Oz Talk: Jordan Peterson’s Rules to Live By

he's undeniably one of the greatest intellectual phenomenons of our generation dr. Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychology professor at the University of Toronto has catapulted him to international fame with arguments that are challenging and changing the way we all think he has captured the attention of millions especially of young men but some young women as well and many of you however have never heard of him but you will get to know him for the first time to this interview today he is here breaking down is provocative rules for life and the prescription for success that will surprise many of you thank you for joining us thanks for the invitation so it is an interesting group of insights that you offer us and I can enter it in many ways but let me just start with for me the perhaps the most obvious which is what is it that you're saying that's resonating with so many people what's what each eye you scratching I think there's probably - we've had a long conversation in our culture about the necessity for self esteem and happiness and that's not what I'm talking about I tell my audiences and my readers very straightforwardly that life is difficult and that there's a lot of suffering in it and that you have to learn how to conduct yourself in the face of that the problem with the pursuit of happiness is that when life's storms come along happiness disappears and then you're left with nothing and so you need to pursue something that's deeper than happiness and if happiness comes along well then hooray for you you don't want to despise it because it's fleeting but it's much better to pursue things that are meaningful than things that make you happy it's deeper and and it Orient's you more appropriately in it and it keeps you centered in your own life and makes you more useful for your family and your community so that's one thing and it's a relief to young people to know that the baseline conditions of life are difficult but that you can still prevail so it's a funny message in some sense or a strange message because on the one hand it's somewhat pessimistic now I talk about suffering and malevolence also but I also emphasize the fact that despite despite that being the bay conditions of existence people are tough enough to prevail so that's that's one element of it the other element is the necessity of responsibility so a lot of what people find in life that provides them with a sustaining meaning is a consequence of not the pursuit of Rights or the pursuit of happiness or or the or the or the development of self-esteem but the adoption of responsibilities and the more responsibility in some sense the better responsibility for yourself from making sure that your life lays itself out like it should responsibility for your family responsibilities for the community it's people who take responsibility that are the ones that you admire and that's the right pathway through life that's where meaning is to be found and I think that's probably the crucial issue is that identification of a profound relationship between responsibility and meaning and for many of the people that I'm talking with it seems like that's the first time that that's been articulated for them so speaking about responsibility and meaning and how to make sense of a world where so many people feel isolated I'll come back to that that seems so helpful and yet you've been a lightning rod in many ways with a lot of harsh comments especially in the print media what is it that your critics are arguing well I got embroiled in some political dispute I would say and my home front in Canada when our government introduced some legislation that purported to be about compassion which but which to my way of thinking was about compulsion with regards to speech and so that's tangled me up but I also think that people aren't necessarily that happy with a message of personal responsibility when they're really interested in the mechanics of social change now my sense is is that well life is unfair social structures are unfair the arbitrary way that illness is distributed into the population is unfair but despite that the best level of analysis for rectifying that in in a practical sense but also in the psychological sense is the level of the individual and so people who think in a collectivist manner or people who who are playing identity politics games that insist that your group identity should be your hallmark don't like what I have to say at all and they have the reasons I'm not a fan of identity politics types I think it's a very very dangerous game particularly because it makes us tribal and tribal people are very dangerous you know as as we degenerate into our tribal groups the probability of violence increases as far as I'm concerned that's what the anthropological data would suggest as well so the collectivist types don't like me very much if clinical psychology it's it's a challenging profession you chose it coming out of a rural town in central Canada how did that advance your life journey what is what do you like is inspire you to do what you do now and especially to take some of the public steps though that are drawing criticism to you which is always painful well I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian governments whether they're on the right or the left for years decades really I spent almost all of my free time thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany and in Russia in in in during the Soviet era but also when Mao was China there were other places as well trying to understand how it was that we could have got off the rail so absolutely terribly and I started studying that at the collectivist level I would say looking for political reasons or economic reasons but as I investigated further those levels of analysis became increasingly they weren't they weren't providing the answers that I wanted I think partly because I was really interested in the notion that there's something to learn from what happened say in Nazi Germany but there's something to learn at an individual level that's my estimation I don't think that there were innocent masses of people led astray by a single malevolent leader I don't think the fundamental motivations for what happened in Nazi Germany were economic and I don't think they were in the Soviet Union either as I read more and more about the situation patience I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie especially about their own lives and about their own experience were really the reasons that those systems went so far as straight now there were other reasons as well but those were very important to me because I also thought that the proper lesson in the aftermath of something like Auschwitz is how do I ensure that I live a life such that if I was offered the opportunity to do something terrible by omission or by Commission that I wouldn't do it that I would have enough strength of character to resist and so the lessons there for me were psychological and that taught me an awful lot about well the role of the individual people like Viktor Frankl for example who wrote man's search for meaning which is a perennial classic in a great book insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify their own experience and Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the goalie Gulag Archipelago the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union also made exactly the same argument so I got interested in the psychological psychological causes of catastrophic governance let's say and that taught me a lot it taught me about responsibility about the responsibility of the sovereign individual and you know we have an idea in our culture it's a very powerful idea that each of us is of intrinsic value but that associated with that value is a responsibility and we have a responsibility let's say for for our own integrity and for that of our families but also of the state because otherwise we wouldn't have the sovereign responsibility and right to vote like our whole culture is predicated on the idea that each of us are sufficiently significant so that we can entrust the destiny of the state itself to our decisions it's like well I believe that and I think that that's a correct idea which is also why I think that systems that are based on that idea function so well like our Western systems do but that's a responsibility that has to be taken with dead seriousness because it means that the good things that you do in your life are truly good and they matter they ripple outward way more than you think but so do the things you do that aren't good including the acts of deception that you engage in perhaps above all else which would include your willingness to evade responsibility to push it off to someone else or or to to to play the short term against the long term but and so well that the man wrap us the bit because you're touching on a bunch of themes and I think they they would all benefit us so first of all you say you I appreciated you actually put some of your thoughts down into two books two books that I've read the the latter is a you know best-selling book right now is a number four selling book in the country 12 rules for life antidote to chaos and I am curious how you put that all together and let's start off with the basic which is what's it all about what's the goal of life according to some of the more recent pieces you've been writing I would say that the goal in life is to conduct yourself so that life improves at least so that undo suffering is for stalled but more than that so that's its to constrain malevolence and suffering to the degree that that's possible but then also to work for a positive improvement in things at every level and that's that's how you should orient yourself so I saw some of you actually sits and it's in the book and part as well as to repeat actions that are worthy mmm-hmm yes which is unworthy that would noble and Warwick yes right so you so to figure out what you should do and they just do it which I think that's an achievable goal most people would think that's laudatory that takes me to the next point which is what's the meaning of life I think the meaning is to be found in that and and as you as you put things together and as you take responsibility for things that meaning emerges from that and so it emerges from that the same way it emerges from a symphony in some sense you know because the symphony is composed of layers of patterns and they're all working harmoniously together and they speak directly to people of meaning which is why people love music so much I mean every form of music does that and that it's a model for proper being which is the the placing of all the different levels of reality into harmonious relationship with one another and meaning emerges out of that naturally and meaning is actually an instinct this is another thing that people don't understand and it's a case I've been able to make because I I know a fair bit about how the brain works you're the two the twin hemispheres of your brain interact to guide you through life which is a truism in some sense you use your brain to guide you their life but your brain does that fundamentally by instilling the the proper things that you do with a sense of meaning and that meaning is it's not something that's just a surface it's not on the surface of the world in some sense it's the deepest instinct that you have it's associated with a phenomenon that Russian neuropsychologist discovered back in the 1960s called the orienting reflex and the Orang ting reflex is what Orient's you towards things of interest and that happens unconsciously and so if something that happens around you that's of significance often something you don't expect say something somewhat chaotic you'll orient towards it and that attracts your attention and then as you investigate what that is that's associated with a sense of meaning and if you put what you're investigating into proper order then that meaning continues to reveal itself so you can use meaning as a guide to proper being but you have to also be very careful to conduct yourself honestly if you're going to do that because if you conduct yourself dishonestly then you pathologize the mechanisms that orient you so if I'm thinking about in my own life how I tried to apply some of these insights if I just try to be a little bit better today than I was yesterday along the lines that you're speaking to try to create that symphony but you little better at it today yesterday and like everybody watching right now not compare myself to somebody else but rather to compare myself to the future version of me yeah is that a rational way that's rule 404 are yourself to who you were yesterday not to someone else is today well that's it's not only appropriate but I think it's also practical and one of the things about what I do including my book is that I'm always trying to take high-level abstract truths you know fundamental truths and to make them concrete and practical so that you can implement them in your day to day life because it's the connection between those abstractions and practical action that really cements their meaning and makes them comprehensible and this idea of incremental improvement is a great one you know if there are things about your life that are bothering you or things about the world that are bothering you then you want to decompose them into solvable subproblems and you do this if you have a child this is the sort of thing that you do naturally right because you want to set your choice the challenge that's sufficiently challenging to push them forward in their development so that makes it meaningful for the child that puts them in the zone of proximal development which is where we're proper maturation takes place they'll find that intrinsically meaningful you want to make it challenging but also with a reasonable probability of success and that and there's an art to that so you want to set yourself a task that's difficult but not so difficult you can't attain it and then what happens is that you step up improvement across time incremental and there's also a certain element of humility to it right which is don't bite off more than you can chew right don't set grandiose goals but incremental improvement will get you a tremendous distance when you don't do that perfectly and it's not easy to do you suffer and I'm on this stage often said that you know pain is inevitable you're gonna have pain how much suffering comes in that pain you actually have a fair amount of control over you can't make it go away to your point it's part of life your thoughts around suffering that you began to touch on have been incredibly provocative for a lot of people while they debated I think in part cuz in our modern world we don't like to acknowledge that kind of suffering can afflict us mm-hmm we think something's wrong with us if we have that kind of separation how was it productive to focus on suffering the way you do well there is something wrong with us if we're suffering there's something wrong with the world because it's an indication that things aren't set in the order they could be set if there's undue suffering and so that is a call to action and it's a painful call to action no but it's it's a universal problem suffering is built into the structure of existence in some sense and the fact that you're suffering doesn't mean that there's something isolated about you that's at fault right which is which isn't important this is why the doctrine of original sin was actually quite useful because everyone makes mistakes and everyone falls short of the glory of God's original sin if you don't mind and this is this again with all the monotheistic religious share of this but it exists in other traditions as well well it's an it's it's a it's a way of universalizing everyone's felt sense that they don't live up to the responsibility properly because you not all you could be and unless you understand that that's that's everyone's problem every single person has that issue then it's easy to become discouraged and crushed by that and the the major advantage I think to to to making a case very strongly that one of the fundamental realities of life is its suffering is that it's actually a relief to people to hear that because they suspect it well they know it but no one's forthright about it's like yeah life is suffering okay fine so where does that leave us well here's where it leaves us it turns out that even though life is suffering if you're sufficiently courageous and forthright and honest let's say in your approach and you don't shy away what you'll find is that there's something within you that will respond to the challenge of suffering with the development of ability that will transcend the suffering so the pessimism is yeah well life is rife with problems every at every level but the upside is if you turn and confront that voluntarily that you'll find something in yourself that can develop and master that and so the the optimism is nested in the pessimism and that's extremely helpful to people especially people who are struggling because they think oh my god life is so difficult I don't know if I can stand this there must be something wrong with me does anybody else feel this way and you can say yes everyone feels that way at some time but that's and and and it is as bad as you think but you're more than you think you are you're more than you think you are and what I really like about this too is it's very much in keeping with the clinical data so for example what you do as a clinician as a clinical psychologist as a psychiatrist as any mental health professional who's well trained is if people are afraid of something afraid of something that's standing in their way as an obstacle like maybe you're trying to develop your career and you're afraid of public speaking well I could try to calm you down about your fear and and protect you from the challenge that would be associated with public speaking you say well you never have to do that or I could say no no look you have to learn to present yourself more effectively in public if you're going to develop your career and you're afraid of it so let's break what you're afraid of in into ten steps or 20 steps until we can find a step that's small enough so that you can actually master it let's assume that with three years of diligent practice that you could become a competent public speaker at least one that isn't terrified and with five years you could become an expert and let's decide how relevant that is to your future prosperity and thriving and then let's assume that if you break it down properly and take it on step by step in this incremental way that we discussed that you'll actually master every single bit of it and the thing that's cool about that is all the clinical evidence shows it works and not only that that's actually how you learn in life like when you're when you're when you bring a child to the playground and the child is apprehensive about making new friends you say okay well look kiddo I stick around me for a minute or two and just watch what's going on it's like and the child would calm down say okay no go five feet away just go out there a little bit and just see how it goes and stay out there as long as you can and if you need to come back for a hug then no problem it's like so then the child can go out ten feet they come back and say okay well now you know maybe just go over there and and and watch those kids and the child to go out and then come back and so that's it it's there the child's going out to where they're afraid seeing that they can master it and then turning back so this seems so self evident that I'm left wondering well the people know there's a hundred years ago this issue of taking responsibility which i think is part of the that the pain that people feel because then it's not something we expect a lot people don't realize that it seems to help a lot in most scenarios if you sort of own it because you control your destiny hmm so do we there's this wisdom we had in for God he spoke about original sin these are stories that are thousands of years