined perfectly or anything you know to say well you shouldn't be a nazi it's like it's kind of vague you know okay no armbands no no goose stepping um but but then what well that's that's a complic it's a complicated question to figure out how to conduct yourself so that you would be unlikely to participate in the horrors of a totalitarian ideological system if the advantages of doing so were offered to you in a realistic way that's really the moral issue because you know if you read about nazi germany and you read about communist soviet union and china you understand that those systems were very attractive to people and there were reasons for that attractiveness and that had you been there there's a high probability that you would have been attracted by those ideas and you can see that now because there's a big resurgence for example both on the left on the on the right but i would say primarily on the left especially in the academic world there's a big resurgence in the same kind of ideas that that uh inspire generations of of soviet utopians say back in in in the in the early 1900s when they had not so much evidence that what they were doing was absolutely bloody pointless and murderous you know and so that does separate the modern people who suggest that such things from those who believed it 100 years ago but nonetheless you know the point is is that those ideas are so attractive that they still they still resonate with people and you have to take that seriously because it means they probably resonate with you and some of it is i deal with this to some degree in chapter one stand up straight with your shoulders back because it really is a discussion of hierarchies and i actually try to make a case like i like to make a case for hierarchy you know the the radical leftist types uh the post-modernist in particular and i put this mostly at the feet of people like foucault he'd be he'd be villain number one although he was influenced heavily by marx and his own special sense of resentment intellectual resentment and arrogance so which which which made him into a sort of perverted and malevolent and underhanded marks which is really something to be because just the ordinary marks wasn't so great um you know and and foucault makes this fundamental case that human that there's no real truth and that what passes is truth is the dominant opinion of the dominant group and by dominant he means those that hold the power and and so that's a hell of a pessimistic view of the world and it's wrong it's wrong and like it's seriously wrong um and and i'm gonna i'm gonna lay out why it's wrong i mean first of all it doesn't even work for kids you know if you look at how kids organize themselves on the playground there are bullies and it's interesting if you study bullies you find out that they're not necessarily the most unpopular kids there are outcast kids who are more unpopular than the bullies and the bullies are ambivalently popular they have some friends and they have some enemies so you know so it's not entirely counterproductive to be a bully but it starts working it starts working less and less well as you get older and so it's it's not doing so well by the time you hit junior high and by the time you're at high school it's not a very effective strategy at all and a bully is someone who uses power it's like bloody well do what i want or i'll hit you or i'll do something else that you won't like that will be physical or maybe it'll be psychological but if the psychology doesn't work calling you names demeaning you you know talking behind your back which is very common form of female bullying because females have their own forms of bullying and they're very effective you know if that doesn't work then i can just take you out of the schoolyard and pound you and if i can't pound you myself well then i'll pound you with one of my friends and that'll be just as effective and you'll bloody well do what i want you to do and that's power and it's like really that's the basis of our society that's that sort of power that's how we organize ourselves i mean it's it's patently ridiculous first of all most children who are popular let's say universally popular and who do well socially aren't bullies they're good at playing with others and they learn that between the age of two and four and they learn very straightforward rules like reciprocity that's the big one it's there's a couple reciprocity is one trust is another to to abide by your word but those are the same things reciprocity and trust are very similar it's like well you know we'll take turns you play my game now and i'll play your game tomorrow you know and you guys have had friends that were real friends and you know perfectly well that if you have a good friend you don't have to keep track exactly of what you do for each other you don't write it down on a piece of paper and you know put a check mark beside it unless you're unless you're a little bit on the paranoid side and and and and that's only the beginnings of your problems and what you do is you know you kind of keep track of who does what for who and you kind of keep the balance equal and you do that because well that's what you do if you're awake and conscious and a decent person and if you have a relationship if you're in a marriage it's the same thing you know it's like you don't obsessively keep track of who owes what when and why that that's a sign of a degenerating relationship what you do is well you do what you can for your partner and they do what they can for you and you're both aware of that and you assume good will and with any luck that iterates across time and it's a sustainable game it's not bloody power and you know you know there's nothing more miserable than being in a relationship where where the rule is do what the hell i want or suffer the consequences you know and what kind of relationship are you going to get out of that even if the person is proud enough to do what you want them to do when you're there and enforcing it they're not going to put their whole heart into it that's bloody well for sure they're going to be if they have any sense at all and they do and if they have any spirit at all and they do they're going to be undermining what you're forcing them to do all the time there's an old soviet joke they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work right great that's a hell of a way to run a society and and and and that's exactly how that society ran so all you do with force is engender bitterness and resentment and if the person that you're that you're exerting force on can't exert the same level of physical force back it's not like they're not going to take their revenge in other ways they're not going to cook you wonderful meals they're not going to be what would you call it enthusiastic sexual partners you know they're going to get their revenge when they can unless you've crushed their spirit completely and then then it serves you right because then you're dragging around behind you someone whose spirit you've crushed completely and that's a hell of a way to live and so what is this idea that our society is fundamentally predicated on power you know and then that's the post-modern claim we group ourselves into our groups whatever the hell they happen to be sex gender ethnicity whatever the flavor of the month is there's an infinite number of ways we could group ourselves and then we organize ourselves into power hierarchies and we dominate each other and then all of those groups go to war against one another and the most dominant group that has the most power wins it's like i don't know what what the hell planet foucault grew up on you know that that might be the definition of like the worst african dictatorship of the last 100 years but it's not a description of our society and it's not a description of the way that people organize themselves into hierarchies which was the point i was trying to make in rule one when i talked about hierarchies now it's very important where you are in your hierarchical position with regards to other people in relationship to your mental health and this is a really important thing to understand because you have an ancient counter in your brain and that was the point of the biological uh comparisons and lobsters being one set of comparisons but not only lobsters we know perfectly well animal behaviorists people who know their neural psychopharmacology know perfectly well that the serotonin serotonergic system operates quite similarly across most animals with complex nervous systems and one of the things that it does is track relative status position and in in birds wrens which is another example i used a lot of it is power you know ren's a little bird it's quite a cute bird it sings very nicely and you you think it's harmless but but it's not it's a vicious little character and i used to sit in my backyard and record ren's songs on my on my tape recorder and the wren that lived in our backyard would dive bomb it you know four inches away and it was very brave of him and he had a little nest that that was up in the tree and there were some nests that we had built bird houses in in the neighborhoods nearby and then in the yards nearby and he would go like half he's half his day spent stuffing those other birdhouses with sticks so full that no bird could get in them you know it was like this is my damn yard which is what he was saying when he was singing so beautifully and you better look the hell out because if