Truth as the Antidote to Suffering (with Lewis Howes)

if you don't have a goal you suffer and then you get cruel and bitter and resentful and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place and so so because you can't suffer pointlessly without becoming bitter and you can't become bitter without becoming cruel so you need a name the question is then the question bitter what you should name yeah a dream that's for sure so then the question is what should your aim be welcome everyone back to the school of greenness podcast we've got the legendary Jordan Peterson in the house good to see you sir good to see you very excited about this you've got a book out called twelve rules for life make sure you guys check this out you've probably already got it but if you don't I'm telling you to go pick it up right now an antidote to chaos you've had so much attention over this last couple of years and I've been digging into the research and just been fascinated by everything you've been up to and I just love your stance on the vision you have for humanity in terms of how we can all live better lives and I think you simplify a lot of things in this book which some things people don't like to simplify they like to complicate and I think that's what's gotten you a lot of attention is that you try to really simplify a lot of these well I try to make everything concrete so that it's actually implementable right I mean there's a lot of high-level abstractions in the book because it ranges up into the theological and the philosophical but it's always grounded in what you can actually do in your life practically you want to bridge that gap from the highest abstraction down to the lowest level of behavior so that it becomes implementable that's how philosophical concepts take on their meaning right because they have to they have to have some impact on the way you see the world and the way you act in the world or they're not fully realized they're not understood because partly what we mean I would say when we say that we understand something it's kind of a state strange phrase to understand something but it means to be able to embody it in a shift of view and a shift of action and then you've got it it's graspable it's in your hand embody something in a shift of view mother they say well there's the same thing because your perceptions are very tightly linked to your actions because of course when you're acting you're aiming at something you have to be devoted towards some some some aim some target would we play that out in sports all the time yeah that's why sports are so entertaining for people is because they dramatize the idea of aim right and then and not only of aim but of the pursuit of excellence in pursuit of that aim that's the game and the reason it's a spectacle and the reason that people participate in it is because it dramatizes something absolutely essential about life and so you want to take philosophical abstraction and you want to use them to to structure your aim and then your perceptions organize around that aim and then you act it out and then you've got it that's then it's it's become part of your life it's not just in it's just it's not just a philosophical abstraction that floats free in space why is there so much conflict in in the world is it because there's so many different perceptions that people have well they think should be right or well sure well part of it is part of it of course there's conflict because we have real problems and so life is actually difficult independent of the of psychological foolishness let's say independent of the obstacles that we put in our own path like this knowledge it's already it's already fatally challenging right life is the ultimate challenge we will die yes yes there is well a challenge yes well do fear pain although yes all the things all everything that goes along with suffering is a challenge and it's it's it's the full challenge because it takes everything you have and so part of the reason we disagree is because there are complex problems to solve and then we also disagree because we're willfully blind and because we're more ignorant than we should be and we're not everything we should be and we tilt towards malevolence from time to time and we betray each other and ourselves and so we take a bad law to in many ways and make it worse no not always obviously and we don't have to but that's sort of the baseline that we're working against I think people are most disappointed in life when they're disappointed in themselves you know they see that they've made things worse than they had to be even though the baseline can be pretty brutal so yeah so the book and all my lectures I suppose are put forward in an attempt to take the high level philosophical abstractions and to make them into something that's actionable and to take the next best action in your life improve your life hmm so we don't have to suffer as much mm-hmm well and hopefully also so that people around you don't have to either so one of the things I've been talking to my audiences about is the relationship between responsibility and meaning which is and what would you say it's a it's a constant refrain in the book it's one of its underlying messages let's say or themes is a better way of thinking about it you know if you start with the presumption that there's a baseline of suffering in life and that that can be exaggerated by as a consequence of human failing as a consequence of malevolence and betrayal and self betrayal and deceit and all those things that we do to each other and ourselves that we know that aren't good that amplifies the suffering that's sort of the baseline against which you have to work and and and it's contemplation of that often that makes people hopeless and depressed and anxious and overwhelmed and all of that it and and they have the reasons but you need something to put up against that and what you put up against that is meaning meaning is actually the instinct that helps you guide yourself through that catastrophe and most of that meaning is to be found in the adoption of responsibility so if you think for example if you think about the people that you admire well you think about when you have a clear conscience first because that's a good thing to aim at which is something different than happiness right a clear conscience is different than happiness yeah that's better yeah that's better guilting yourself you're not feeling bad about your sister right you feel that you've just acclaimed you've justified your existence right and so you're not waking up at 3 in the morning in a cold sweat thinking about all the terrible things that you've involved yourself in what you said to someone they shouldn't have said I you acted or what opportunity you lost or or yeah or or the things that you've that you've let go that you should have capitalized on all of that and so if you think about the times when you're at peace with yourself with regards to how you're conducting yourself in the world it's almost always conditions under which you've adopted responsibility right at least the most the most guilt I think that you can experience perhaps is the sure knowledge that you're not even taking care of yourself so that you're leaving