old Adam and Eve right right these are constructs that archetypal dusts are fundamental to who our species is and somehow it seems so slip from us well some you know knowledge is coded in different ways saying so a good example someone who's a good example acts out for you how you should be and a good story portrays that dramatically but an articulated representation tells you exactly why it explains it and so some of this needs to be more articulated than it has been because we've become detached in some sense from our underlying examples and stories partly because they've been criticized so much so but I think we're at a point where developing this more articulated knowledge is necessary but just so I make sure everyone's clear on this what I'm taking away is it's a balancing act between the rights you deserve and the responsibility that you must take and if that balances off in society and we do seem to focus a lot on people's rights yeah which is you know instinctive to who we are yeah but we often don't pet Matt Pat Matt match it up with the response right which is exactly why I think that what I'm talking about is falling on inceptive ears is because you actually cannot have a prolonged discussion of rights without having an equally prolonged discussion of responsibilities for a variety of reasons first of all the actual reason that you have rights is so that you can discharge your responsibilities it's not the other way around it's like you're granted rights by everyone around you or or no it's not granted exactly it's part of the part of the the purpose of your rights in some sense is so that you can be given an autonomous space that's protected in which you can manifest what's necessary about you in the world that's a contribution to it so I have to leave a space for you so that you can make your contribution for yourself so you can take care of yourself so that you can shoulder responsibility for your family and so that you can serve the community the best way that you can and I don't I don't want to set up a society that will interfere with that but then and then there's the association that we already talked about between responsibilities and meaning which is absolutely crucial and so it's the responsibility element is more important than the rights elements as far as I'm concerned or it certainly is at this point in time so people know this they instinctively know it and yet the role of the victim seems which is a painful role to have because something bad happens to you to be a victim hmm but it's something that society struggles with what about people who feel like they're a victim they're right they're victimizers to like everybody is a strange mixture of victim and victimizer lots of terrible happened to people that aren't justifiable in some sense you know well illness strikes people randomly I mean not entirely randomly obviously but there's a very there's a large random element in it where you're thrown into existence as a consequence of your birth that's existence especially the 1950s talked about all that all the time and they talked about it as thrown this that you're sort of thrown into reality with your particular set of predispositions and weaknesses and and then there's going to be times in your life where things twist in a manner that's unfair to you that you're not getting your just desserts but that goes along with all sorts of unequally distributed privileges as well and so that's the arbitrary nature of existence and but but you can't allow those sorts of things to define you because it's not it's not that useful strategically you're when you're playing a card game you're dealt and you're dealt a hand of cards well what do you do you play that hand the best you can why because all that all the hands are equal no because you don't have a better strategy than playing the hand that you're dealt the best you can and that doesn't even mean it'll be a winning strategy but because people don't always win sometimes we lose and sometimes we lose painfully and sometimes we lose painfully and unjustly that's not the point the point is you don't have a better strategy and neither does anyone else and then it's also not so obvious how privilege and victimization are distributed you know if you take someone who's doing quite well in life and you scratch underneath the surface you generally don't have to scratch very far until you find one or more profound tragedies of the past or perhaps of the present no one no matter how well protected you are in the world you're still subject to illness you're still subject to aging you're still subject to the dissolution of your relationships the death of your dreams death itself so vulnerability is built into the structure of existence now if you start to regard yourself as a hapless victim or even worse and um barely victimized victim well then things go very badly sideways for you it's not a good strategy you end up resentful you end up angry you end up vengeful you end up hostile and and that's just the beginning things can get far more out of hand than that so strategically it's a bad game it's better to take responsibility for the hand that you've been dealt there's no better you've got no better protection in life than doing that this this is where a lot of folks in the modern West get unsettled because we have been brought up to believe that we need to be compassionate to another and you point out that sometimes that compassion I don't know if it encourages weakness more it's another word for weakness hmm and I'd love if you could open that up for them because it is the kind of discussion that gets folks really unsettled feeling feeling sorry for someone is not a moral virtue you know morality is much more complex than mere reflexive empathy so I would say when is reflexive empathy useful that's easy you're a mother your child is under six months old reflexive empathy is the right reaction and I think that that's why it's such a powerful motivating force as well you know a child under six months old is always right if the child is in distress always right you're wrong the child's right no matter what is why the child is distressed it's your problem and you should do something about it and it's not the infant's fault okay now we have a very lengthy dependency period as human beings and that and that means that infants 30 and 40 years for yeah exactly exactly and so because of that intense dependency that empathic circuitry has to be very very powerful but it can easily be utilized in a domain that's outside of its proper purview and Unruh flex of empathy is not a moral virtue and just because you feel sorry for someone you are not a good person now that might be a subcomponent of being a good person but it's very frequently the case that complex problems require sophisticated complex planning thinking and analysis well which is why we invented science for example which is why we invented sophisticated social policy and all of that and it's certainly not the case that everything that's good in the medium to long run looks so good in the short term I mean they think about when you're disciplining a child which you have to do because one of your responsibilities as a parent is to produce a child help produce a child who is disciplined and who's socially acceptable to everyone else which is your fundamental responsibility whenever you discipline a child you you cause short-term distress for the benefit of the medium to the long run and that runs contrary to reflexive empathy you need more than empathy to get by in the world so so it's it's it's unsophisticated thinking to assume that first of all that reflexive empathy towards those who are hypothetically unfairly victimized constitutes a moral virtue it's not that simple and it can be very very dangerous because you can undermine people by inappropriately feeling sorry for them it's not helpful so as I was listening to a bunch of the different talks that you've given I was caught off guard by a comment you made in a series on the on the Bible and this is an important issue because a lot of folks read the meek shall inherit the earth and have a belief that it means the weak will inherit the earth certainly what I thought mmm-hmm and you stunned me by arguing that the word meek didn't really mean what we thought it mmmm I looked at a bunch of different translations yeah and my conclusion was well you know words get translated multiple times and they shift their meaning across time and so ancient texts are hard to interpret and it requires a fair bit of study but my interpretation was those who have swords and know how to use them but keep choosing she will inherit the earth and that's a very that's a much better idea as far as I'm concerned because it means that you have a moral obligation to be strong and dangerous both of those but to harness that and to use it in the service of good so it's it's it's associated with a complex set of ideas but not with that but that principle right there is a is a stark differentiator of you from much of the material that I read generally it's truly about compassion you use the word victimhood but a lot of folks do feels a virtue to feel sorry for others because usually behind that is really something that easy no hmm that's the problem is that we wouldn't have to think if empathy guided us properly but it doesn't it guides us properly in some very specific conditions can also make us very dangerous because and there's good there's good experimental literature on this if you're very sensitive to and in groups claims whatever they might be that makes you very hostile to perceived out group members in group people within your tribe words with it we're well within whatever group it is that you're identifying with at that moment you know so empathy drives that in-group identification it's like okay well what about the old group oh those are predatory those are predators we better be hard on them you know it's it's a mother bear's compassion that gets you eaten so we can't be thinking that empathy is an untrammeled virtue there's no there's no evidence for that whatsoever the psychoanalyst knew this perfectly well as well when we were still wise enough to to attend to their more profound realizations and that's the motif of the devouring parent the devouring mother is them as a more general trope and that's someone who will do absolutely everything for you all the time so that you never have to rely on yourself for anything that's not good no there's rules for example if you're dealing with the elderly in an old folks home here's a rule never do anything for one of your clients they can do themselves why because they're already struggling with the loss of their independence and you want to help them maintain that independence as long as possible and that might mean sitting by well someone struggles to do up their buttons for example when you can and this is the same if you're it may be helping your three-year-old dress themselves it's like yeah yeah you can put on the buttons a lot faster let me help you with that it's like no you struggle with that you master it and I'll keep my empathy to myself thank you very much so that I can help you maintain your independence so and that suffocating mother is Ursula that's right in Little Mermaid yes so these motifs still sneaked into our culture sure well you see it in Sleeping Beauty as well in the Disney movie where the Evil Queen keeps the prince lock plans to keep Prince Charming locked into the king locked in her basement fundamentally chained up until he's so old he's useless right and he and she's the force that stops him from making an alliance with the young woman and and having his life right I'll just keep you chained up here well you're where you'll be safe it's like no you don't need that you know what did Freud say I think it was Freud the good mother necessarily fails right because as your child emerges as your child develops you're a perfect mother up till six months you take care of your child's every need okay well that somewhere between six and nine months the child starts to crawl around starts to become a bit autonomous starts to be able to do little things on on his or her own you back off every time the child steps forward you step backwards and maybe you step backwards a little faster even to motivate your child to step forward and then what you're saying is it isn't you I care about it's who you could be and see that's another thing that I'm talking to young men and then women about it's like it isn't you I care about it's who you could be you think well that's pretty harsh it's like not when you're talking to 18 year olds it's like they have their whole life ahead of them whose side should you be on the eighteen-year-old kid who's confused oh you're okay the way you are it's like no you're not you're not even close to okay the way you are you haven't even started you're not who you could be physically you're not who you could be spiritually you're not educated to the degree you could be you could really be something man you got 60 years to work on it get the hell at it that's way better that's a way more positive message even though it's got that strange harshness about it because it's judged mental every ideal is a judge you can't get away with it it can't get away from it right or with it you put something up as an ideal that it stares down at you and says you are not what you could be every great piece of art does that to tell young people it's like no no you're not okay the way you are that's why we have universities that's why we have training programs it's like you don't know enough to go out there and change the world you're not out there waving placards around and telling people how to behave get your act together learn some skills educate yourself learn how to speak learn how to conduct yourself learn how to stand up make yourself a force in the world there's way more to you than you think you appreciate why that message would resonate with some but scare the heck out of others should scare the heck out of everybody know that what they say fear of God is the beginning of wisdom there's real truth in that and this is a C I think and this is what scared me I learned from studying our wits and the terrible things that I studied for many many years that I was responsible for them you know I believe that yes because it's it comes down to individual integrity all of these things if the state is corrupting around you that's on you it's your responsibility you think well how can I take on that responsibility it's like be more than you are so and how could you not be afraid of that well of course you'd want to shy away from that but the alternative is far worse it's far worse to let things degenerate like you have a chance you have the you have the opportunity to contend with the structure of reality and to set things right you can do that if you take it on voluntarily and that's a terrible burden to confront suffering and malevolence especially given the degree of malevolence it's a terrible thing to confront the alternative is worse let things slide you just see where you end up there at least you have a fighting chance if you're a contender right you're in the ring and there's and and you can and you can do it that's the thing that's that's the that's what makes me so fundamentally optimistic about people is that the problems that confront us are our most infinite in their catastrophic consequence but there's something within us that's even greater than that and so that's that's the fundamental reality you don't get to that either unless you start with what's so terrible say life is rife with suffering and injustice and we make it worse with our malevolence it's terrible okay well that's horrible who can withstand that it's like yeah well if you look inside that you see that something beckons and what beckons is the possibility of what you could become if you confront that and that's what we need to know and that's I think integrally tied up with our most fundamental religious convictions we know that people have an indomitable divine spirit or how do you call that forth while by challenging it it's not going to come out without that you're not gonna be who you could be without pushing yourself to your limit because why wouldn't you be it's not like it's easy you have to be compelled in some sense you have to be challenged and that's why you do your children no favors by by pair over protecting them quite the contrary why does that message make you so emotional and what will you like at age 18 your Saskatchewan Alberta at that time yeah well I was thinking about the sorts of things that we're talking about now I've been thinking about them ever since I can remember but you know I've got better at thinking about them across time but I was I had a lot of the problems I suppose that the typical eighteen year old would have I drank a lot I can't come from this little town in northern Alberta heavy drinking I started drinking when I was 14 so I was quite a partier I I was confused existentially I would say I wasn't sure what the proper direction in life was I was very much obsessed with the problem of the cold war that's never really going away because that seemed to me to be just a kind of insanity that I didn't know how to fathom and you know it was all of that did and I was obsessed with reading and obsessed with learning and so that was what all drove me in this direction and then as I started to develop these ideas like I had to let go of things you know one of the ideas that I've been promoting to people is that you have to let the dead wood burn off and you do that by you do that as a consequence of necessity in the pursuit of responsibility when started writing seriously I had to stop drinking because I couldn't think properly so that was it it was either like you're gonna do one of these are the other you're either gonna continue wasting your time I was having to find time I was in graduate school and and and I had a very social I was very very social and a lot of that involved drinking and and and that sort of thing couldn't do both especially when I was editing I couldn't get my thoughts down pristinely not precisely enough plus the the emotional magnitude of the things that I was dealing with were more overwhelming if I was well in the aftermath of the party you know so my decided when I was like 25 or so did just stop I I've been caught off guard by how politicized you've become and I mmm as I read of your youth I know that you had your run-ins with religion which a lot of people do you actually got politically active but on the left not the right hmm help me understand what went down well I in the in the little town I grew up in the the member of parliament the provincial Parliament equivalent to American state was a Democratic Socialist he was the only one in the entire province everyone else was conservative which would be sort of moderate Republican I would say and you know there's something to be said for political voice for the working-class and for the dispossessed and it certainly is the case that hierarchical structures the hierarchical structures that compose our society do produce dispossession they stack people up at the bottom and and so people at the bottom need to have a political voice and so I was very attracted to that end of the political spectrum but as I came to investigate some of the problems I've been discussing more deeply I started to understand that mere economic rectification was insufficient that that wasn't the level of analysis that was appropriate for my inquiry anyways translated redistribution of income doesn't work well think about it this way the guaranteed basic income idea it's like well that's predicated on the idea that man lives by bread alone well that isn't how it works I certainly seen that my clinical practice I've had clients especially addicts if you gave them money they would die and the reason for that like one guy that I remember in particular I liked him quite a bit they had a bad cocaine problem and as long as he was flat broke he wasn't dead but as soon as his he was on disability as