you build i'm going to stuff your damn house with sticks and if i see you sitting on a branch i'm going to dive bomb you and knock you off and that's power and that's what wren's do despite the fact that they're cute and chickens do the same thing there are pecking orders among chickens and virtually every animal wolf packs organize themselves into hierarchies and chimpanzees organize themselves into hierarchies and like there are rat hierarchies and hierarchical organization is the rule among animals that live somewhat socially and even those who don't that occupy the same geographical territory there has to be some way of organizing access to relatively scarce resources that doesn't result in chronic combat because chronic combat well look you're ren a and you're rent b and you decide to have it out so you peck yourselves half to death and you're rent c and so you got a little bit more patience you just wait until those two wrens beat each other to death and then you move in it's like it's a stupid solution it doesn't even work for ren's let alone people and so you know the wrens announced their prowess and they do that with the quality of their song and their displays and and they they indicate to one another who shouldn't be messed with and then there's a minimum of combat and you could make a pretty good case that that's power that that's power but like it's not like wrens get together and build like rent apartment houses and then and then go out on collective worm hunt insects i guess collective insect hunting expeditions and bring them all back and distribute them or or or or make insect farms so that there's more insects for all the wrens they haven't got that far you know they're competing in a zero-sum game and that isn't what human beings do we figured out how to not have zero-sum games a very very long time ago and it turns out that if the game you're playing isn't zero sum right which means that there's only a finite number of resources and everybody has to fight to the death for them and some are going to get the lion's share and others are going to starve if you're not playing a zero-sum game then you can learn to cooperate and compete in an intelligent civilized manner and all of a sudden there's more than enough for everyone now still some people are going to have more than other others you know and but there's nothing how are you going to stop that and do you want to like do you want to only know what do you want you want to only be allowed to know what everyone else knows you don't get to know anything that no one that anyone else knows because it's got to be equal you want everyone to be exactly the same amount of attractive you know which and if you averaged attractiveness overall and you only allowed each person to be as attractive as the average person there'd be not much attractiveness left in the world and it seems to me that that would be quite the loss you know and strength you're not allowed to have any additional strength or or or ambition or talent or or act or or let's say athletic ability it's like or artistic ability i mean aren't we kind of happy that there's massive inequality in the distribution of talent i know it's it's i know it's harsh and hard but you can't expect everybody to have every talent that there is and it would be a hell of a sacrifice if no one got to have any talent because it wouldn't be fair and so i don't get the whole equality of outcome thing it isn't it isn't going to work there aren't that many geniuses you know we want to exploit the geniuses and get them to work for us and if the if if the price is is that somebody has more than you do of something well suck it up for christ's sake well jesus seriously man it's like look how much more do you have than most people have you know you you need you need to make thirty thousand dollars a year to be in the top one percent of the socioeconomic distribution worldwide you know you always hear about the one percent right of the evil one percent and they churn by the way because it's not the same people all the time it's like all of you here are in the evil one percent and you think well that's not very fair because i was really only talking about within my country my well that's convenient for you you know or it makes it really really convenient argument for you it's like well all those other people those foreigners they don't count if they're poor who the hell cares it's it's it's it's the australians that matter you know and so no that's that's that's a non-starter you know and and by historical standards you're doing a hell of a lot better than the top one percent i can tell you that i read a nice article by a coalition called human progress the other day and they were comparing the typical middle class person who lives now with uh rockefellers in the 1990s and say well would you rather be a middle class person now or nelson rockefeller in 1919 and the answer seemed pretty damn clear that well you know if you were nelson rockefeller then you would have been richer than anyone else and there's something to be said for that status right because people do like to have more than others it's a it's a i don't know if it's a good thing or not but it is one of the things that we like and so you'd have that you'd be richer than everyone else but there'd be all sorts of things that you have that now that nelson rockefeller wouldn't have had a hope of purchasing like the antibiotics that he would have needed to stop his son from dying for example you know just as a start and so so i think this this this this complaint about inequality look no one likes inequality exactly you walk down the street this is why i always get a kick out of people who protest i'm against poverty it's like really you're against poverty and and you think that's a unique enough attribute so that it was worth your time to make a sign that said that you were against poverty and show other people it's like i've never met i've never met anyone that was for poverty you know you walk down the street with someone who's pretty well off you know and they've got 1920s spats on and a bowler and they're feeling pretty damn rich and the stalkster certificate sticking out of their back pocket and you know there's a homeless person there and they give them a good kick and they say the more poverty the better it's like no you know when people walk down the street and you see homeless people and they're often homeless is a complex problem like you think well homeless people are poor it's like yeah yeah man that's like one problem they have out of 50. and like i've worked with poor people you know in my clinical practice and pour in multiple dimensions and many of them you gave them money they were just done especially if they were like alcoholics and cocaine addicts as long as they were broke they had some hope of living through the next month but as soon as their unemployment check showed up man they were face down in the ditch three days later right nothing but cocaine and alcohol with all their idiot friends for three days and then they'd show up back in my practice saying you know god i relapsed again well what happened well my money came in it's like yeah money's really going to do you a hell of a lot of good it'll just kill you faster than poverty now not that there's anything good about poverty but it's not like these are simple problems you walk down the street and you see someone who's been an alcoholic for 20 years and maybe they're addicted to methamphetamines as well or maybe they're schizophrenic it's like it isn't unequal distribution of monetary resources that are is the primary cause for that problem and it isn't going to be some sort of straightforward redistribution that's going to fix it because it's way more complicated than that and so and then the whole power thing too it's like look i get it i get the left wing i get the left wing issue and i really do and i think i get it better than the damn left wingers get it because you know most of the radical types they follow marks and they say well one of marx's dictums was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people and that's right that's true wealth and capital income for that matter but not only that whatever it is that you might like to have accumulates in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of people it's a principle that was discovered by an economist named pareto vilfredo pareto and he pointed out something that had been pointed out in the gospels by the way thousands of years earlier which was to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken away the rule being once you start to succeed at something the probability that you will continue to succeed ever more rapidly increases so there's exp there's an exponential function with regards to success but there's also an exponential function with regards to failure so failure and and success aren't like this they're like this fail fail die succeed succeed succeed ridiculously like it's this weird curve and and it's funny because it doesn't just characterize economics it's it's a really fun it looks like a really fundamental economic law i was actually quite shocked when i first learned about this which was only about 15 years ago because i thought most things were normally distributed it turns out that that's not true what people produce creatively isn't normally distributed a small proportion of people produce most of what's of value it doesn't matter what it is and you know