that responsibility to other people because that's pretty pathetic and I unless you're psychopathic and you know and you're living a parasitical life and that that characterizes a very small minority of people and an even smaller minority think that's justifiable but most of the time you're in guilt and shame because you're not you're you're not not only are you not taking care of yourself let's say so someone else has to but you're not living up to your full potential and so there's an existential weight that goes along with that Souls you suffer even more hmm when you don't take care of yourself or take the best actions or do the work that you know you can do you rely on someone else to support you financially emotionally and physically whatever it mean a home whatever it may be yeah well because you're not only you're not only not being what you could be you're interfering with someone else being what they could be right so you're you're you're not only a void you're a drain Jesus that's a catastrophe and but we usually don't even know I wearing that when we're in that situation because we're in a depressed state or we're or we don't want to see it you know you wake up at 3 in the morning and you know and so and then you think of the people that you so you admire yourself or perhaps you can at least live with yourself when you're taking responsibility at least for yourself and so that settles your conscience but then if you look at the people that you spontaneously admire and so the act of spontaneously admiring someone is the manifestation of the instinct for meaning right and this is partly why people are so enamored of sports figures because the sports figures are playing out the drama of attaining the goal of attaining a certain kind of let's say psychological and physical perfection in pursuit of the goal that's the drama and to spontaneously admire that is to have that instinct for meaning latch onto something that can be used as a model and then that model should be transcribed into something that's applicable in life you know when you really like to see in an athletic performance you really like to see someone who's extremely disciplined and in shape do something physically remarkable but and and to stretch themselves even beyond their previous exploits because you really like to see a brilliant move in an athletic match but you also like to see that person ensconced in a broader moral framework so that not only are they trying to win and disciplining themselves in pursuit of that victory and then stretching themselves so they're continually getting better but they're doing it in a way that helps develop their whole team and that's good for the sport in general and that reflects well on the broader culture a great leader and their team they're positive they're good sportsmen who against the competitors yeah I'm negative towards the other people they're lifting them up too yeah like the ultimate that's right so human that's right so that they can they can work for their own improvement in a way that simultaneously works for the improvement of their team and that and and for the sport and while I meant to the degree that that spills over into the broader culture so much the better so that's all being dramatized in a in an athletic event and it's really it's not philosophical it's concrete right it's dramatized in the world and that's what the games represent and so well and it's partly because well in some sense life is a game it is in that you're always the analogy is that in in life like in sports you're you're you're setting forth a name and then arranging your perceptions and your actions in pursuit of that it and that you also we generally do it well cooperating and competing with other people that's also the game-like element as well all of that's dramatized in athletics yeah that's like philosophy for people who aren't philosophical and I'm not being smart about that yeah it's like it really is philosophy for people who aren't being philosophical because it's played out you know and you can see it too you can see the spontaneous appreciation for the human spirit manifest itself when you see people rise to their feet spontaneously in a sports arena when they see someone do something particularly remarkable see an athlete who's extremely trained stretched themselves beyond what you'd think is a normative human limit and everyone celebrates that spontaneously so it's quite something to ya to behold and so took me back to a responsibility and meaning when we're watching sports or someone and do this act what does this do for us with in terms of responsibility and meaning well it it helps us figure out what we can imitate give us a model yes it's a model there's a model of something that I respect well even what philosophy is or even theology for that matter is an abstract model like it's laid out in words now the problem often is is it becomes so abstract that people don't know how to bring it back down to the total embodiment yes whereas something like like the drama of a sports event is sort of midway between philosophy and action right and so it's it's not entirely abstracted because it's not only coded in words it's acted out visually you can see an example of what just happens and you can try to reverse-engineer how they yes exactly well Italy at least you the fact that you admire the person means that you might start to try to act like them now it's not easy and maybe that would mean maybe that would mean that you start to discipline yourself with regards to a particular sport but it might also be that you start to mimic or at least affected in some way by their their sportsmen sportsmen like behavior right which is the ground of a certain kind of ethic because if you can play well with others which is sort of the hallmark of a good sport then that actually means that you're a reasonably sophisticated and civilized person it's really important to learn to play well with others there isn't that's the ground of ethics and you can do it there and that's setting that hopefully you could translate it into like well well right that's exactly right that's what goal well that's what you hope for yeah that's the goal of this so if the if the goal of the game is to put the ball through the ball into the net then the goal of having games is to produce people who can take proper aim no matter where they are right that's exactly what we're trying to do with with with with athletics so on so I've been talking to my audiences a lot about that about and well and there's more to it too because if the background of life is is there's a there's an inner Attica Bellona of suffering and that's complicated by let's say malevolence and the proclivity of people to betrayed themselves and now which complicates it makes it worse then the if you don't have a noble aim and and and if that isn't in viewing your life with sustainable meaning then you fall prey to all the catastrophe the pain and the anxiety and the anger that that suffering generates and that makes you bitter because what I'm here to say is that and correct me if I'm wrong we must have an aim in our life no matter what stage of life we're in and if we don't have some type of aim even if for a few months