soon as his disability check came in he was facedown in a ditch three days later so well and you think well maybe that's a consequence of his overwhelming poverty etc you could come up with some social reason for that path that he took but it wasn't by any stretch of the imagination that simple it's like people need purpose more than money even I mean obviously we don't want people starving and actually we're doing a pretty good job of solving that problem worldwide you know either un projects that there won't be anyone in absolute poverty by the year 2030 which is really quite the bloody miracle that's for sure so we're doing pretty good job of getting rid of abject privation but then it isn't the provision of material well-being with ease that allows people to live properly even though a certain amount of material wealth is necessary precondition its purpose that's a much more difficult problem to solve it's like we need something to grapple with we need a meaning to justify our lives and some of that is to be found in while the struggle against against privation and and malevolence the mere offering of material sustenance to people isn't going to solve the problem Dostoevsky knew this 150 years ago he said if he gave people everything they wanted so all they had to do was eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species the first thing they do is smash it all to hell so that something interesting could happen so that's our fatal or fatal flaw and salvation both of that that that wanting to contend rather than to sit back and have everything taken care of so how do we get an 18 year old to understand what though chef ski wrote a hundred and fifty years ago how do you get a thirty in or fifty at your own words my age to understand how to take responsibility no we have discussions like this you know when you make the case to people as well so I've been touring around my wife and I have gone to 60 cities now well since January of this year and I've been speaking to audiences that average 2500 people and I have a I deliver a lecture that's very much like this conversation it's like lay out the structure of life the fact that it's rife with suffering and malevolence that we erect hierarchies in an attempt to deal with that to deal with those problems because they're too alike that the hierarchies dispossessed people and so we have to take care of the dispossessed as well and to draw the relationship between meaning and responsibility and the audiences are wrapped as a consequence of that you know and I'm always listening to my audiences when are they silent because you know when everyone in an audience is silent then everyone's in the same place that's a meaningful place they're all lined up and they line up on this axis of responsibility and meaning so there's a hole in our culture where this information hasn't been provided but it was there at times in our history which has been the thing that that I started with which is the issue of sacrifice it's so paradoxical right why would be giving of myself to you make me feel better mmm it does seem like most time if I'm if I have money I give you some my money I have less money mm-hmm but you're arguing that if I understand true sacrifice and I sacrifice myself for something that has meaning well part of it is you know human beings discovered time that's one of the things that makes us very peculiar creatures to be aware of our own mortality is a consequence of the discovery of time right we can see how we extend out into the future and so that makes us very strange creatures as as selfish creatures yeah because you actually can't be narrowly selfish and survive and here's the reason you have to take care of yourself now so let's say well then you can pursue impulsive pleasure perhaps at the expense of other people and why not here's one reason why not there isn't just you now there's you tomorrow is you next week is you next month and next year and ten years from now and so if you conduct yourself in a manner in the present that interferes with your future selves then that's a downhill trip for you and so taking care of yourself in the future and taking care of other people actually turns out to be exactly the same thing because you're actually a community of people that's distributed across time and so if you act in your own best interest then you're gonna sacrifice some of the present for the future and that was one of the great discoveries of mankind right which is something that I also concentrate on in twelve rules because I'm really interested in the issue of sacrifice why would you give up something now why would you ever give up something now voluntarily the answer is sometimes if you give up something now and often something you love something you're very in love with even perhaps not not for the best reasons then you can make a bargain with the future and that bargain with the future isn't any different than the bargain you make with other people so that narrow selfishness is blindness to time and context and there's nothing about it that's good and I do think the musical example is it really it's a really good one like in a musical piece every note has to fit with every other note across the entire span of the piece well that's what your life needs to be like is like how you act with me right now is has to be in harmony with what you want for yourself tomorrow and that's gonna be tangled in as well it's not only that you repeat across time and have to take that into account it's that you repeat across time in the context of your social life and so all of that has to be brought into the equation and the sacrificial motif is a huge part of that and that now too also is something that runs contrary in some sense to empathy because sometimes you have to you know you have to beat yourself on the back of the head with a stick to get yourself to move forward properly even though you know I should be doing this I should be doing this it's hard it's like no sympathy for that it's you have to do it because otherwise things are going to get worse I heard you say that you're you're recording what are the 10 commandments saying you do under your neighbors as you have them do unto you the word nice is not that command no no well nice isn't enough you know and and this isn't that enough or is it not the right thing to expect because so many members of my audience beat themselves up in a way they would never have heard oh yes that's and they say they're thinking but most thinking is self flagellation hmm part of it as writers you know take it easy on yourself because they're another hand sometimes you tolerate stuff from other people because you teach people how to treat you mm-hmm and if you don't get who that you get it well getting that balance right is really hard so in route rule 2 I think is treat yourself as if you're someone response treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping and that that I was really interested in that issue of people mistreating themselves you know so because we are privy to our own weaknesses and faults we know them better than anyone else knows them and so it's very easy for us to determine that we're not worthwhile because of all the ways that we don't live up to what we should live up to and the painful knowledge we have of that and to not regard ourselves as worthwhile and to not treat ourselves properly and that's not good you you have to treat yourself as if you're valuable and then that is the same attitude that you extend to other people well it's because you are valuable so and you and and that it's a necessity to adopt the responsibility that goes along with recognizing that so even if you're not happy with who you are and even if you have your reasons you still deserve presumption of innocence you still deserve to have a good defense mounted on your own behalf you still need to treat yourself as if you're someone valuable and and and someone worthy of love even though you have all the reasons to know why you fall short and that's absolutely crucial and it is hard for people to learn that hard to hard for them to learn not to beat themselves up too much then why doesn't anyone ever get away with anything that's one of your lines well I think you imagine you have a plastic ruler you know when you pull it back in front of your face and you let go it's like you think well this is going pretty well so far snap yeah well it's because you can't you can't bend this structure of reality this is why and this is I think also partly what in this message is frightening is everything that you distort snaps back and often magnified and everyone knows that and one of the things I discuss with my audience is like well just think about how you talk to people that you're trying to be trying to treat properly you don't say to them okay here kid here's the way you deal with life this is you put your son in your knee and say look lie every chance you get falsify things don't take any responsibility for anything if you can Slough it off to someone else if you can hide things where no one will find them that's a hell of a good strategy like no one believes that ever so we know that that doesn't work now we're tempted because now and then you think well I can just cut a corner here or I can get away with this and no one will find out it's like yeah they will they'll find out or you'll find out and I saw this in my clinical practice all the time you know people would be suffering for some consequence a lot and we'd untangle it maybe we go back five years or 10 years and it would be something that was left undone something that was done that shouldn't have be done not and sometimes not even on the part of the person you know sometimes on the part of their parents or maybe even on the part of their grandparents like these things stick around for a very long period of time but it's like if you if you produce a rift in the structure of reality it's not going to go away until you rectify it and and often it breeds more demons that's for sure if that's the case why is it so hard for us to tell the truth what what is it biologically in us and what I I like to push you on this biologic issues because you're psychologists you actually understand how the brain works and how you know in fact the fundamental of order versus chaos issue is in part reflected in our brain so all these balancing acts our brain is pretty good at yeah but truth is hard for us yeah well you know it's hard to confront things now when you could hypothetically put them off it's discounted a bit you know a child who's called onto the carpet for their actions is likely to think well if I lie about this I'm not going to get punished for it now I away with it and they might not even really believe that but they don't want to face the consequences of their actions right here and now well we can just put it off a little bit well it'd be nice if you could do that and so you're tempted to do it you can shut it off into the future that's just future you you know you don't want to be that guy yeah but but it's it's better it's better to have the fight now it's better to confront it now if you can manage it you touched earlier on this issue of the evil within us yeah and use stories a lot in some of them are stories that all of us are familiar with Harry Potter being a good one for this example where there's a little bit of evil in Harry Potter yeah darkness darkness the shadow yeah I bowled the mark yeah all right what is it about having or respecting that we all have evil that you find it's important for us living our lives well I think the capacity for evil is something that is not easily distinguishable from strength you know and I mean mine my knowledge runs out at this level of analysis in some sense the world seems to be structured so that we have that we can act for the good and we can act for evil and I think that's associated with self-consciousness I think that's illustrated in this story of Adam and Eve when Adam and Eve becomes self conscious the scales from fall from the rise they realize that they're naked and to realize that you're naked is to understand your vulnerability that's why I mean even clothed themselves where anyway oh no I'm naked I can be hurt okay I can be hurt I have to clothe myself I have to protect myself in the future you actually become aware of that in a way that animals aren't well what does it mean that you're naked means that everyone else is too what does it mean that you can be hurt means that everyone else can be heard to means that you could hurt them and that's why the knowledge of good and evil goes along with the knowledge of nakedness that took me a long time to figure out it took me about 30 years to figure that out why are those so two things conjoined oh yes when you understand that you're vulnerable you understand that everyone else is vulnerable and then you have the option of exploiting that and so that that's what transforms human beings to some degree from animals because a predator just eats you but a human being a human being can play with you and will for all sorts of reasons now the capacity to do that though why is the capacity to do that let's say useful well it's useful to be strong and not to have to use it that reflects something that we talked about earlier because it makes you formidable and I think that you have to be formidable in order to move forward properly in the world even to get through obstacles that aren't just to get through obstacles you have to have some strength of character you have to have some commitment and some of that is there will be a cost if you interfere with me it'll be the minimal cost necessary let's say if you're if you've got yourself under control it will be the minimal cost necessary but do not be thinking there won't be a cost and I don't think I don't believe that if that's not built into your character then you have you have no strength and you certainly have no strength when you're pushed by someone who's malevolent a bully if you're like that if the bully pushes you and your response is there will be a cost for pushing me and you will pay it then the bully will go elsewhere and we know that too from studies of bullies you know like even childhood bullies they push around their kids and then they find the ones that retreat and withdraw and they bully them so and you know you might think well usually children are bullied because of some abnormality that's a very common idea it's like there's a guy named Dan always very smart norwegian psychologist and he studied bullying for a long time as a precursor to fascism by the way so that was his interest he said his analysis indicated that at least three-quarters of children have some obvious abnormality that could be the focus of bullying attention might even be your name it doesn't take much of a genius bully to come up with a good way of making fun of your name or you're too tall or you're too short or you know or or your brother's too tall or too short or there's something isn't the abnormality that is the cause of the bullying it's the abnormality might become the focus of the bullying but part of the cause is the withdrawal in the face of the bullies because the bully thinks he can get away with it well if you're and it's also the case with children who are preyed upon by adult predators like adult predators of children look for children who are easily cowed and who won't put up a fight so for example if you're teaching your children to be terrified of strangers that's really not a very good strategy you want kids who are confident and who will make a noise if someone messes about with them and who are poor and so that that that characterological strength has to be built in we play to that that the evil side of that equation we do a lot of shows on true crime through the lens of a doctor I'm interested in forensics and one like down emotions psychologically what creates evil what is the nature of evil I mean so she just can wrote about this yeah they're unbelievable evil that he witnessed and lived through in Soviet Russia hmm so some people see it and can react and respond and and they survive others walked away what but what caused the evil levels well some of it some of its like moronic evil you might say it's like well someone has something you don't and you want it that's just theft bicycle theft or something like that it's pure material greed and then I guess the level after that would be something like well the the desire to cause harm because you're vengeful and that's where the idea that you're a victim starts to play a real role if you're a victim and things are unfair then it's okay for you to react and to lash out and to hurt and so then there's the the conscious desire to actually produce suffering and then that can just expand beyond anyone's imagination until what you're trying to do is take I think like the that that that maximizes out when you're trying to take revenge against God for the structure of reality itself and I think that's the right language so when people and you see approximations of this with the high school shooters and people like that especially the guy who shot up the elementary school yeah you bet you you got to go to a pretty damn dark place before you think that the right thing to do with your life is to make people fundamentally identifiable because of their innocence and lack of wrongdoing the target of your vengeful hatred you've gone somewhere unbelievably dark to get there but that's not the darkest place you can go it's certainly a suburb of the darkest place you can go you know you can you can go to where Hitler went and try to cook up a strategy for destroying everything you know I mean everyone says well Hitler was trying to dominate the world it's like well maybe Hitler was trying to set up a particularly dramatic for dramatic forum for suicide with Europe in flames that's what he did you know you've mentioned totalitarian governments the Nazis in particular several times one of the knocks on you is that Nazis come to your rallies oh yes it's such a complete utter nonsense it's absolutely reprehensible all of that why do you why do they come to you rather well-known for there's no evidence for that at all all right types don't like me at all there's lots of documentation of that and the reason they don't like me is because I don't like people who play identity politics and I don't care if they're on the left or the right you know the left says here's the victimized groups and our society is basically an oppressor oppressed society and we should do everything we can to lift up the oppressed and I don't know what we're doing with the oppressors but I don't imagine it'll be that Pleasant and the identity politics types on the right say oh yes we should play identity politics but we'll be white ethno nationalists and look for white superiority or a white ethno state it's like as far as I'm concerned none of those none of that's even vaguely it's it's reprehensible it's thoroughly reprehensible on all fronts the reason that this all came about there's complicated reasons but because I'm not a fan of the collectivist left let's say it's been in the interest of people who push that doctrine to paint me as the most radical of opponents which of course would put me in the far right camp but just because you're no fan of people who play identity politics doesn't mean you're part of the alright so that's that's been a strategy I think that's been what would you say put into play against me for a variety of reasons that has been somewhat successful but not very in the final analysis if maybe it's the wrong actions to put you all but if zero is ultra ultra liberal and 100 is the ultra conservative all right where are you on that spectrum you think of yourself as more conservative more liberal I know that your life you've changed well I'm a traditionalist in many senses you know but I'm a very creative person so it's very difficult temperamental II for me to place myself on the political spectrum it's not like I don't think that the dispossessed deserve a political voice you know that's why I was interested in socialist politics