this it's like how many books does stephen king sell it's like half the books right and then there's the next guy after stephen king and no one even knows who he is and he sells like one-tenth as many books as stephen king and then there's author number 50 and out of the thousands and thousands of offers and he's barely scraping by and then there's the bottom 99.9 percent and they can't make a living writing and that's how it is and it's the same with musicians and it's the same with with with athletes you know if you look at number of goals scored for example in hockey i'm a canadian so i'll use that there's a small percentage of absolutely phenomenal hockey players even in something as amazing as the national hockey league or any professional sports league you know you you have to be one hell of an athlete to make it in a professional sports league and still you get this tiny group of superstars who are way better at it than anyone else you know and and so there's this weird rule that as you get more getting even more gets easier and who knows why it is exactly partly it's practice but and it characterizes all sorts of situations like it characterizes the size of planets a small number of planets have almost all the mass it characterizes stars the same way it characterizes biomass in the in the in the uh amazon jungle it characterizes city size a small percentage of cities have almost all the people it's like what what's that and then then you go back 10 000 years you look at a paleolithic grave site and you see what people are buried with and like there's one guy there's two guys there is this covered with gold right the gravesite is insanely rich and everyone else has like a bone and it's theirs and that's it you know and and so you analyze paleolithic gravesites you see exactly the same pareto distribution a small number of people are buried with all the wealth and almost everyone else has none and so it's this unbelievably deep proclivity of resources to distribute themselves unequally and you know this too because you play games like monopoly right you've all played monopoly what happens when you play monopoly you all start out equal right exactly 100 equal and you all have an equal chance of winning because it's basically a game of chance not entirely because you can play stupidly but you know but but you can only play so intelligently because you're at the mercy of the dice and what happens inevitably is that some evil capitalist ends up with all the money and all the hotels and all the houses and just like takes you out and yet you play and you don't think oh my god you know there's something fundamentally unfair about that or maybe you play non-competitive monopoly where after every round you redistribute the money so everyone right so there's no fun in that and so and so the so the problem with karl marx as far as i'm concerned is that he was nowhere pessimistic enough it's like no you can't blame inequality on capitalism in fact capitalism is pretty good at ameliorating inequality like there's still plenty of inequality in capitalist societies make no mistake about that and you can make some claim although it's a tricky one that some indices of inequality have increased over the last 20 years it depends on how you measure it because it's complicated because you know even poorer people now have access to well let's say iphones which have more computational power than the entire system that put the apollo 11 on the moon which is you know for six hundred dollars which isn't a bad bargain so so it's not that easy it's not that easy to do those economic calculations but one of the things you can say about capitalism and about private property and about the idea that people have a right to what they earn and a right to what they own is that it's pretty damn good at generating wealth and the wealth isn't equally distributed by any stretch of the imagination but a fair bit of it goes to the bottom and that's why we're seeing well a relative dearth of of tremendous deprivation and you might say well we want to squeeze out that last bit of inequality and it's like well maybe we do and maybe we don't it's not so obvious first of all because even if we did want to we don't know how and we certainly do know that if there are some ways that if we go about it then things really go to hell in a hand basket really fast and everyone ends up equal because they're all starving and dead you end up in a situation like venezuela not that they're all starving and dead but the average venezuelan lost 17 pounds in the last year and that wasn't from voluntary diet right and that's a very rich country and so we do know that there are ways of ameliorating inequality that just don't work and so it's a dangerous thing to mess with because we don't understand it now you know that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand it and that also doesn't mean that the left doesn't have a point you know if if your society becomes too unequal and too many people stack up at the bottom and they don't have an opportunity to move forward that seems like it's bad for everyone and so we could we could agree on that and we could try to set up our hierarchies so that they're not too brutal for the people who end up at the bottom right that would be nice if we could be sensible and figure out how to do that but i think we're not doing that bad job of figuring out how to do it we build infrastructure that everybody can use we have universal education systems and so on and they're not perfect but they're they're far from um they're far from catastrophic and they're a hell of a lot better than they were a hundred years ago so we are making some progress on that i think the problem with the radical leftists is that they don't take the problem of inequality seriously enough they blame it on capitalism it's like sorry that's wrong it's a way deeper problem it wasn't capitalism that produced inequality of gravesite wealth distribution in paleolithic europe 10 000 years ago and it's not capitalism that makes some stars have all the mass right it's a different order of problem and so we have to be more sophisticated than economists were 150 years ago when we talk about inequality and when we talk about hierarchy we also have to be more sophisticated because we have to start to understand what it means for there to be a human hierarchy and and and the basis upon which hierarchies actually establish themselves if they're going to be playable iterable civilized productive sustainable um uh what voluntary that's an important one what what are the characteristics of such things and i think that if we use a little bit of sense we can figure that out too and i like to use the example of plumbers because i actually happen to like plumbers uh partly because i don't like it when my basement is full of sewage and that's happened once or twice and oh you call a plumber and then that doesn't happen and i'm i'm i'm pleased about that like i'm sure most of you are you know and plumbers have done an awful lot for the world and there's a big difference between a good plumber and a bad plumber i've had two bad plumbers and the first bad plumber was in montreal and my tap was leaking a little bit and so he came in to fix it and i don't know what the hell he was doing but he was using a torch and he was burning something maybe taking some solder off some pipes underneath the the sink but he lit the wall on fire which wasn't helpful because the wall wasn't on fire before he showed up and so and then and then he forgot to shut the water off at the main pipe when he took the tap apart and so then apart from the fact that my wall was charred my bathroom was completely covered with water and then he sort of panicked and he put the thing back together the tap back together with the with the with the washer which was now extraordinarily damaged and he shut it off and he turned he had figured out to turn the water off at the main valve by then and he turned it back on and he left it was like now the wall was on fire and the floor was covered with water and there was five times as much water running out of the tap this was not an improvement i joked with my wife that he was an anti-plumber you know like like like an anti-matter plumber and if he ever met a real plumber on the road and shook his hand they'd both disappear in a puff of light so so that was one plumber and you know and then another plumber we were we were redoing our house in toronto and it was the day before the drywallers were supposed to come in and so we were working like mad because drywallers like they're fun to watch man they zip in they lift up their piece of drywall they zip it up with their screws and they're really fast at it and it's quite quite a skilled operation and but they're really fast and they don't muck about and so you have to be ready for the drywallers and so this guy had redone all our pipes pvc plastic pipe and you put this that together with a kind of solvent so you just put solvent on one end of the pipe the male end and you put it into the female end with some solvent and they stick together and hopefully it seals and he said my joints never leak and so we tested them we went up on this roof three floors up and filled the pipes up with water and his joints leaked like 32 joints leaked with four inches of water in the basement and this was the day before the dry waters were supposed to show up and then also we found that he had put a lot of the pipes outside of the wall where the drywall was going to be which actually also constitutes a mistake right because i don't know about your house but but my house isn't a house where there's plumbing sticking randomly out of the walls so we had to spend the whole night redoing all the joints and and cutting the pipes and you know putting the way they were supposed to and and so and so that's a bad plumber and so we're going to make the case that there are bad plumbers you know and and they don't know what they're doing and so so don't have any skill or maybe they're worse than not skilled they make things worse because that's worse than just not skilled and then you could say well maybe they lie to you when when they deal with you and maybe they overcharge you and maybe they don't treat their employees very well you know and maybe they're not good to live with at home either who the hell knows but they're not good plumbers and so we're going to say that just in the plumbing domain which is an important domain skill matters right that seems reasonable and then we might say the same thing about well what probably matters in law like if you ever need a lawyer i would recommend that you get a good one because if you get a bad one it's going to cost you a lot more than if you get a good one like like everything and you know they're good teachers and not so good teachers and they're good massage therapists and they're good nurses and there are horrible nurses and there are great surgeons and then there are surgeons that will definitely kill you you know and you you want to go to one that won't kill you that's that's the and you you'd assume difference in skill you know and whatever your occupation is you know bloody well maybe you're a shorter cook at a diner and like some short order cooks can whip up a pretty damn decent breakfast in three or four minutes and you're pretty bloody happy to sit there and eat it and other short order cooks can produce some god-awful mess of of burnt eggs and wretched toast and rancid bacon and orange juice that's like had a crayon dipped in it for the color and with with a really ornery uh waitress and coffee that's been cooking since like 1953 and there's a that's a big difference in short order cooks there's qualitative difference in skill okay and so one of the things we might point out is that part of the reason that we have hierarchies in the west is because people actually differ in skill not power skill some people are better at whatever it is they're supposed to be doing than other people and we think that what they're supposed to be doing is important so that it matters that they're better at it and what are we going to do we're going to deny that skill plays a role all the evidence suggests that it does like if you look at what predicts long-term success from a psychological perspective in a given occupation conscientiousness is the best personality predictor and conscientious people are dutiful and hard-working and they have integrity and they do what they say they're going to do and so that's the best predictor second best predictor and the best predictor is intelligence and so it looks like in a relatively complicated occupation if you're going to be successful in a western culture the best predictors of your success is whether you're intelligent skilled and conscientious and that's pretty good like how else would you want it to be if you're going to set it up and it isn't power because agreeableness is another dimension you can be disagreeable men are more disagreeable than women by the way and if our society was fundamentally based on power then the most disagreeable people would be the most successful and they're not they're the ones that are most likely to be imprisoned so so that evidence just doesn't support that and then you know the other thing is is you don't have you imagine well our society is fundamentally an oppressive patriarchy and everything's based on power it's like okay so you need a plumber and so what you do is you go out in the street or maybe you don't maybe you cower at home and these like gangs of plumbers come to your house and they're armed to the damn teeth with their pipes and they say look i don't know whether you need like some plumbing work done or not but maybe we'll come in here and break a few things so that so that you do need it but even if we're not going to do that it's like we're the plumbers that are going to take you out unless you call us and so the next time the toilet overflows man here's the number and you better put it on your fridge or there's going to be hell to pay or you know the same is the case of like gang affiliated massage therapist exactly the same thing tattooed to the hilt right arm to the teeth and and roaming the streets making bloody sure that if you have a stiff neck that the most powerful massage therapist is the one that you're going to call first you know it's complete bloody rubbish it's absolutely not the case now it is the case that even in a hierarchy that's functional the thing can go sideways and it does you know you get companies that get too big they start to get corrupt people who play politics and who are good at manipulating start to rise up the hierarchy the the structure stops performing its function its useful function in the way that it should it starts to degenerate but generally then it dies you know like the typical fortune 500 company only lasts 30 years and the typical family fortune only three generations it's not that easy to keep a functional enterprise going you have to be awake and so no it's not an oppressive patriarchy our culture that's wrong it's based on competence fundamentally imperfect as that is it's not like we don't make hiring mistakes it's not like there aren't people who are foolish and blind and higher and fire based on attributes that have nothing to do with competence but that's a sign of the deterioration of the system and the corruption of the system and not an indication of its fundamental function and it's also the case that and this is partly what i tried to outline in rule one which is pretty much the rule we're going to discuss today um part of your goal if you want to take your place in the hierarchy properly is to be a good person and that was the argument i was trying to make in the chapter not that you're supposed to be like the most brutal crustacean on the block you know it's so foolish was kathy newman i think that asked me in in in the uk so you're saying that human society should be organized along the lines of lobsters it's like look lady if you're gonna if you're gonna insult someone you might want to try accusing them of something of believing something that someone somewhere believed at least once in the entire history of the human race and not that yes absolutely lobsters for everyone you know that's how what i was trying to make the case was that we have this very old system in our nervous systems which is very old which keeps track of where we are in hierarchies and that regulates our emotions because of it because it's really important to you and you and you and you if you're not completely bloody psychopathic that you have a place in a social hierarchy and that you're admired and respected and valued by other people and it's so important that that the neurochemical system that keeps track of that regulates your other emotions so that if you're low on the totem pole because well for whatever the reason happens to be sometimes you deserve it sometimes it's accidental sometimes you've been hurt there's lots of ways that that that that this can happen your serotonin levels plummet like a defeated lobster and then you you feel way more negative emotion about everything and way less positive emotion about everything and that's absolutely dreadful like it's it's that's clinical depression and it's a terrible terrible condition and so it's absolutely crucial that you maintain a tenable position in a hierarchy and not have one of power but one of competence and at least even if you're not in a position that's tenable you're moving upward towards one that's tenable because that at least gives you hope you know because maybe you're young and useless and you don't know what the hell you're doing you're just getting started and so you're low man on the totem pole but it's not like you're stuck there forever you do some decent work i had some kid tell me the other day it was really nice it was just last night was it a comedy show i went to here and um a lot of the comedians knew us reuben and i went in there and so a lot of them knew us which was quite interesting and one of them said god you know i was in a rough shape two years ago i was just getting married i just got married and i was nihilistic as hell and depressed and bitter and things weren't going well for me at all and uh and i was unemployed and one of my friends got me a job and he said i'd really liked a bloody job i didn't want to have the job and i was kind of dragging my ass to the work and not doing it well and i listened to one of your lectures and it said look if you haven't got anything going for you but you have a job don't quit your job whether you hate it or not it's like man that's what you're hanging on to the edge of the world with your fingertips you know don't let go oh if you can find a better job okay fine but you don't just quit because then what you're done and he and he said and another thing that i had mentioned was uh why don't you just try to work