when I was a kid and I understand perfectly well that hierarchies dispossessed and that something has to be done about that but I'm also I also think that we mess with fundamental social structures at our great peril I think we've destabilized marriage very badly and that that's been that's not been good for people especially not good for children but I don't think it's been good for adult men and women either and I certainly as a social scientist one of the things you learn if you're a social scientist and you're well educated and and informed is that if you take a complex system let's imagine you have a complex system and you have a hypothesis about how to intervene so that it will improve okay so what will you learn you'll learn once you implement the intervention that you didn't understand the system and that your stupid intervention did a bunch of things you didn't expect it to many of which ran counter to your original intent and you will inevitably learn that so I I learned that I had a whole series of very wise mentors who insisted to everyone they talked to who was interested in public policy for example that when they put in place a well-meaning public policy initiative that they put aside a substantial proportion of the budget to evaluate the outcome of the initiative because the probability that the initiative would presume produce the results desired was virtually zero and I believe that that's technically true and so that tilts me in the conservative direction because I think well that's sort of working that system and I'm also not a utopian so I don't expect systems to work perfectly if they're not degenerating into absolute Tyranny I tend to think they're doing quite well because if you look worldwide and you look at the entire course of human history degeneration into abject tyranny is the norm and so if you see systems like our systems saying in the democratic western world that are struggling by not too badly it's like you should be in awe of those structures because they're so difficult to produce it's so unlikely and then I think well you take a system that's working not too badly I think well I'm going to radically improve it it's like no you're not you're not going to radically improve it you might be able to improve it incrementally if you devoted a large part of your entire life to it and you were very humble about your methods and and your ambition but if you think that some careless tweak of this complex system as a consequence of the ideological presuppositions you learned in three weeks in your social justice class at university and that's going to produce a radical improvements like you you you you you can't even begin to fathom the depths of your ignorance you mentioned marriage is an example of this as a social psychologist what happened to marriage well I think a bunch of things happened I mean one thing that happened might be that we live a lot longer than we did so the problem of having a relationship that extends over decades is a different problem than having the problem of having a relationship that extends over the period of time where you might have kids so I think there's that I think that women have clearly become more autonomous and so they've been able to transcend their more limited roles those roles by the way weren't imposed upon them by patriarchal men I think that's a reprehensible view of history because I think men and women fundamentally served as new actually sustaining partners throughout the course of history despite their continual disagreements and the difficulties of life women were relegated to a more restricted role because they lacked sanitation they locked tampons they lacked birth control and those problems have been solved in the last hundred years essentially since about 1895 and so that's freed women to participate in a much broader sense than they were able to before but we don't want to underestimate the power of those technological revolutions even though they sound rather mundane they're not mundane at all especially not the birth control pill that's put a certain amount of stress on marriage because the traditional roles have been expanded and you might think well that's great it's like yeah it is it is it is great in that a broader range of people have access to the expression of a fuller range of their talents and in principle that's good for them and definitely it's good for the rest of society because now we have access to the genius of women let's say - but that's me negotiating the marital role more difficult and then the other thing that's happened as far as I'm concerned is that we we got a little too careless about liberalizing the divorce laws and changing the structure of marriage in general I don't think that that was good for people especially not for children because the evidence the evidence that children do better in intact two-parent families is overwhelming no credible social scientists that I know of disputes that so and I might be because the minimal viable social structure is actually the minimal nuclear family two people one isn't enough to is barely enough but it's a minimum especially and I think the reason for that is this is how I look at it everybody has lots of flaws and tilts towards insanity in at least one direction and so partly what you want to do is you want to link up with someone over the long run because there they might be saying where you're in and vice-versa so if you have a partner and you put yourself together and this is also how marriage works symbolically by the way it's the reunion of the original man before the separation into man and woman you put yourself together you have one person who's basically sane and so that maximizes the probability that you'll do reasonably well throughout your life course but it also makes the pair of you especially if you're communicating sufficiently saying so that you're a foundation for the raising of children who will be socially competent and excessive accept acceptable because if they have parents if they have a parental unit let's say that's communicating and that's straightening each other out then the child can adapt to that unit as a microcosm of broader society and so if the child can figure out how to get along with the parents in in the in the best possible sense then they're also simultaneously figuring out how to get along with everyone else so and I think if you go below that pairing things fragment in a way that can't be easily rectified I know what you're getting emotional talking about some parts of of this discussion and part when we talk about meaning and responsibility mm-hmm I know that touches you well personally the other well I think it's a consequence actually of many of the things that I've experienced over the last especially the last six or seven months so I meet 150 people or so at each of these events personally and many of them have stories to tell me and they tell me overwhelming stories and that has a cumulative effect on you so one kid for example he was in his early 20s I would say he came up to me and he said I don't want to take up too much your time but year and a half ago I just got out of jail and I was homeless I started watching your lectures said I'm married I have a daughter and I just bought my first apartment good work and I was in LA and I was outside the Orpheum Theater it's kind of rough in downtown LA and I was walking down the street with my wife and this car pulled up beside us and this kid hopped out Latino kid about 90 so and he said are you dr. Peterson I said yes he said oh I'm really happy to meet you and and he shook my hand he said and I've been watching your lectures and just wait a minute wait a minute and and I said okay okay and then he ran back to his car and he got his dad out and they came over and they have he had his orb they had their arms around each other and they were just smiling away you know like with a real Duchenne smile a real smile and he said been watching your lectures I've really been working on putting my relationship with my father together and it's really worked and so I thought well that's a lovely thing to have happen when you're walking through rough neighbourhood is that some kid jumps out of his car and comes rushing over and tells you how much better his life is because he's been working hard on the basis of your recommendation to fix his relationship with his father and people are telling me stories like this all the time and then and the thing that's sad about it I think and this is what makes me emotional it's not only that this is so good and and and said good at a level that transcends politics absolutely but that people require so little encouragement you know there's so many people I see in my ed my lectures and I have a very diverse range of people who come to my lectures they're starving for encouragement and they don't need much I said I had this kid talk to me at a barbecue I was at this weekend and he's working with delinquent kids 13 and 14 years old and he said they were pulled out of other delinquent camps and brought to his camp which was for the worst delinquents and he started talking to them about my lectures and so they've been watching him and now they have a little fan club that's based around my lectures and they're doing things like talking to each other about making their beds and cleaning up their rooms it's like it's it's unbelievable how little genuine encouragement many people need and how and how they had none no one ever said to them and meant it it's not okay for you to be weak loser it's not okay and the reason it's not okay is because you could be way more than that and it's a crime an ethical crime for you to allow all that necessary potential to go to waste it hurts you it hurts your family it hurts the world really really it does and people think oh okay I get it and they do get it because they know at some level the other thing people tell me you know they say well I've been paying attention to your lectures developing a vision for my life trying to tell the truth trying to adopt more responsibility and things are way better but the other story is you've been able to help me put into words things I always knew to be true but didn't know how to say which is a good role for an intellectual to play and so well so those are that's why this all makes me emotional it's so it's so good you know and so much of this has been covered as if it's political it's not political what I'm doing it's not political it's something that politics is nested inside politics is nested inside the healthy sovereignty of the individual now I'm working to buttress and sustain the healthy sovereignty of the individual the great idea of the West so is it worth it there's the pain that you must feel with some of the biting criticism that you witness here about yourself is it worth it oh absolutely and absolutely and you know I'm not so naive as to think you can get the good without the bad you know I I've had discussions with my publicist say and and the people who are working on my book and and sometimes the discussions are such that well maybe a little less controversy would be a good thing it's like it's hard to say what's a good thing you know and what's happened to me over the past two years fortunately is that every time I've been attacked the net outcome has been in my favor even though it's very painful innate in the immediate what when it's happening with the mobs of students for example or with a particularly reprehensible pressed piece some of which some of the press pieces people who were very close to me told me they thought they sunk me and I mean I watch people respond to these things and very frequently now if someone's mobbed in social media they they apologize they're done with one episode you know and this has probably happened to me a hundred times in the last two years so it's very stressful but I'm kind of detached from it because we'll see how it plays out you know and you can't do difficult things without them being difficult and so I'm not up I don't feel that it's been and we say how to say it exactly I'm perfectly satisfied with the way things are going especially with these lectures because they're so positive so how do you want to be remembered years from now when the world looks back at what we're witnessing right now what should people say about Jordan Peterson that he wanted the best for people not the worst and the reason I want the best I think is because I know a fair bit about what the worst is light and I definitely don't want that and that's a conscious decision to turn away from that it's like enough hell that's the lesson of the 20th century and so it means that we take responsibility for that we put the world together and we start with ourselves we do that by adopting responsibility not by fixing someone else and not even by fixing social structures they're not that easy to fix it's like start with yourself you're a fixer-upper man you got work to do get at it then maybe you'll develop enough wisdom so that you'll be good for someone other than you and then you can expand that outward so I would like the best for people I think when people look back on you they'll also see that you began to tie together seemingly disparate parts of who we are as a species and I I'd like to get into that because it's deep stuff but you are articulated in a way that I think people will understand let's start with the soul mm-hmm this idea that we have something that promotes people's this amorphous part of us but you argue that it was in our parents that it's through all of us it's a much bigger concept than I had heard hmm yeah well I think see this is how I think reality lays itself out I think we all know this you're not driven by your past like clock you're not deterministic you are to some degree because you're limited you're limited creature you've got rules that you run by and all of that you know you're not a mission but you don't you're not driven by the past what you do instead is confront the potential of the future that's what's in front of you so it's a it's a it's a domain with multiple pathways and that's what's always in front of you could go there you could go there you could go there there's there's an array of choices that confront you you you confront that as soon as you wake up and become conscious in the morning and then there's all this potential that's there in front of you and you use your ethical choice to determine which of those possibilities will become actual and it's it's through that mechanism that you participate in the creation of reality and that's the making of you in the image of God because that's what God did at the beginning of time according to our old stories right spoke and transform potential into into the being that was good and that was dependent on using truthful speech so that's what you do if you act properly as you confront potential and you translate it into reality and it's your soul that does that your soul makes that translation hmm but the soul for you is bigger than just in me right so part of almost like our collective unconsciousness touches all of us our soul seems to be bigger than just what's inside of us it's connects also the thing that's the same between us in some sense right I mean it's it's a funny thing because you're you're a singular being possessed of this creative consciousness but so am I so it's a phase strange kind of singularity because we share it and it's the thing that unites us in some sense as as as as a sovereign individuals alright so how does faith play a role in all this and faith again is I gather that the few act appropriately you'll have a better life good stuff will happen to you is that what faith is I think you make a decision about whether about what your fundamental attitude towards being is going to be I think that's faith it's like well are things bad or good it's like there's a lot of evidence they're bad there's a lot of evidence they're good where are you going to come down on that should you work to make things better should you work for their annihilation these are decisions that you make and I think they're they're fundamentally based on something like faith the your decision to confront the unknown and the things that frightened you is like well do you have faith in your potential do you have faith in what you could call forward out of you because you need that in order to move forward with confidence you want to instill faith I mean we know this if you're trying to raise a child you want to instill faith in them now you might not say well I've been still in faith in God it's like well it's not so easy to decide when you're doing that but to instill in your child if the faith in the ability of their own potential to unfold in a positive direction well that's faith that's what that's what you want for someone whose confidence like yes in absence of evidence and absolutely in the absence of certain evidence I believe that my commitment to this path of action will bear fruit all right so let's take this discussion and I think make it practical so one of the biggest battles that I sense in America North America saw through the West is that between religion and science mm-hmm and many ways this is a fracture that you quote Nietzsche is speaking to what he said God was dead mhm that is a good thing no and led to the totalitarian ideology of much of the last century but let's just take it right through today to North America in particular and our brains hardwired to look at these information differently religion made it possible to have inquisitive minds that led the science religion also placed in all of us this bleep that there's some divinity in us yeah special in all of us and you very thoughtfully speak about how science talks about what is how can people watch us right now they are see us or hear us the technology is remarkable but religions not only there's a but science is not designed talk about what it means it's what should be what should be yes there has to be something beyond that you know and I believe that like I believe that the description that I just gave you of human consciousness is actually actually scientifically accurate I think that we do confront potential and that we do cast it into reality I think if you understand how the brain works from its ability to first grapple with what's unknown in physical representation and then to represent it an image and then to presented in Word I think that what you see is the process of potential coming into reality so I don't think that there's anything that's that's not commensurate with a scientific viewpoint there I also think that if we act as if we're each divine Centers of consciousness of that sort then we treat ourselves properly think well you've got some intrinsic value yeah you treat other people properly because I'm duty bound to treat you as if you have some intrinsic value we build social structures on that predicate they work so the idea that the individual is sovereign in some desired divine sense if you act that out politically it's like pay your society functions and people don't starve and and and things aren't an absolute abject tyranny and your rulers have something to bow to that principle of intrinsic sovereignty now the question is how that might be related to some metaphysical reality because that's the question of God and the way I don't know exactly how to answer that except that I've seen this relationship say between the opening statements in Genesis which described God as this being that uses communicative intent to call forth being out of possibility and that that's that's that's the essence of God as portrayed in Genesis and that's built into us as an image I think okay well that's what our whole society is predicated on and that works so it seems to me that there's something true about that I don't know what the fundamental relationship is between consciousness and the soul and the metaphysics of being but I'm certainly unwilling to assume that this is all meaningless and random I don't believe that I don't think that's a good theory I don't think it works at all when you act it out so there's something wrong with it and I don't think there's any evidence that it's true so people say well do you believe in God and I think I think a bunch of things when I'm asked that questions like why are you asking what do you mean God what do you mean believe it's like then those are reasonable objections for question that complex but I think a better answer is I act as if God exists say well does that mean you believe it's like well what you believe is most appropriately expressed in your action so and I think what's the saying by their fruits you will know them that's an action-oriented idea it's like so that's enough belief to stake my existence on but that doesn't mean I'm certain of it how can you be certain of it it's not within the human it's not within the realm of human capacity to be certain about such a thing and so you have to stake something on it it's like I act as if it's true that's as good as it as I can manage and I don't think there's a more appropriate answer than that it's like it's up to you to take it from from there in some sense I think part of the reason that you've become so popular is because you take religion and you allow us to see the fundamental grammar that is offered by different religions mmm without people having to first make the very important step of deciding whether they believe or not I know for a lot people listening there that's going to be a bit of a struggle but it is one of the more rewarding aspects of reading yes listening to you and I do think that a lot of people will come to either conclusion you just offer which is I can live my life that way and the fruits of my action will be bestowed on my my family in my life and many will just decide the belief period because it makes sense because there's much wisdom in these writings man what religion it is and I've talked to folks in every discipline about how they feel about what you're saying and most find a way into me yeah but the the reality that there's wisdom out there beyond what a scientists like me can offer and I'd like you I look at the brain I see that left hemisphere is pretty good at some types of processing the right hemisphere is different and one is better about things of order and one's better about things of chaos you know I'm making sense of what that just happened paying attention to things that are unexpected the other ones pretty good at just automating my life yeah and I start to see that much of my behavior is hardwired more than I would have normally he's the Pater expected and I suspect that when you read some of the this wisdom I've stopped thinking about people who wrote these beautiful old treatises you know like many scientists think about them as you know simpletons who didn't really have to end how the Stars and the planets worked and this is their best effort oh yeah they were trying to answer a very different yes yes they're not superstitious scientific theories there's something different well I'm not in the thing about belief I think I think you put your finger on it is well do you follow the story that's a fundamental religious question you know when people go to see a movie like Pinocchio this is a movie I've taken apart online in some detail it's like they suspend disbelief no one thinks that a wooden puppet has become alive no one questions why the wooden puppet should rescue his father from the chaos of the whale and you all just makes sense it's like well yeah but why does it make sense exactly and and isn't it interesting to notice that it makes sense and these stories have a pattern in the and the pattern has a function and that's a religious function you say well I don't know whether I believe it's like well you followed this story the Harry Potter books are a good example of that because they have a deeply deeply religious sub structure and that's why they were so insanely popular you know they have to speak for a book to become that popular it has to speak to something that's in everyone because otherwise why would they become that popular you know and in the second volume Harry confronts the basilisks the thing that turns you to stone that lurks underneath the Magic Castle it's like well that's life that's jaws it's the same story it's like we have a structure it's kind of magical we live inside it it's a hierarchy but underneath there's chaos and terror and that can come up at any time and paralyze you with its gaze right turn you to stone because it's so awful and every building is like that and so what do you have to do is you have to go down into the depths and confront that thing voluntarily and then you find and that's what that's what you'll find what's of great value in that pursuit and be reborn it's like well that's the Harry Potter story that's the second volume it's like well everyone knows that story do you believe it well do you act it out that's the that's the question do you act it out it's the right pattern I think and maybe you know maybe it's not even the right pattern maybe the human race is a hopeless race and there's and there's no destination for us but for better or worse that's our pattern our pattern is the snakes are after us well we can cower in our dens or we can go out and we can find the source of the snakes and we can contend with it and that's what we decided to do and god only knows how long ago millions of years we decided we weren't going to cower in our dams we were going to go out and root out the snakes just like st. Patrick or st. George and then we found well there was the snakes that will eat you and then there were the snakes that were in other people's hearts and then there were the snakes that were in your hearts and all those had to be contended with and rooted out and that's part of the that's part of the even deeper mythology is that there's an association in Christianity between the snake in the garden of evil in need of Eden and Satan where did that come from what kind of crazy idea is that well I just laid out the idea it's like there's always a snake what's the worst possible snake what isn't an actual snake it's a metaphorical snake that's the snake that's in the heart of your enemy when he comes to burn down your city well what if you get rid of your enemies well the snakes still there well then it's in your heart so what's the ultimate battle the ultimate battle is with the snake in your heart it's like yes true true metaphorically but more than that metaphysically as true as anything can be that statement is this true is anything can be the way that bit of society where the dividing line between good and evil is between my tribe and someone else move on right yes maybe it's inside each and every one of our hearts yes well that souls in essence comment right that's his conclusion from the analysis of the Gulag Archipelago it's like constrain the evil within that's your primary moral obligation that's why I don't like identity politics it's like it's not my tribe in your truck don't be thinking that that's a mistake it's more sophisticated than that you have to understand it as a spiritual battle not as a economic battle known as a physical battle you have to conceptualize it as a spiritual battle that that abstracts it a term that puts it up into the level of abstraction where it's properly dealt with because otherwise it degenerates into tribal violence all right so it to take that abstract and reduce it to practice religions are able to provide a grammar but science has provided a grammar for some as well but religion provides the basic building blocks for a lot of folks what do you say about the argument that God is dead look out for what will replace him that's the thing this is why I'm such an admirer of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both of them in particular because nature famously announced in the late 1800s that God was dead but it was also that wasn't the announcement the announcement was God is dead and we have killed him and we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood and he thought everything would fall because that foundation piece had been terribly torn away and I believe that so I'm trying to find out well what is that foundation piece see now Carl Jung the great psychoanalyst was a student of Nietzsche Nietzsche thought that human beings would have to create their own values in the aftermath of the death of God and there's a utopian idea associated with that the Dostoevsky he wouldn't that wasn't an idea that he would allow he didn't believe that human beings could do that you following Freud discovered that let's say that you can't create your own values because you are a certain you are a certain sort of being you have a nature and the best you can do is go down into the depths and rediscover the values and that's the same as the raziel ofin of God it's the same thing it's the rescuing of the father from the belly of the beast it's the same thing that Pinocchio does and it's an eternal return to the depths and recal reclamation of the relationship with the Divine Spirit let's say and and that's that's religious or metaphysical language but I mean it most concretely in this sense we already discussed it's like well that's your ability to contend with potential in turns and turn it into reality it's your fundamental responsibility it's actually what you do as a living self conscious being and we ll elevate that to the highest value say that's divine it's like yes that's divine how is that related to the transcendent divine I don't know but it seems related to it I also think that that's a perfectly reasonable claim and there's all sorts of experiences that people have under all sorts of different conditions that seem to indicate some relationship between their isolated consciousness and and being as such it's outside of our grasp for some reason but that doesn't mean it's not there it doesn't mean that people haven't reported on it so one thing that you've raised my consciousness is whether we would even have a civilization if we were unable to believe in things bigger than us so I'm of Turkish origin and I went back to Turkey this summer and park as I was visiting the Syrian refugees but within an hour drive of this refugee camp was the oldest civilization known to mankind it's called get back get back the literal translation is potbelly hill it's 12,000 years old three times older than the pyramids four times older than Stonehenge and they had big sculptures and the reason I was stunned by it is I was always taught in school I don't know what you learned but you're at a farming community probably had some discussion of how farming came about but but I learned farming happened and then because of that we had free time we sent off a couple people to be religious leaders they went off and wrote all the religious tomes and that's how civilization evolved but your Beckett ibid didn't have a agricultural community it was a hunter-gatherer community which meant that hunter-gatherers were able to build temples to their gods and because they could believe in things bigger than themselves they began to think they can control the world around themselves so follow this is important him era culture came because about belief in deities not the opposite right completely flips everything in my that I had every well if you're a hunter the question is what should you hunt see and we're built on a hunting platform human beings because we can throw a name so then the question is once your brain starts to develop is okay what's the ultimate aim right and you might think well it's it's it's to hunt it's like no it's to provision okay so how do you provision by aiming at transcendent things because then everyone cooperates and everyone shares we all work together and we get rid of hunger as such instead of aiming at a particular animal right we aim at something higher and it works and so that's encapsulated in our narratives and then the aim issue is really fundamental to that like what's at the center what's the point that we're aiming at and that's the ultimate points the highest possible aim it's even in our language and everything we do has to do with aim it shows you how deeply the idea of hunting is in us or carnivorous chimpanzees fundamentally use the word sin mm-hmm that's right it's in us to miss your and tartness your target yeah it's an archery term Amartya means to miss the missed the mark yeah that's a really useful thing to know it's like well what's the sin well it's when you miss your target how do you miss your target how about you don't aim how about you don't know how to aim how about you refuse to aim how about you have no aim and no one can live under those conditions we need a name it Orient's us it gives us direction and it gives our life meaning like literally doesn't neurologically so that begs the question without culture you know seventy thousand years ago he believed humans started a diaspora from northern Africa at least 12,000 years ago you have Rebecca tempeh Abraham by the way was born there not surprisingly a lot of Christ's disciples were in that area it meets you start to begin to realize as there's lots of layers of culture that got us to where we got and if I'm hearing you correctly you're saying there's a collective unconscious that senses thousands of years of human evolution and that culture cannot be discarded you throw that culture that faith away those traditions even if you're not quite sure why they exist you toss them away and you discard them there will be consequences okay so the first thing is that some of the best scientists that I knew like yak panksepp who was a great neuroscientist who studied emotion and I think it was probably one the five greatest scientists of emotion he was really interested in in archetypal ideas the people who study the emotional and motivational systems in the brain are the ones that are most convinced about the reality of archetypal issues so for example that again so the people who understand how our brains work socially and motivate who look at the emotion and motivational system so the deep layers not the cortical tissue Killian yeah they're convinced that these archetypes are vital to us hmm yeah well not all of them but many of ex-player too archetype is an archetype see well it's a behavioral pattern that that's what it would be most fundamentally a behavioral proclivity and then the secondary archetype would be the reflection of that in a story so let's say one of our behavioral proclivities is to react in a certain way to a predator so how do we react to a predator two ways terror freezing to be turned to stone when you look at the Medusa that's the response of a prey animal to a predator that's archetypal it's wired into us it happens way before you think way faster than you can think but then that's secondarily reflected in a story and that story becomes abstracted so the ground of the archetype would be the biology and then the secondary manifestation would be the manifestation of that biology in action and the archetypes are the most important things I gather because that they weren't important we wouldn't be hardwired to react to them that's right that's exactly right so so it's these archetypes aren't running away from it they're also respecting your parents yes yes so you better respect your parents or you die I mean you have you're dependent on your parents for 18 years it's like yeah there's there's filial those there's filial respect built and now it's it's pliable because sometimes you have parents and if you respect them you die so there has to be some plasticity there but as a as a fundamental rule of thumb it's there as a pattern and I guess an archetype would also be something like the proclivity to learn language no one really understands that but it's obviously built into us even children who are quite impaired intellectually with the general exception of really severely autistic kids learn to speak it's it's built into our biology in a way that we really don't understand fear of snakes is built into our biology for a long time psychologists thought it was just no we just learned fear and then psychologists thought no we learned to be afraid of some things more easily than others so you could conditioned fear to pictures of spiders faster than you could conditioned fear to pictures of pistols for example but then it went farther than that it's like no no you're not just conditiona Balea natively afraid of snakes but I don't think it's snakes I think it's too reptilian predators which is a broader counter category than snakes so and that's the dragon fundamentally because the dragon looks like an amalgam of predatory cats predatory Birds and predatory snakes and maybe fire as well which would have been an ancestral friend and enemy right because fire is an ancestral friend an enemy there's evidence I think it was Richard Wrangham wrote a very good book on fire a while back a very good answer or primatologist he figured we'd been using fire for two million years something like that and that we traded we traded the intestinal tract for brain once we learned to cook and that was a secondary consequence of hunting let's say or at least associated with hunting because our diet became so much more nutritious and calorie rich especially eating meat and fat that we could afford to shrink our digestive system and trade it in for brain chimps spend about eight hours a day chewing because mostly what they eat is leaves it's like go out and try to eat leaves it's like all you're gonna do is chew because they have no nutrition so anyways we're built on a hunting platform we throw a name even our perceptions are are very aimed at something and the metaphysical question you see how the biology transforms itself into the abstractions like well you have to have a name cuz you're a hunter it's like well what's the ultimate name that's the religious question what should you hunt above all else what should you devote your life to pursuing so why are these stories the best way for us to articulate these negotiators rules that we all have with each other because the because the the principles are so complex that we weren't able to articulate them and understand them so one of the things Nietzsche pointed out was you know you tend to think that morality emerges in thought and then is imposed on behavior we think up the rules and then we apply them it's like no we evolve the rules then we observe them in behavior then we tell stories about them and then out of the stories we can abstract general principles and then maybe we can get to the point of an articulated morality but it's bottom-up now there's top-down effects because as you articulate you start to change your behavior but a lot of this has moved up from the bottom one of the things I lecture about in my public appearances is the emergence of proto morality and animals so here's a great example this is from yak panksepp the scientist that I mentioned earlier he wrote a book called affective neuroscience which is a great book he said here's what he did rats like to rough-and-tumble play so if you take a juvenile rat especially the males they'll work to enter an arena where they can wrestle with another rat and they really like it it's play behavior it's not aggression it's distinguishable from aggression okay so you put your two rats together ones ten percent bigger than the other the 10 percent big rat just flattens the little rat your Pinzon just like kids yeah okay but then you see don't play with someone once you play with them multiple times in life so the game isn't one bout the game is repeated bouts okay so now you pair the routes together so the next time you pair them together the little rat has to ask the big rat to play that's the rule then if you pair them repeatedly if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time 30 or 40 percent of the time it's some substantial amount of the time the little rat won't play with them anymore and so panksepp de su ha is right that's for sure that's a major discovery because it's the emergence of it's the emergence of fair play it's at the mammalian level it's like if the if the big rat plays unfair cuz the little rat doesn't get a chance