as hard as you can at your damn job for like six weeks right all flat out you know if you work 10 longer hours you make 40 percent more money that's something worth thinking about you know you've got a job maybe you show up 15 minutes early and you leave 15 minutes late you know when you actually work and your boss notices because people would probably notice and then maybe someone's going to get promoted and maybe it'll be you because something's gonna tilt the scales and that little extra bit of work done without cynicism and resentment might be enough well he said he started at 21 bucks an hour and in six weeks he was making 37 an hour and it's not a king's ransom man but it's a hell of a lot more than zero and it's quite a lot more than 21. he said his life had turned around substantially because he learned if he put some damn effort into it and i'm not trying to be joel optimist here like i know that people hit runs of bad luck and that things can take you out of life right unfortunate illnesses and and and and betrayal and like there's no shortage of randomness and horror that can wipe you out even if you're doing your best but you don't have a better bloody plan than to do your best and it tends to work a lot better than you think and what's so interesting about the hierarchies that people set up is that that's how they're set up they're not set up on power they're set up on reciprocity and skill and trust not always you know and if you're in a job where you work hard and you're a good guy and and you're doing your best and your boss is a bloody tyrant and you never get a break it's like okay fine you're you're you're in a fuco world get the hell out of it you know you get your resume set up write your cv fill in the educational gaps that you can have that you have send out your 25 resumes a day and prepare to make a lateral move because you're in a bad place but almost everywhere and this certainly been the case virtually everywhere i've worked and i've had like 50 jobs you know if you go above and beyond the call of duty you know and wake an intelligent way interpersonally socially with regards to the diligence of your work with regards to the truth of your attitude and your courage and all of that that will work and you know if you try it for a year and it doesn't work then go somewhere else because you can right you're free i mean it's not easy you can't just walk out the door and instantly find another job but you're not enslaved you could make a move you could even decide that you're going to make a move and double your salary you know it's not a bad goal and it's certainly a possibility it's like it isn't hierarchy it's ethics that determines success in a functional society it's ethics that determines success not power the rest of it's a bloody lie and that doesn't mean that all our systems are perfectly ethical you know you got to be awake if you're in a system there's going to be some corruption in it part of what you're supposed to do is keep your damn eyes open for the corruption and your mouth speaking truth so when the corruption starts to take root you object to it so the whole damn system doesn't turn into a pathological power play and that's part of your ethical responsibility as a conscious being an ethical being a religious being for that matter and a citizen you know and and you're charged with that that's why you're that's why you vote that's why you're the cornerstone of your state man you're you're the you're the you're the what would you call you're the you're the wellspring of the ethical actions that replenish the dying world that's what you are and if you if you act that's really that's what you are and if you act that out properly then things work and that's why that's always been described as ethical behavior it's not because you're supposed to be good you know and being good isn't that easy anyways and it certainly doesn't mean being nice and harmless it's not an easy thing to be good you have to be tough as a damn boot to be good because you have to stand your ground when you need to stand your ground and you have to be able to say no when it's time to say no and you have to mean it and so then you have to think and plan strategically so that when you're going to say no you can mean it and it will stick you know and that takes a certain amount of that takes a certain amount of integrated malevolence i would say and and once it's integrated it's not malevolence it's strength it's it's strength of character it's the ability to stand your ground and you have to cultivate that and you cultivate that at least in part by telling the truth and so you take your place in the world as a decent person and as a decent citizen and then and you play the hierarchical game properly and that is to stand up straight with your shoulders back it's like the world's an onslaught you've got the tyranny of culture to deal with you've got the catastrophe of nature you've got your own damn malevolence and ignorance right all coming at you plus the incredible complicated indeterminate potential of the future that's all coming at you and it's all your responsibility and you can cringe away from it and be afraid of it and be victimized by it and be bitter and cynical about it and and no wonder because it can be painful or you can turn around and you can say man bring it on because there's more to me than there is to the catastrophe and this is what i discovered from looking at what i looked at i looked at the darkest things i could look at really for 30 years i was really a lot of fun to be around i can tell you i looked at the darkest things that i could think of right not only what happened in auschwitz and what happened in the gulag but but personal issues you know it's like i wasn't so much interested in the totalitarians as a group i was interested in the people who undertook the terrible acts that the totalitarians required you know the people who i was just rereading ordinary men and it was a story about a police battalion in poland that trained ordinary policemen to take naked pregnant women out into the fields and and and shoot them in the back of the head it takes a lot of training by the way before you can bring yourself to do that and you aren't the same person by the end of it it's pretty goddamn horrific you know when i was trying to figure out what would it be like to be that person because we are that person and then what would it be like to not be that person right to refuse to do that to not participate in that you know and and what i discovered by making that totalitarian proclivity personal was that there was there's more to us than there is to the horror these nature is bent on our destruction bad as culture is tyrannical and bloody back as far as you can look as malevolent as you are in in the darkest part of your heart and that's plenty malevolent the the possibility that's within you that can well up the courage and the truth and the ability and the skill and and the and the willingness to set things right if you are willing to set them right is more powerful than all of that and so it's so interesting it was it was proof for me of an old saying i i read from carl jung it's an alchemical motif in stir qualis inventor which is what you most want to be found will be found where you least want to look essentially and it's so interesting because it means that if you're willing to turn around and to stand up stay and stand up straight and face the darkness like fully what you discover at the darkest part is the brightest light and then not something that's so much worth discovering because there's going to be terrible darkness in your life and it's going to make you cynical and bitter and it could easily be that you're just not looking at it enough because if you looked at it enough and you didn't shy away and you brought everything you had to bear on it you'd find that there was more to you than there was to the horror you know i watched my father-in-law i'll end with this and you know you don't know a because you're not bringing your a-game to the table with all that cynicism and bitterness and resentment willful blindness and avoidance maybe you're playing at 60 percent it's not good enough because there's too much of what's bad for 60 to be good enough it's like you need 90 or 95 or 100 percent my when when when about 15 20 years ago my mother-in-law developed um a pre-frontal temporal dementia which i wouldn't recommend you know it's one of those degenerative neurological diseases like alzheimer's and those bloody things are like they're in the top echelon of awful you know you watch a person deteriorate before your eyes it's a lengthy lengthy death and and it was slow and her husband he was he lived in this little town that i grew up in about 3 000 people he was quite a character man everybody knew him i bought him a foghorn leghorn t-shirt once because that's kind of what he was like he's loud and sort of bombastic but he stood up straight i can tell you and he played the fool a little bit mostly for the amusement of people but he was no damn fool and and i always admired him and liked him and and the feeling was was mutual thank god since i married his daughter and uh you know he drank a lot with his crazy friends up in northern alberta and he wasn't at home a lot because he was working a lot and and you know he was kind of a party animal about town but a good businessman and a good man and and then his wife got sick and they moved to another town