then the little rat won't play so then you think well here's the morality and this is what you say to your kids when you say it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how it matters how you play the game you don't know what the hell you means what do you mean by that it doesn't matter to win of course it matters to win okay but let's define winning there's the game you can win the game okay but the game isn't isolated because there's a whole bunch of games because it's a tournament but then it's a tournament of tournaments cuz it's many games so what your whole life your whole life that's right is the sequence of games so what do you tell your kid play so that you will be invited to play because the winner is the person who's invited to play the most games and so then so what does that mean it means well try to win because you're no fun if you don't try to win sharpen your skills because you're no fun if you don't try help your damn teammates because it's a team effort and you want to push them up as you put yourself up distribute the spoils don't hog all the glory right if you're a head when you're playing soccer past the damn ball right act act in this admirable sportsman like manner well what's that's prototypical morality so then you think well there's he's a good sport he does this well well he's a good sport over here too here's another person who's a good sport and it's something different and here's another person and then we get a picture of what the good sport looks like and that's the good citizen and we start telling stories about that but it's not like we understand right we can't understand we have to build the story up from the behavior and the so if you look at these old stories there's behavioral wisdom encoded in the stories here's an idea Moses leads his people through the desert right and all fractious they got out of the tyranny but now they're in a damn desert it's like out of the tyranny out of the kid under the frying pan into the fire right so that's what happens you go from a tyranny into a desert not to the promised land which is why people will stay in a tyranny it's like why do you stay on that tyranny what we'd rather be here than in the desert because that's the next place it's ok well now you're in the desert so what do you do fragment and fight over what's important so that's what Moses faces it's like all these Israelites they're fighting like mad so they come to him is lye outlined in the story so he adjudicates their disputes and he spends like ten thousand dollars listening to all the Israelites whining about whatever everybody in the desert and complaining about God and so this is driving Moses crazy he's trying to figure out how should these people live and he's he's actually adjudicating the cases well then all of a sudden he goes up in a mountain and poof the rules appear it's like those are the rules by which you live their discoveries it's like oh this is how you have to this is how you have to conduct yourself behaviorally in order for everyone to prosper its bottom up if he if he wouldn't have gone out of the tyranny into the desert and done that a G all that adjudication he the rules wouldn't have been revealed or you could say let's say you're watching a wolf pack or a trip a troop of chimps they have structure behavioral structures so that would be acting out the archetype you're the anthropologist or the or the ethologist and you're watching for the primatologist think well it's as if the chimps are following these rules well that's us that's us we're watching ourselves over thousands of years it's like okay what are we up to well here's an interesting story about how things go badly it's like yeah you're extracting out the essence of the behaviors and you turn them into a story and the story is compelling because you want to imitate it right just like a child acting out as farther a child acting out her mother you want to imitate it so that you get the drama down you imitate the pattern but then you could start to think okay well there are principles that can be articulated that underlie these patterns oh that's natural ethics so it's it's and this is this is a wonderful thing because it means that the natural ethic in some sense isn't just a rational construct it's not just a floating abstraction it's like the the articulated ethic matches the image it matches the story and the story matches the behavior and the behavior matches the biology and the biology reflects the structure of of being it's just that's the musical layering of all these layers one on top of another so if we if we get that it's not just random chance not just a bunch of rules but it's actually tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of years of us seeing stuff observing stuff and our biology matches it what's going on today why do we live in a society I think the biggest epidemic is isolation and loneliness yeah but it's manifested a lot of disagreeable behavior hmm I've heard you use the word complexity management as opposed to mental illness the lab people think I'm depressed I'm borderline I'm you know personality I've got this issue and that issue but it's actually I find Erstad you correctly something that's much more common something much more ubiquitous something much more under animal that we have a complexity management problem hmm yeah well the the doctrine of turning to face that which confronts you is a complexity management solution it's like what do you do when horrible things are chasing you turn around chase them back that's your best bet and then I think that is an unbelievably ancient human decision well so that's the story of that that's the classic story of the dragon fight you go out admit the hero goes out to confront the dragon and rescues the Virgin from her clutches well what does that mean it means that the standard human pattern of sexual attraction is for the person who decides to confront the predator in its lair to be reprobates it's like well that's worked for us that's our fundamental story and who knows how old that is it's as old as it's as old as predator primates that's how old it is maybe it's older than that so that's at least several million years old but it goes back it's like Linnaeus Bell who's a who's an anthropologist UCLA she makes the case that the reason that human beings have acute vision is because we were preyed upon by predatory snakes over a 60 million year period so we have unbelievably acute vision and we're particularly good at seeing the kind of camouflage patterns that snakes have on their skin in the lower half of our visual system it's like snakes gave people vision that's linen Isabelle's theory and the way she established that was she went around the world and she looked at the acuity of primate vision and correlated it with the prevalence of predatory serpents so the more snakes the better or more exactly right so that and that's such a cool principle too because there's a metaphysical principle there too which is you know why why does reality have an adversarial nature why would God set something on you say an enemy an adversary makes you stronger well isn't that cruel it's like not if the person who sets the adversary on you believes that you could win now maybe that's an insufficient explanation but there's something about it that's you know you can think about this biologically - I was reading the master in his emissary which is quite an interesting book about hemispheric function and and the author pointed out that if you want to make a very small movement with your right hand the best way to do that is to put your left hand up and then to push against your right hand and push opponent processing precision in action is a consequence of opponent processing you have opponent processing between the right and left hemispheres to to make things function you need this this opposition between powerful forces and I think that's built into the opposition between chaos and order that's hemispheric ly represented but also something like the opposition between good and evil maybe you get a higher good when there's opposition between good and evil I mean obviously these are ideas that are at the absolute extent of my cognitive ability to try to think them through but maybe the good you get when good and evil are both possibilities is a higher good than you good you get with just good that tug-of-war which you actually are you artists do brilliantly right they they stand on the border between order and chaos they look in the chaos they see patterns and then they tell the people on the other side hey I just noticed a couple things over there right so if that's where we need to be there in modern society why is it that we can't get those two groups talking to each other people who are primarily left brain you know organized order folks and they the folks on the right side of more chaos folks good good good question well that's it that's that's something I've really been struggling with in my lectures I try to make a case for left to left in the right way okay so the right wing the right wing there's a variety of things that distinguish them but we'll talk about one in particular you have to accomplish useful things in the world just to survive okay and if you're gonna do that in a social space you do that by constructing a hierarchy and if you construct a hierarchy it's going to be of a certain steepness because the people at the top are gonna be more successful than the people at the bottom there's also hierarchies of productivity so the people at the top are more productive than the people at the bottom and those overlap to some degree so you have to do useful things to survive if you're going to do useful things in the social system you have to build a hierarchy okay so hierarchies are necessary and valuable that's what the right says the left is yeah wait a minute though the hierarchy tends towards ossification and corruption and it dispossesses people at the bottom top when your fires no problem well then those are both true and that's part of that opponent processing you need the hierarchy social animals organize themselves hierarchically hierarchies are way older than capitalism way older than the West they're older than trees they're unbelievably ancient there's no getting rid of the hierarchy but hierarchies tend towards corruption and dispossession and those still tie by the way the lobster yes exactly yes someone give someone gave me this yeah exactly three hundred and fifty million years of hierarchies now that doesn't mean we should organize their societies on the lines of the lobsters that's not the point the point is is that you can't attribute the existence of hierarchy to the west or to capitalism so that's a that's a foolish critique that's the basic Marxist critique is at least part of it okay so the left-wing says wait a second now the hierarchies tend towards corruption and they dispossessed people and they need to be taken care of it's like yes how much should we take care of them versus how much should we sustain the hierarchy and the answer is we don't know and it changes so that's why you need political dialogue okay so what's the fundamental necessity for political dialogue freedom of speech so freedom of speech is the mechanism that keeps the opponent process balanced and so you don't mess with freedom of speech which is why I opposed the legislation that I opposed in Canada which started all this political treasure legislation just for two seconds on this yeah so there was a laws that said you must refer to transgender people the way they did they did they want you to write picking the pronoun they use yes that was part of the legislation background part of the legislation and you have it you have any problems with transgender people be identified by but put on they use in private settings in your practice or your in your classrooms my proclivity when people ask me to address them in a certain way is that if I believe that they're being straightforward in their communication then I tend to accede to the demand like a reasonable person does so that wasn't the issue the issue was the compulsion of speech and also the government's insistence that it was alright to build a social constructionist view of gender into the law which is now the case in what's the case in New York it's also the case in Canada and that's not appropriate because gender is not socially constructed in its entirety it has a biological basis so you don't build that into the law so but anyways that it was the compelled speech issue that really got me it's like no you don't have sovereign control over my speech never in the history of English common law has a as a has the legislative branch produced legislation that compelled voluntary speech there has been restrictions on hate speech there's more of those in Canada than there are in the US and I don't agree with them either I think that's a mistake but that's a separate issue compulsion and speech your Supreme Court deemed that invalid in 1942 no compulsion of speech in the private sphere no matter what the reason and I think that's the correct principle well what's what's the issue with hate speech well hate speech exists clearly the question is it's the fundamental issue who defines hate and that's like the Achilles tendon of the kilise heel of the of the law it's like the answer is those people who you least want to define it so you what you want is you want to have people say they're hateful things out in the open where you can keep an eye on them and where they can invalidate their own viewpoint which is generally what happens in validate their viewpoint yes and they say something hateful racist for example the Society said you guys you're missing the boat you're completely off talking about this right you reprimanded spam you get back in line right exactly exactly that that's how it supposed to be well that's and that's a good way of putting it because what it also means is that the people who espouse those opinions for whatever reason get appropriately subjected to social correction that's good you want them to be subjected social correction so what happens if the government passes a law saying you can't save those words then where do they go underground and psychologically and socially and that's not good because then you don't know what's going on like this thing that happened with Alex Jones is good example of that it's like leave Alex Jones alone why because you you want to see what he's up to you not good not because you like him but you want to see what he's up to yeah absolutely you want to see what people are up to you know because sometimes extremists are correct almost never they're almost always dangerous beyond belief but like one time in a thousand things have changed so radically that someone who appears extreme is correct well you got to be able to know when that's the case you got to keep an eye on it you know and it's not clear to me at all that the most of the followers of Alex Jones necessarily agree with them maybe they're mildly entertained by his antics whatever it might be but it was a mistake to go after him it's got to keep an eye on it plus you shouldn't persecute people who are paranoid that was Kissinger's big statement to Nixon mm-hmm about Nixon if impaired where people have enemies right right right now you can confirm their bias right that's exactly right yes that's not a good idea why is every person watching us right now and they're quite a few suffering from anxiety depression addiction all three together even how's it possible we're not all there in that quandary oh well first of all many people are at different periods in their life right it's a rare person who doesn't have a severe bout of anxiety at some point in their life often because things collapse around them you know like they they encounter some real catastrophe even with depression if you look at the epidemiological studies most people who eventually suffered depression had their first episode precipitated by something truly awful so you know we move in and out of states of terrible negative emotion throughout our life why don't we why don't we stay there what makes us better almost subconsciously we have a resilience yeah well some of it some of it's the grace of God and blind luck you know some people are just healthier than other people and that makes a big difference so you know you don't want to be too morally self-righteous about the absence of anxiety in your life it could easily be due to your characterological strengths and your willingness to confront things voluntarily and all that but health plays a big role health and good fortune you know I mean you meet people now and then who are in their 40s and they've never suffered a serious loss from death for example do you think part of the reason that people find their path is because they know the story they're in oh definitely and some folks they don't know what story they're in or they're in someone else's story's a bit player as you said you to articulate it yeah well we've produced some things some exercises online to help people get their story straight this is one exercise called future authoring that's because think about that I did that I am it yeah well you know the idea was that it's it's based on exactly the questions you asked which is well what's the story of your life is it a comedy or a tragedy comedy is something with a happy ending fundamentally in a tragedy as well it starts bad and gets worse you know when is it a tragedy that someone else is imposing on you or some bit bit of you that you don't understand what's the story of your life part of that is well what do you want what are you aiming at that's the reverse of sin right you're aiming at something well the future authoring program helps you determine what it is that would be good for you to aim at what do you hope for what do you hope for when and if you so that exercise basically assumes that you treat yourself as if you're someone that you're taking care of that's the presupposition your valuable despite your flaws it would be okay for you and maybe alright for the universe as a whole if your life wasn't any less any more wretched than it has to be so we could set it up for that okay so so now if you were looking three to five years down into the future and you could you could have what you needed within the bounds of reason what would it be what do you want what do you want from your family what do you want from your friends how are you gonna educate yourself what are you gonna do for your career how are you gonna take care of your mental and physical health how are you gonna resist temptation what are you gonna do with your time outside of work that's productive and meaningful you get to have it it's like knock and the door will open okay go to knock first and then you go to pick the door and like I really like this because it is you cannot catch something you're not pursuing so now if you're pursuing it that doesn't mean you'll catch it but generally you'll catch something interesting along the way you know that's the that's the thing that's so cool about this let's say you set out a vision you start pursuing it you don't get what you were after but you learn a lot as you move towards that destination and as you learn your vision is gonna change and you may end up with something that's better than what you were aiming out to begin with but that won't happen unless you initiate the journey that's partly something I learned from from the Abrahamic stories with the story of Abraham in particular because God calls Abraham to an adventure when he's like 85 it's like get out of your father's tent for God's sake get out there in the world right really that's how the story is set up leave your family in your tent it's time to get out in the world well what do you see confront famine is the first thing tyranny and the potential loss of his wife it's like Abraham must have been going it's like the tent was tense looking pretty good but it's this call to adventure okay so you put together a vision that's your call to adventure get out there in the world and contend with it well