and you know he took care of her for like 15 years it was unbelievable as she deteriorated you know and she got more desperate to have him around her love for him never never went away even even as she lost herself almost completely she would always light up when when he came into the room you know and he took care of her right till within weeks of her death he had to finally put her in an old folks home because he was no longer strong enough to lift her up from the chair and we interacted with him a lot you know because we were trying to help him figure out how to cope and we had signs put up in the house electronic signs that would tell her when she when he was leaving so that she would know where she he went and we had recordings in the bathroom so that she knew what to do when she went into the bathroom and we tried to do everything we could to not make this absolutely bloody atrocious experience complete hell and he participated the whole way you know it was really something to see it was really left me with a tremendous sense of admiration for him but but not just for him but for people who can do that you know when if if there was a new decline he took it on and and he didn't complain about it he tried to do what he could you know and and like it was no picnic don't get me wrong but it wasn't hell and and then we were all gathered around the death bed her mother's my wife's mother's death bed and that the family was there and they got along pretty well you know what her sister's a palliative care nurse and the other one's a pharmacy a pharmacist and none of them are particularly afraid of of illness and death you know they're a pretty tough group and so you know they made sure their mother's lips were wet while she was no longer eating or drinking and and tried to make her comfortable and they're around the death bed and they were kind of getting along you know it wasn't family feud at mother's death time and that was kind of nice and and she died and that was that and but it wasn't just that because the fact that the family had coped with it well and nobly and honorably i would say brought them together they were closer afterwards than they were before and they all had more respect for their father and then in the old hole in the old folks home he met another woman who had a husband there who had alzheimer's and they got to know each other you know and he died after a while and she died after a while and then a few months later they started going out and then eventually they had a relationship and now they live together and so he gained something like it wasn't that he replaced what he lost you know what i mean because he still has pictures of his of his wife up in his house and she was the love of his life and that's not going away but you know his family respected him more and everybody pulled together more and it wasn't hell at the death that it was just tragedy and the family pulled together more and that was a good example of of how you can extract at least a certain amount of light out of what out of out of what's dark even at a personal level and it's worth asking yourself it's like drop what you're doing that's foolish that you know is foolish and pick an aim that's worthwhile you know to make things better for yourself like you're worth taking care of like you're worth something you know and to surround yourself with people who who believe the same and who are what rejoicing in your accomplishments and unhappy when you fail right and you're comparing yourself to your accomplishments of yesterday and not to someone else's today so that you're not jealous and bitter and you put your own house in order so that you're not cursing the world when some of its disarray might be your fault and you're trying to pursue something meaningful and you're doing your best to tell the truth and all of that and then you see what happens who the hell are you you know you think you're a miracle of some bloody bizarre sort we've been around for three and a half billion years you know every single one of your relatives propagated successfully and here you are against all possible odds in this in this world of hell in some sense and and and bitterness and and and and and and tyranny and malevolence and yet god only knows what's inside you this capacity for consciousness the capacity to confront potential and to turn it into something good that's us man that's the western story that's the individual as the cornerstone of the state that's our responsibility and it really is who we are and so we need to know that and we need to remember it and we need to act it out and then maybe we can see what we can do about it you know and see how good we could make things and maybe that would be the purpose of your damn life right not to be happy it's like there's problems to be solved be happy after you solve the goddamn things right so i learned because i looked at dark things that i learned that the light was more powerful than the darkness as far as the i was concerned and that people will re capable each of us of remarkable things and that we need to know that that's what we are where this consciousness that confronts potential with all its catastrophe that's what we are that's what makes us in the image of god that's what gives us our intrinsic value and that idea that we have intrinsic value that's the bedrock presupposition of our state we're going to question that we're going to live it out better to live it out find out who you are thank you very much [Applause] all right so now we're going to try to plow through as many questions as we can all right okay okay all right here we go i thought this was the most important one that i saw it got 73 upvotes which was the most tonight do you think joe rogan is as deep and sophisticated as he seems or is he just a stoner [Laughter] um i've been in a room with lots of smart people where joe was in the same room and it wasn't obvious that he wasn't the smartest person in the room so you know he's he's one of those characters who's not he's not a formal intellectual but often really smart people who have taught themselves you know and sort of come up in the world through their own devices have a uh an original intelligence that's not so obvious among say the more classically university educated more cookie cutter and joe joe is uh he's a remarkable guy i mean you think he's tough as a boot that's the first thing he's a fighter that's that takes a lot of bravery he's damn funny like pro level funny his net and and and often viciously funny the thing he did on the kardashians that was just man i just couldn't believe that he would go that far it was just it was just my jaw just kept opening more and more as he became more and more of like he was just like what what gargoyle on a bed post right whispering in in jenner's ear yeah god very politically incorrect very funny and he's very brave and he he knows that there's a lot of things he doesn't know so he's got a really intelligent humility so ask intelligent questions and you know so he's been successful at like five things so um he's no he's certainly not just a stoner that's for sure i got lots of respect for him the quick follow-up on that obviously is will the two of us smoke a blunt on stage do you have one i'm sure it could be a rain no no probably that wouldn't be i think it's still illegal here isn't it yes it is yes it is one guy said no it's not illegal in canada i'll tell you we just we just made it legal and now everyone is stoned all the time especially in the winter when you should be stoned do your best aussie accent saying good day mate no way i'm not doing that no way no i can't do jokes on command it makes me turn red and then i sweat and i have this rule that i don't say things that make me turn red and sweat so all they went funny this group uh who would win in a cage fight between a serotonin-filled lobster and a petted house cat and a white house cat a petted well it would depend on the size of the lobster right i mean equal weight i i bet i'd better i'd bet on the lobster equal weight i'd better the lobster if it was a 60-pound lobster there'd be no competition one snip that'd be that but equal weight the lobster would win i like how he can give a scientific answer to even that especially underwater this is a good one what does the b in jordan b peterson stand for it stands for barrent and it's a norwegian name and it means bear and and not the naked kind the other kind and um and it was my great grandfather's name and he built a boat and sailed it from norway to new york with like 14 other people yeah so and he was quite the cool character he he was a he was a blacksmith and a bit of a mechanical engineer he built farm equipment for his farm in saskatchewan he homesteaded there they built a log cabin they cleared the land it was tough work a tough life and and he was he raised my father mostly my father admired him greatly he died when i was fairly young but i remember him and so that's that's where the baron comes from you're stuck on an island and you can only bring three things what are they uh well a powerboat with a lot of gas [Laughter] did peterson three things well an axe like obviously um you definitely need an axe a knife that would be good knife axe flint that'd be good hey isn't isn't it the australian guy i might be wrong about this but there's this there's this youtube show i watch about this guy who goes out in the i think an outback like with nothing he just wears shorts and he goes out there and like builds little cities you know what's it called yeah yeah that's right that's right i mean i think that guy's absolutely unbelievable you know it's so fun to watch him it's like i've got some shorts then he goes out and he gets a stick and a rock and he makes an axe and then he cuts down a bunch of trees small trees and he makes a house and then he builds a floor and then he builds a like a heated floor which is really quite cool then he builds a water wheel and it's it's it's amazing it's amazing to watch him but i'd still i'd still go for the axe i'd like the axe and the knife and the flint and i think i could maybe not die instantly if i had those three things well i'm going to read this one just because it's like man they've got like you know the most influential public intellectual we've got and this was the question they came up with so i just have to read it i guess i bring my wife too but i don't think that would make her very happy imagine i was having my wishes you know i'm on the island a genie shows up you get three wishes axe poof knife poof wife poof it's like what the hell did you bring me to this island for i don't think that'd be good all right well wait till this one who is your pick to win the wwe universal championship at wrestlemania this year seth rollins or will brock lesnar retain oh it's brock it's brock for sure it's brock i have no idea who brock is by the way the name today sounds great all right let's shift gears a little bit how many upvotes did that question get that one got 12. 12. it's like 12 that's really what 12 of you wanted to know you don't want to know how many you're asking what kind of underwear you wear all right i'll tell you what kind of underwear i'm wearing all right i've never done this before all right you're gonna do it it's funny my wife bought me underwear with moose on them and so i i have to tell you that because that's a canadian thing like underwear not underwear like underwear with moose and so i just couldn't believe she bought me these and they're actually quite nice which i also can't believe because i don't understand how red underwear covered with moose can also be nice but as far as underwear go they beat the hell out of tidy whities says the guy wearing a blue tie with lobsters on it hey well i keep getting these as gifts man you you can't believe how much lobster themed clothing there is [Applause] all right let's shift gears a little bit has the sudden rise to fame over inflated your ego and if if so how do you regulate it oh i'm married well you know more importantly i'm married to someone who's very sensible you know and and she doesn't let things go to her head really she she doesn't get overly upset and desperate when things are overly upsetting and desperate and she doesn't get overly enthusiastic and narcissistic when things are going well she's very level-headed and and you know when we've been through a lot we're we're not kids my wife and i we're both damn near 60. you know and we've had we've had our kids and we have grandkids and we've traveled all over the world and met all sorts of people and done all sorts of things and so you know we're reasonably sensible and to the degree that we're not we sort of butt up against each other and try to make ourselves slightly more sensible than we are and so that's helpful and also over the last couple of years you know i've had people i've been watching very carefully because well especially for the first year and a half because i was always one utterance away from complete bloody disaster and so i was watching what i was saying and doing very carefully but i had people around me who were doing the same you know my my wife being foremost my two kids who were both awake you know and careful and they were keeping a close eye on things and my parents are still alive and and they were watching as well and i have a group of friends some of whom i lost some friends but i kept a number of them and they were watching very carefully and letting me know when i was not you know a little too angry maybe or a little too acerbic or or or arrogant all those things they'd let me know right away and so um and i i've i've been a psychologist for a long time and i know especially from reading carl jung about the danger of ego inflation it's not something that you want to mess with it's very dangerous and you know i tell these archetypal stories a lot and i learned from jung 30 years ago that knowing the stories doesn't make you the archetype and that's very very very important to understand you know and so i'm i try to be cognizant of my shortcomings which are manifold and to be grateful that's a good thing you know like tonight here you all are and i'm really happy about that pleased about that and and i would say grateful is a rough word to use because it's kind of it's been overused you know it's been it's been used by people who who it's been used to signal a virtue that is non-existent often but i am grateful for this because it's so unlikely you know that that there's 5 500 of us here sitting together in peace and tranquility and harmony trying to think hard about what we should be doing in our lives and how we can make ourselves better in a non-naive and and non and non what would you call it it's it's it's that there's a kind of striving for goodness that isn't virtuous and i i think it's the it's the praying in public kind it's the i'm against poverty sign kind i'm hoping what this is is that it's it's the old original sin kind you know it's like yeah christ there's plenty wrong with me and i include myself in this all the time you know i know there's plenty wrong with me it's like it'd be good if something could be done about it even a little bit and and maybe that would make things a bit better for everybody and maybe that's a noble goal and maybe we can come and have a serious conversation about that for two hours and think hard about it and maybe we can turn around our lives a little bit and and because i think we can do that and and that it's possible for each person to make things around them way better than they are you know not always because sometimes you're in such a dire goddamn situation that that basically all you've got is sl hope for slightly less hell you know but man you can make a huge difference in your life to take care of yourself properly and a huge difference in your family's life and a huge difference in your community's life and and it would be so good if we could people wonder what's the meaning of life like what's it all about what's what justifies the suffering and the misery and all of that it's like well that's what justifies it it's like you put yourself up against that you think okay all with all of this pushing against me how much can i push back could i move the horror an inch back with with all the strength that i have at my disposal man and the answer to that is yeah you can it it it makes you better with regards to yourself but it also makes the world a better place and so well so you know more of that and and you don't want to be you don't want to be you don't want to be uh narcissistic or or egotistic about that because it just gets in the way you know and one of the things i learned from from solzhenitsyn this was an unbelievably useful man this is a pronoun thing this is a pronoun thing about 30 years ago i came across this website that was that had been produced by this guy who was a paranoid schizophrenic and he was an aerospace engineer in england and he was no fool he's a real genius he put together a really interesting site and he had this delusion he had developed this delusion that he was the center of the world and he had this really complicated explanation because he lived in the geographic center of england and he thought of england as the center of the word that had spread around the world and he lived right in the middle of the town that was in the geographic center and so his schizophrenic fantasy had put him at the center of the world the center and he'd made a very elaborate web page about all of this and uh and then at the and so so i was thinking about that this the center of the world i was also reading solzhenitsyn at the same time and solzhenitsyn said you know that the world is constituted and this is the this is one of the fundamental axioms of western civilization is the world is constituted so that each person is a center of the world like literally that we can't understand this because we can't understand how something could be constructed so that that could be the case because we're used to things having one center but the universe isn't like that it has multiple centers every conscious being is a center and and a center of of infinite scope in some sense you know like bounded but but infinite which is also very difficult to understand and and there's a big difference between being the center of the world and as center of the world so if you remember that you're a center of the world then you stay sane but as soon as you start thinking that you're the center of the world well then you know you're you're just done and it's not going to be helpful and like even if you are doing the best you can you know you invite everyone else along it's like i'm doing the best i can but there's way more work to do man and we're everybody needs to participate and everybody's participation that's the other thing that's so weird about it everybody's participation is vital there isn't anybody that it