you might not get what you want but you might find what you need but it won't happen without the pursuit and that's part of faith right faith is I'm going out in the world to seek my fortune and if I do that properly then the fates will cooperate with me how did the archetypal stories that we in our subconscious have these are these these they're archetypal questions are the ones that everyone really was trying to ask even if we can't put words to it right how do they help us maintain our sanity and do you think that's part of what we're struggling with right now that we've we've lost touch with ancient wisdom again part of our collective unconscious that should be there should be part of us that we distance ourselves from either from technology or modern culture whatever well look we have the capacity for abstraction right and so to abstract means you can think without acting because otherwise it's useless it's not abstraction then so you can you can peel reality away and represented abstractly and then you can start manipulating it and you can criticize what you're representing and we're doing an awful lot of that a lot of that subsidized I would say this intense criticism of our own structure it's like fair enough you know but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak especially if it's the divine child that you're throwing out which is what it is it's like criticism this is where the left goes too far when it's criticizing it's like well you can criticize the hierarchy you can criticize the current instantiation of the hierarchy it isn't obvious that you can criticize the idea of hierarchy itself you're pushing a little too far then you can describe the tyrannical nature the partial tyrannical nature of the current societal structure you can't say all hierarchies are patriarchal tyrannies that's too far you have to use some judgment and so that the proclivity for and the thing is what are you trying to do when you criticize well if you're smart like when I get my students to read Freud it's like or Nietzsche well these guys had a they were bound bound by their time in place and so they had presumptions that we no longer share and be they said things that were regrettable Nietzsche said a variety of things about women that were regrettable partly I think because he he didn't have that much success on the romantic front partly because he was very ill partly because he was isolated like he had his reasons but it's not that helpful maybe you read Nietzsche it's like you get rid of 10% of it but you keep the rest you read Freud it's the same thing you read these people who were flawed humans and you think well let's separate the wheat from the chaff we don't have put it all in a pile and burn it it's like old Freud made a mistake burn him that's what we're doing with people on social media it's like no discriminate there's a horrible word for people don't discriminate it's like yeah discriminate man like your life depended on it you read these the old thinkers and you think well no no yes that goes in the keep pile that goes in to keep pop we're not doing that with our culture and it's partly because we don't have any gratitude as far as I can tell and this is another thing I talked to my audiences about here's the story here's how to here's how to survive in Indonesia okay so you live on a mountain but it's a volcano all right so you get to climb up the volcano at night it has to be at night because it's too hot otherwise and you so you have to climb up this volcano and it's a mountain then you have to go inside the volcano down to near where the volcanoes active because it's active so it's built and belching out sulfuric clouds at you all the time and if you encounter a bad one then you just die so when you have a mask around your face that's just a wet rag and you go down to the volcano and you pick up a 40-pound clump of sulfur and then you carry it up out of the volcano at night because otherwise it's too hot and then you carry it down the mountain and you get a couple of dollars so that you can do it again yeah that's not your life but someone has that life and you don't have that life because look around you man this is a remarkable place that we've built it's absolutely unbelievable and most of the time it works and you should be on your knees in gratitude for it even though you can also say well look we don't have full equality of opportunity we're not making the use of full use of the talents that everybody's bringing to the table the system tilts towards tyranny from time to time and we have to keep an eye on it's like yeah but you're not hauling 40-pound sulfur boulders out of volcanoes at night that's something you know so a little gratitude would would would temper the the criticism you've made the point that part of the reason people get bitter and it's because they don't think they can be as good as they should be able to be and a lot of it comes back to self esteem how do we build self esteem at any age because I see that slip away in a lot of people and without that they don't have the confidence to act as some of the things you're speaking to ok so self esteem is a tricky concept because the best predictor of self-esteem is trait neuroticism so the higher you are in treating neuroticism one of that for everybody there there are five cardinal personality traits extraversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness and openness I have a test that people can take understand myself that allows them to assess those five traits broken down into two additional aspects I took mine by the way my results were scary yeah well the test is designed so that everybody's results get to be scary it's scary to find out who you are it's so but how the trade neuroticism is a measure of the proclivity for negative emotion anxiety and emotional pain essentially and the higher you are in that the lower you score on tests of self-esteem so self-esteem is not a very good measurement because basically it's a Miss named reverse neuroticism so it's not easy to deal with that proclivity for anxiety but there's a separate question which is more like how do you encourage people is that and so it's not a matter of bolstering their self-esteem it's actually a it's really important to get these things right because if you don't get the conceptions right then the implementations fail so it's about reducing the eroticism well if you could I don't think you can what really what you can do is make people more courageous that's different so even if you're treating people who are phobic like Agra phobic it isn't obvious that you make them less phobic what is obvious is that you make them more courageous so if you're treating someone who's agoraphobic and they they won't go on an elevator so they're afraid of an elevator and you slowly expose them to the elevator negotiating that and they get to the point where they can get on the elevator they don't really they're not really less afraid of death than they were they're more confident of their ability to prevail in the face of adversity and that you can teach that and you do that by challenge we do that through a challenge so if you want to build someone's self-esteem let's say but I would say encourage them then set them a set of optimal challenges and allow them to watch themselves succeed at those challenges and that will build it right into their bones alright so let's go back to this lobster story since you're wearing the lobster tie alright so 250 million years ago you had a hierarchy if there's hierarchies and most everything it seems some lobsters win the hierarchy they get to have all the female lobsters like yes yes what do you do with the lobsters at the bottom of the hierarchy now today you say we got to talk about them can't ignore them yeah but there's not easy just as engineer society to automatically manifest a better life although I think a lot of people say we could do better than we are for a lot of people don't seem to get it they don't get a chance you know what is the the bethe lobster how do they get quell I think do a lot of I think we have done a lot of things successfully in our society so the first is is that it's not a monolithic hierarchy by any stretch of the imagination as we've made society more complex the number of sub hierarchies is multiplied tremendously and so let's say each of us comes to the table with a different set of weaknesses and strengths is it's highly probable that you'll be able to find a sub hierarchy where your particular pattern of weaknesses and strengths actually constitutes the crucial element so if you're high in agreeableness for example well healthcare is a good field for you and if you're really conscientious then you can be a manager and if you're open then you can be entrepreneurial or creative play at a different hierarchy find a hierarchy that matches your temperament that's a really good rule and then we could say well let's diversify the hierarchies and we are doing that and and at a very rapid rate thank god there's an endless number of diverse hierarchies on online for example so you you you know a sophisticated society produces a subset of hierarchy that's matched for as many people as possible okay but then there's additional complications and some of them we don't know how to deal with so for example one of the things that predicts the ability to succeed in hierarchies across hierarchies seems to be associated with intelligence so all things considered across most hierarchies it's better to be intelligent so then the question is well what do you do with with people who are of less cognitive power and that's an increasingly complex problem so and I don't think we have a straightforward solution to that because one of the dangers is is that as our society becomes more technological and more cognitively complex the effective intelligence actually grows and that's what the leaders what do you do with with members of our society who cannot compete well because we have an obligation that was one of the basic prison one of the basic insights I gained from reading and listening to you was that we all had that spark of divinity yeah that you can't leave one niche you said god is dead because science had prospered but it only happened because religion first respected our specialness yeah each of us yeah and only after that can we begin to transcend it okay well this is the way I the way I look at this is that let's say that you're blessed with success like you've been blessed with success okay so you have a lot of resources at your disposal okay now you could feel guilty about that and perhaps to some degree that you should that's between you and your conscience but let's say that you've generated your resources in a fair game and that a lot of people have benefited along with you so you've played a straight game now you have all these resources okay so what should you do with the resources well impulsive pleasure it's like well little that goes a long ways and it's liable to take you down in a very very short period of time okay so mighty shows on that so right okay so how about with that does it work right it's not a good medium to long term solution okay how about your ethical responsibility grows in proportion to the resources that you have at your control and the right thing to do is that as you become more competent authoritative and able is to expand the range in which you're operating to do more good it's like you got a problem you see some some something in the world that's bothering you think well that's a problem it's bothering me because that's an interesting thing not everyone bothers everything some things bother each of us that's your problem whatever bothers you it's like that's like a little marker I don't know why it emerges that's your problem you should go out there and do something about that okay so you have some excess resources it's like great get at it and this is one of the things I like about someone like Bill Gates for example it's like what's he doing well how about combating malaria okay you got sixty billion dollars you want to wipe out malaria that's it might be a good thing that you have sixty billion dollars if one of the consequences is that you're gonna wipe out malaria or at least you're gonna try and he's after the five major diseases right and actually from what I've been able to read is like making some headway it's like great so so what is winning losing what is success how does that all fit into this hierarchy game it's musical musical sure multiple layers you bet it's like you know maybe it's a Strauss waltz saying it's beautiful and you're dancing with someone you love and the orchestra's being conducted and everyone's dancing around you ever thing is stacked up harmoniously it's like you're winning at every level simultaneously that's where the maximum meaning is it's like that there isn't anything better than that why would you pursue anything else you want to win at every level and that means that not only do you win but the the fact of you're winning is related integrally to the fact of everyone else's winning that's a perfect game it's like not only are you winning so is everyone that's playing with you it's like great and that is and I do believe I believe we're we're wired for that to be a meaningful experience God look at look at look at us you go to a sports game and you see a remarkable display of athletic prowess and sportsmanship at the same time everybody spontaneously gets up and applauds before they think it's like yes you got it I see that picture but I also see pictures often on this set of men and women coming in not getting each other yeah and a lot of times it's it's hard to understand what the guy's up to something just because you know I think as humans like Maseratis and I as a surgeon I see the inner workings that is when one little spark plugs off everyone could hear it sometimes you can't hear it over the noise but it's there so when when a woman is not happy for example with how what she needs out of life yeah most divorces these days the middle-aged couples are initiated by the women yeah how expensive higher treat neuroticism in all likelihood explain well women are higher in trait neuroticism than men and I think it's because they have to take care of infants and so they're I don't think woman's adult woman's nervous systems are attuned to the needs of women I think they're attuned to the needs of woman and infant that's the other mother and and young infant too and so there's more sensitivity to threat then might be good for a woman's mental health across the span of her individual life but it's the price she pays for being hyper-vigilant for her infants and it's driving the sorts of things that we know that one of the predictors of divorce for example is hi treat neuroticism and at least one of the partners okay they're more unhappy so how does an unhappy woman express that in a successful way to get the guy to change because he doesn't have trait neuroticism yeah he's not a word about being a father of a young child you know it's not he's hardwired for Amy at the target yeah well it might be worth having a discussion about what target to aim at you know again that's why we developed the Future authoring program it's like okay what are you both up to what are you aiming at we need to we need to establish that and you say well I'm not aiming at anything it's like yes you are if you don't know what you're aiming for that just means you don't know what you're aiming for you can't live without a name it also might mean that you're aiming at 25 things at the same time so you're polytheistic in some sense and 10 of those aims are working at cross-purposes to the other 10 so you're a house divided amongst itself I think a lot of times women are bit players in their families story and they figure it out hmm that's not fulfilling mmm you want to be the main character protagonist of your story well that's also perhaps associated with higher trade agreeableness it's another big five traits oh if you're agreeable you tend to defer to others and you're compassionate now deferring to others isn't necessarily a virtue we tend to think of compassion as a virtue but we already discussed that it's like well one of the things that you do if you're a clinician or like clinicians basically do two things they help people deal with anxiety and negative emotion that's a big part of it and the other is they do assertiveness training and that's usually for people who are too high and agreeableness it's like okay what do you well I've had clients who were so agreeable they couldn't say what they wanted I was like what do you want I don't know they've been so other-centered that they don't they don't know what it is that that they're crying out for and that's often a very lengthy process of discovery but then you have to you have to find out what you want then you have figured how to fight for it because you don't just get what you want it's like Madison how things were that this is you know since you're talking about fighting for what you want this came up in your channel for interview in the UK about the fundamental difference between women and men and a hot topic that we've talked about on the show is that like the women aren't paid in a in a way that it seems equitable to the men in a similar job and you made arguments that there are fundamental differences between men and women where women to play some of the role and assertive this is part yeah well agreeable people get paid less for the same job than disagreeable people they don't ask sure look if you do your job very competently you might expect that your boss should notice that and probably he or she should but the problem with doing things well is that it's invisible what's visible is mistakes so then you just work really hard and you're invisible it's like well you're invisible that's not helpful and like did you ask and maybe asking isn't good enough like I've counseled lots of people who've tripled their salaries in two or three years like it's work man it's work it's a strategy it's a war to do that but you can do it I mean the first thing you do is well the first thing we do is well are you actually doing a good job let's say yes okay fine are you documenting it generally no if you're documenting are you communicating the documentation well no okay is your CV up-to-date and prepared are you met ready to move laterally are you looking for other positions are you looking for other opportunities within the workplace how often do you talk to your boss about what you're doing what are your salary goals well I want a 15% raise did you ask no oh sorry man you're not gonna get it if you don't ask unless you're assuming that your boss is omniscient and benevolent which is highly improbable especially if you're doing a good job and you can be ignored you know and then it's not only it's not only a matter of asking it's a matter of negotiating because if I want something from you and it's somewhat of a zero-sum game and often the distributable pile of money is somewhat of a zero-sum game it's like here's six reasons why you should pay me 15% more and here's two things that aren't good that will happen if you don't so and then usually you're not even negotiating with your boss you're do negotiating with your boss's boss so what you're trying to do is to give your boss a story so that he can or she can go to the next person up and say well we have to give this person 15% more because if we don't first they're doing a good job but here's the documentation which they so helpfully supplied me for and here's the negative costly thing that will happen if we don't it's like oh yeah give them their money because it's cheaper than hiring someone else it's like you have to think strategically and you have to be disagreeable and the disagreeable part is you have to put negotiate on your own behalf what so what's the fundamental diverse between men and women well the temperamental traits are women are higher in trait neuroticism so they feel more negative emotion anxiety and emotional pain primarily and they're higher in agreeableness which is compassion