isn't okay for anyone not to be in the game you know and and i don't understand that exactly as well but that also has something to do with our like our being made in the image of god and and the central value and divinity of our consciousness the consciousness that gives rise to being itself these are truths you know these are truths it's consciousness that gives rise to being from from from possibility and and and that's us that's what we do and we decide is it going to be better is it going to be worse and if it's better well that's on you man because you made it a little better and if it's worse that's on you too and that's your destiny every day and that's what gives you your intrinsic value and the and the and the meaning of your life the significance of your life and the effect of you on the structure of reality itself that's all that's all you and it's a miracle you know and and that is why i believe fully that's why it says in the in genesis that human beings are made in the image of god god is what extracts order from chaos from potential it's like i don't i think that that's i don't think that can be said in any way that's more true than that and it's it's a hell of a thing to contemplate and especially when you think that you actually believe it you know because you do believe that you have intrinsic value our whole legal system is predicated on the idea that you have intrinsic value even if you're a murderer even if you're accused of something absolutely highness there's still something about you that has value outside of the dictates of the state and you treat other people like that you know if you're going to have a friendship with someone or an intimate relationship or a love for a child or a parent you treat them as if they have intrinsic and transcendent value it's like well is it true or not and if it's true well maybe it's an ex maybe it's an inexhaustible source from which you can draw it's possible it seems to be the case and it it's worth the experiment because like what the hell else do you have to do that's better than to try that so no so that's that answer well here's a segway will you run for prime minister of australia people ask me that in different places i've talked to lots of politicians and i'm talking to more of them all the time and i'm interested in i'm not interested in politics so much i don't think i have the temperament for it to tell you the truth because i don't think i could take the i don't really think i could take the what is it the it's sort of the vicious boxing you know like i i have a reputation i guess of enjoying conflict but i don't enjoy conflict at all it really bothers me actually but i don't shy away from it either and that's because i know that sometimes and this is what i've learned from being a clinical psychologist in part a serious clinical psychologist is like if i walk into a room and there's trouble i'm not going to pretend that the trouble isn't there i won't do that i'll point it out and so that kind of makes me annoying often and but i can't stand it if i can see it and everyone's pretending you know there's an elephant under the carpet and everyone is shifting in their chairs as the elephant moves and they're all smiling away stupidly as if everything's okay it's like i'm not doing that i'm gonna point it out and i don't like that because if it's usually not an elephant either it's usually some god-awful monster and it's been there for a long time and no one wants to admit to its existence and so that makes for difficult conversations but i don't enjoy them but i know perfectly well that things that you hide grow and i enjoy that a hell of a lot less so anyways i'm not i'm not interested in politics i don't believe because i don't think i have the temperament for it but i am interested in aims and i am interested in trying to figure out what we should be aiming at because we need a new story you know like we're all bloody petrified in one way or another and cynical about the possibility of multiple apocalypses because one isn't enough and and we don't have a counter story it's like okay well here's a bunch of ways that things could go to hell in a hand basket it's like well what could we build instead you know who knows what we could do we could irrigate all the world's deserts you know that might be a good thing to do i mean maybe we want some desert that'd be we could keep some desert but we could irrigate the dam deserts if we could get if we could get our our our our if we could become sophisticated enough with regards to our technological use of energy it's not like we're going to run out of energy it's like the world's the universe is made out of energy and matter we're not going to run out of it you know i mean and we could make sure everybody had a high quality education and that child mortality was cut to almost nothing and that we were taking full advantage of everyone's talents to the best of our ability and like i'm interested in establishing these aims and and so and i am working on that with all sorts of people in canada and the united states and to some degree in australia and in other countries trying to understand well we need a noble aim for christ's sake what the hell we've got all this technological power and it's multiplying like mad and all this wealth it's like what could we make the world into let's let's find out what the hell you know we've got to stake our lives on something and that's that's better than politics that it's it's it's it's it's it's better than it's a better role for me all right so we got time for one more what is a great day for jordan peterson look like well there's a couple of kinds of great days i would say um it's a great day if i have a chance to spend it with my with my wife and my kids that's that's generally a great day i get along very well with my kids and i get along as well as anybody would want to with my wife and so um well and i say that specifically because you know uh if you if you're fortunate in your partner you have someone to contend with not not someone that you just always get along with you have someone that you're you know you're you're you're contending with there's a story in in the abrahamic stories where it's it's it's jos joseph jacob jacob becomes israel i believe i'm hoping that's right he's kind of a trickster and and and he causes all sorts of trouble and at one point um when he's going back to reconcile himself with his estranged brother he sends his family across the river and is laying on the banks alone and an angel comes to wrestle with them it's actually god and they wrestle all night and weirdly enough jacob wins and god dislocates his hip because he's god you know he's not going to let you just walk away so he dislocates his hip and and then he renames him israel and israel means he who struggles with god and that's something really worth knowing man you know because what that means is that at the basis of our most profound stories is the notion that the founder of the holy state is the person who wrestles with god and that doesn't mean believe in god you know it that that isn't what it means it means contends it's like this is this is this this is this reality that confronts us is a rough and harsh place right it's not for it's not for the weak of heart it's not for the faint of heart it's for it's for the person who wants to step forward and contend and it turns out that if you're that person you wrestle with god which means that you try to defeat it defeat there's a there's a vic an attempt to be to attain victory even over god of all the strange things and that's what makes you part of the holy state it's like it's that it's an unbelievable idea and i think it's so realistic that you want something to contend with you know and if you have a good marriage and maybe if you have good friendships for that matter you have someone to contend with and in my wife i have someone to contend with and it's the case with my children as well not to the same degree because they're my children but it's a good day when i have a chance to spend it with them and then this is a good day you know which is why we keep doing this you know like i think all the days we've done this have been good don't you think it's been unbelievable man i mean and and it's and i do mean literally unbelievable every night you think wow wow really this is going to happen again we're going to we're going to like bring 3 000 people together and this is what we're going to talk about and and it's going to be serious and we're going to like aim high and and and think critically and have a genuine discussion and and everyone's going to be like locked onto that that's amazing and so yeah these are good days which is why we keep doing them and so those are two kinds of good days and and and i'm fortunate to have them with a fair degree of regularity so [Music] well that right there is how you circle up a show so i'm going to get out of the way and make some noise for dr jordan peterson everybody thank you guys for coming out tonight thanks steve

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 2,635,270

Rating: 4.8075247 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, melbourne, austrailia, lecture, learning, education, peterson, aim, socrates

Id: dPv1RYsi7sA

Length: 118min 56sec (7136 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020

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[u/slickskater69]

Elon for president JP for minister of education?