compassion and politeness and that's it's about half a standard deviation which isn't a lot so men and women are more the same than they are different by a substantial margin but at the extremes those those differences really make a difference so for example women's higher trait neuroticism negative emotionality is reflected in the fact that cross-culture they're more likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders whereas men's disagreeableness is reflected in the fact that they're more likely to be arrested and imprisoned so it's 10 to 1 male convicts to female you think that's a matter of socialization you think this court system is stacked against men we're gonna have an equity program for men and women in prison or we're gonna accept the fact that men tend to be more violent than women which is also by the way women commit women attempt suicide more often than men that's a reflection of their higher levels of anxiety and depression but men commit suicide more often because they use lethal means yes and that's a reflection of their lower levels of agreeableness and their proclivity towards physical aggression so and you think well that's all sociologically constructed no the data are in so you rank order countries by how egalitarian their social policies are and you put the Scandinavian countries at the top because they have the most egalitarian social policies if we know what egalitarian means you know if it's not the Scandinavians then we don't know what egalitarian means because that's what they've been trying to do then you look at personality differences across those countries if it's sociological then the smallest personality differences are in Scandinavia because they've been obliterated by the egalitarian policies that's exactly the opposite of what happened the biggest personality differences in the world are between scandinavian men and women why because that when you take out the sociological variability you maximise the biological variability right it's exactly the opposite of what virtually everyone predicted no one no one saw that coming but that's what happened and it's not like a few little studies done by some right-wing professors of psychology in some little podunk institution first of all there are no right-wing professors of psychology so no one's been happy about this second these are studies with thousands of people like their the there are among the most credible psychological studies that have ever been done and it's not only personality its interest this is the big one the biggest difference between men and women in the Scandinavian countries isn't trait neuroticism or agreeableness those are personality dimensions the biggest difference is in interest and women tilt towards people and men tilt towards things it also turns out that if you're in a thing oriented job you tend to make more money cuz they're scalable you know it's like how many people can you take care of so a thing is you're building machines cars gadgets gadgets yeah people you're helping people hire a psychology yeah exactly exactly that tends to be more one-on-one it's hard to scale healthcare and you don't make a lot of money in most enterprises that aren't scalable taking a step back from this sure you're following our bliss that's the message that we've been putting out there a lot and I you there's a comment and I've heard it from others as well that we were better off falling or blisters than our bliss yeah yeah yeah is that an important part of your message that the promise of bliss is is a false promise yeah it's not the right term and you got to get your terms right precision and speech right speech matters because that's how you turn potential into reality right meaning if you pursue what's meaningful then sometimes you'll encounter bliss perhaps is often as it's possible to which I would say isn't that often those are sort of peak experiences meaning and I do believe that meaning is a fundamental instinct in fact I think it's the most fundamental instinct it's what you've got meaning is real it might be the most real thing I pick on that theme because it's an example of how people aren't getting you because amongst the critics and another example because you know people say well follow my bliss I would be happier if you'd light I want to be you know it's like the bubbliness part of my code you want to be good that'd be way better pursue what makes you good as opposed to evil bless sorry no and what about the issue of political correctness much of which I think came about because a lot of my generation grew up when reprehensible things could easily be stated about women in the workplace about folks of different gender color you know that was Vietnam war the Vietnamese war it's really torn the country apart I think a lot of my generation has PTSD just watching the news at age five and wondering why everyone thought that everyone was lying and it's known as impacted us but there are groups that have a sensitivity to how they are portrayed and political correctness allows you to be polite if nothing else good and at a higher level yet you've criticized political correctness I gather because you think you did chases narrative it's a group oriented narrative it's like so people have social groups obviously and they're individuals and the question is group first individual second or individual first group second and the answer is individual first group second or else and the politically correct types who play identity politics say no your fundamental characteristic is your group now there's all sorts of problems with that is like well the first problem and this is the intersectional people within the politically correct camp has already realized this or which group oh it turns out that people belong to like five groups okay so do you make all of their group's the number one thing well that doesn't work because there's an infinite number of groups so that just can't work actually you see what the West discovered was that you have to fractionate the groups to get justice where do you start fractionating them individual hemophiliacs out there where you know there's a lot of sense sensitivity that you may not be able to control as a precious speaker you're not gonna please everybody I get it but for me a lot of the speech that we would call politically correct is polite speech is I'm giving you a break cause I don't know probably you know problem with polite speech it depends on how it's enforced and who's enforcing it that's the thing it's like you want to be polite no problem first of all you should reserve the right to be impolite when necessary because otherwise you're you've been you've been deprived of your defenses and that's not good so it's not for example it's not like I don't believe there's hate speech there is the question is how should it be relate regulated it's not like I don't believe that there's prejudice there is that's not the issue the issue is how do you conceptualize the world or that's and the identity politics types they have a fundamental tribal conception they try to make group identity the fundamental issue they assume that the best narrative is oppressor versus oppressed and they play up the victim issue and I don't think that's good for anyone I think all it does is divide divide society and return us to a to a fractionated tribal existence it's the wrong the whole story is wrong that's the problem with political correctness it's like you put the group first no no wrong the thing that we got right in the West is that we put the individual first and I'm not willing to see that eroded it's a mistake and it's not because of rights it's because of responsibility so the way out of the oppressive structure of history is through maximal adoption of individual responsibilities it's the best way forward so talk about how we passed that along they did the best that we are along to the next generation there's a line that you've offered that really caught me off guard there many but this one was particularly provocative you said don't give your children a reason for you to hate them hmm right right that's rule five right don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them yeah well that's another most of the book twelve rules for life is about responsibility and meaning I would say those are the two responsibilities meaning and truth that's probably the interplay of the of the principles well the question is what are you doing if you're a parent and the answer is preparing your child to be maximally socially welcome that's your job and it's the job of the two of you because the two of you together make one reasonable person okay so now you're a reasonable person because you've kind of ironed out your idiocy with each other right through that opponent process that that contentious relationship that wrestling that's part of a real relationship you're both smarter and wiser than you would have been otherwise because you and that's part of the reason for the vow way it's like I'm not leaving you oh my god you mean we're stuck with each other yes for how long six decades oh so this stupid problem we have isn't going to go away for six decades it's like well we right no kidding we better do something about it so there's going to be contention there so let's say we fix each other up so we're kind of 80% functional as a unit okay now we have a child a child has this 80% functional unit and to the degree that the child can establish a relationship with that unit that will generalize to other people so you want your child to be a good play partner for other children because by the time he or she is four their primary source of socialization will be other children so if they're not prepared to take their place in the world of children they fall farther and farther behind that's very well-documented okay and you want them to respect adults why well firstly because they're going to become an adult so they should obviously respect adults because they're gonna spend two-thirds three-quarters of their life as an adult so that better be worthwhile so better be respectable otherwise you devalue their future and that's pretty counterproductive and mean and then the second thing is if they respect adults and can listen to them then adults who kind of naturally like children are more likely to teach them things and give them opportunities and so that's a good deal and so if your child is doing something that makes you dislike them assuming you're in a relationship and you've earned out most of your idiocy then other people will also dislike that and so if you allow or encourage your child to continue in such behavior you turn them into someone who's miserable and socially isolated now if you don't want them to leave home ever that's probably a good strategy if you them badly enough they won't be able to drag themselves out of your door but if you love your child and you want them to thrive then you do everything you can to have the world open up its arms to them and that's a huge part of that is discipline careful minimal force discipline fewest number of rules few rules few rules minimal enforcement that's right just the least you have to do that's right that's exactly right minimal rules because it gets too complicated otherwise enforced with minimal necessary force those are excellent principles see part of what got me on that statement is the possibility that if you are unsuccessful you will hate your children and we see times when parents are ruining their children versa and vice versa yeah cuz they've fallen out of love with them yes I see this at the end of life quite a bit when oh yes father's dying and all the other strange children are coming back into the picture and you see horrible fight oh absolutely absolutely well I can tell you a quick story so when my mother-in-law died she had prefrontal dementia and it started quite young so she died when I believe she was just in her early 70s and it was a kind of a brutal death and her husband really went beyond above and beyond the call of duty with her I mean he just he just made my jaw drop man because as she deteriorated he stepped in and loud her to preserve her autonomy to like he wasn't over caring he was really attentive and when someone offered help he would take it he wasn't so proud you know in in the arrogant way he would take help and and so and he kept her at home until he was getting old too he couldn't get her off the anymore and so then she went into the old-age home where she eventually died and her whole family gathered around her deathbed we were there for about the last week and you know that's pretty rough she was dying of hunger and thirst really but the disease and one of her daughter's palliative care nurse was making sure that her mouth was wet and taking care of her and and they all pulled together they all pulled together it was really something to watch and so and then she died and so what happened well that was awful but it wasn't hell hell would have been her dying and everyone around fighting and everyone walking away embittered and full of enmity as a consequence of her life and death but what happened instead was that all her kids had a newfound respect for their father which has prevailed over the intervening 10 years and all the siblings got tighter and so they lost their mother which was no trivial thing but because they handled it so well they they gained something that I'm not going to say in some naive way that it was equivalent to the law so that they came out better you know you don't have to make that case they certainly didn't come out worse and so these these end-of-life scenes the ones you're describing it's like those things can bad can get so horrible if it's contaminated by enmity and deceit and misbehavior and that's the difference between tragedy and hell since I'm a doctor the masked one medical question I know that your diet has become an issue of interest mm-hmm you're obviously rail-thin you looking to take the Jordan Peterson died probably in mmm maybe it'll look like you but I know that to medical issues forced you to be careful about your diet yes so what specifically do you eat you not eat and how was it benefited you well it's mostly been of benefit to my daughter who had a very complex autoimmune disease with about 30 extremely severe symptoms and she learned over about a three-year period of experimentation what she could eat which was virtually nothing and what she couldn't eat which was virtually everything all she eats is beef and water be for the water that's it and she's been eating that only that for a year and she never cheats because cheating has very severe consequences for her and so her mother has some of the autoimmune symptoms and I have some of them and so it looks like she got all of them and so when when this worked for her and we watched very carefully over a number of years while she was doing this and like the improvement in her is I just can't believe it every time I see it I literally can't believe it it's it doesn't compute and I can't believe that it was diet either you know because that went against many many things that I believe but I decided to try her more restricted diet and first of all it was just meat and greens and then I stopped eating greens to about five months ago and her mother has been doing the same thing for about eight months and their requests have been they're hard to believe I don't even really like to talk about them because I'm not a dietary expert and it sounds so completely insane but but I lost 52 pounds in seven months 52 pounds yeah and I wasn't I wasn't I wasn't overweight while I was but not by modern standards no and you know a year before that I had cut all the sugar out of my diet hey but I was still eat carbohydrates of all sorts and I lost like three pounds nothing then I tried this diet it was like the first here's what happened this is what happened in the first week I tried this diets this was just meat and and greens essentially I quit snoring that was way before any weight loss it's just like it just off and I was snoring a lot it was disrupting my way sleep so I thought oh that's really interesting I quit snoring isn't that weird then I lost seven pounds the first month I thought hmm that's quite a lot then I stopped having to have a nap in the afternoon because I was napping a lot then my gastric reflux disorder went away then I lost another seven pounds then the psoriasis that I had on my foot and my scalp that started to go away so and then over the course of seven months I stopped taking antidepressants I didn't need them anymore my Moody isn't perfectly regulated but it's it's pretty damn good and and I lost 50 pounds in total and I wake up in the morning and I've never woken up well in the morning in my entire life so so I don't know what to make of that I can't first and I wouldn't recommend it well this is not something you do lightly obviously there are issues that are going on your gut but it does make it serious as a physician as you point out it you learn from the extremes as well well here's a hypothesis you can make of it what you will this is hypothesis I've formulated over the last year and like I said this came as an absolute shock to me and it still is a shock and I wouldn't recommend it because it's hell on your social life and it really makes traveling difficult so it's it's not to be done lightly and there are other consequences too but here's a hypothesis let's say you have a patient who has multiple complex medical symptoms of unspecified etiology okay so what might you do how about if you reduce their complexity how about if you regard every single thing they eat as a variable because maybe it is so then you take them down well people use elimination diets but that's you got it down to one thing basis one thing and what's weird is it appears that you can live on that one thing so either people say well you can't live on an or meat diet it's like mmm that's not so obvious it defies the conventional wisdom yeah well here's the other thing that's worth thinking about maybe there are a lot of people who are overweight there are way more people who are overweight than there should be and we don't know why like I've read some literature that suggests that maybe it's a secondary consequence of emulsifiers disrupting our our gut lining there's lots of theory here point if you simplify the variables well one well the other the other issue is what's the harm so you eat nothing but beef for two months who cares it doesn't work quit doing it but maybe like if you see symptom reduction and I've heard stories and these are what's what do they say the plural of anecdote is not data that's right it's like yeah but the plural of anecdote might be hypothesis I really appreciate all the well information you shared I've taxed you there's lots more to discuss but its wisdom that's worth thinking about I agree with everything you're saying but I think a lot of folks will be stimulated to think further on things that matter well thanks very much for the invitation it was a pleasure to be here and to have the opportunity to talk with you tour the Petersons be sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss anything and remember to check back often to see what's new

Channel: DoctorOz

Views: 4,246,334

Rating: 4.841888 out of 5

Keywords: Dr. Oz, The Dr. Oz Show, Jordan Peterson, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Potential, Life, Pyschology, Meaning, Challenge, Oz Talk, Health, Advice, Struggles, Family, Relationships, Success

Id: AscPHmLWo-M

Length: 162min 32sec (9752 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This might be the finest interview of Jordan Peterson out there. That ValueTainment one with Patrick Bet-David is quite interesting and unique among JBP's interviews (loooooved when JBP discussed writing), but this one has it all.

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And hell, I've never ever in my life watched, read, or consumed anything with Dr. Oz until this interview. I'm certainly impressed with how well he complemented Peterson. They both left this interview better, stronger people.