of an aim of going somewhere direction we're gonna the suffering is gonna be even more suffering pointless because we're already gonna face the greatest challenges that's right you start already struggling that's right there's no way adversity is coming no matter what x range we have big goals or small little goal or whatever may be but it's gonna be less suffering if we have an aim yeah well in not only that it's worse than that even because the suffering is zero meaning well the suffering is pain and the suffering is anxiety and uncertainty and the suffering is hopelessness but the consequence of all that is that you get bitter and when you get bitter you get mean and you get cruel and you start to hurt yourself and other people so it's not only that if you don't have a goal you suffer it's that you if you don't have a goal you suffer and then you get cruel and bitter and resentful and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place mm-hm and so so because you can't suffer pointlessly without becoming bitter and you can't become bitter without becoming cruel so you need a name the question is then the question of course is what you should name yeah that's for sure so then the question is what should your aim be now we have a program it's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about that day I I have this website called self authoring com and that program helps people write about their life and so there's a past authoring program to establish your aim you have to know where you are it's like you're trying to orient yourself on a map you can't orient yourself on a map unless you know where you are you also have to know where you're going right so those are the two relevant things the past authoring program helps people write about their life so it's a guided order by our we ask people to break their life up into six epochs six sections and then to write about the emotionally important events in those in those epochs and to detail out why why the positive things happen and why more of that could conceivably happen in the future and to detail out why the negative things happen and to try to understand why with an aim to not replicating them in the future because the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past the purpose of memory is so that you you figure out what went wrong when something went wrong so you don't duplicate it in the future that's the purpose of memory and the past authoring program can help people catch up and you know you have to catch up if you have memories that are older than about a year and a half that still cause you emotional pain when you think about them or if you dwell on them they come spontaneously back to mind means you haven't it means that there's part of your life that you haven't mapped out properly and it still has emotional valence that's gripping you you're still holding on to that story or it's still holding on to you right you ever got to go yeah yeah well you haven't been able to navigate your way through it you there's a pitfall there that you fell in and you don't know how to avoid similar pitfalls in the future and that's why your brain won't let it go because it's saying that's what the anxiety systems do it's like this happened to you it wasn't good this happened to you it wasn't good this happened to you it wasn't good fix fix fix fix it that will never go away unless you fix it how do you fix it well you have to figure out why it happened right that's the first thing is like how did you how was it that that situation arose to pull you down and that's not simple that's why well that's why we have the writing program because it's complicated to think it through but you but if you face it and you and you meditate on it let's say and send you do this voluntarily there's a pretty high probability that you'll be able to decrease the probability that will be repeated in the future so oh well well we that the second part of the program helps people do an analysis of their virtues and their faults the same sort of idea what's good about you that you could capitalize on what's weak about you that you need to fix so that it doesn't bring you down right and that's the present authoring but the future authoring program is probably most relevant to you and your listeners because you're in Ch in helping people establish aims and so we already talked about the fact that you need a name in life or that's where you derive your meeting and without that things go to hell and and as literally as that can be taken and so but it's not easy to ask people to say well it's easy to ask them what do you want your life it's a very hard question to answer because it's too vague and grand day so we help in the future authoring program we help people break that down it's okay so here's here's the situation so put yourself in the right frame of mind so what's the right frame of mind it's like rule 2 in this book treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping here's someone that you are responsible for helping so what that means is you have to start from the presupposition that despite all your flaws and insufficiencies that it's worth having you around and that it would be ok if things are better for you so you need to take care of yourself like you're taking care of someone you care for so there's a bit of a detachment in that and then the next thing is ok so now look three to five years down the road okay you get to have what you need and want assuming you're being reasonable and that you actually want it which means you're willing to make the sacrifices that would that would make it possible what do you mean by reasonable well that does that's the next thing well within your grasp that would be something what if you don't thing is out of your grasp but you still push hard enough well then you need an incremental plant right you need to break that goal down into steps of raising goal within a year that's like yeah I mean we've done the work to master a skill yet yeah yeah well that's it and you can have a high end goal and more power to you if you do need it well you need a pathway to it you know if you if it's ten stories up above you you need a staircase to get there right and so you have to build the staircase to it and so in the future authoring program so you're asked first of all okay here's you get to have what you want to need that's the proposition but you have to aim at it you have to define it name at it so here so then the first thing is okay uh if you could put your family together the way you wanted it to be what would that look like and so that might be your siblings and your parents but that also might be you know your wife or your husband and your kids assuming that you're at that point in your life you can have the family you wanted what would that look like right okay career same thing you get to have the career or the job that that is within your grasp necessary and and suitable for you if you were taking care of yourself how are you gonna educate yourself because you're not as smart as you should be there's a lot more things you need to know so you've got to keep learning and moving forward so you need to plan for that how are you gonna take care of yourself mentally and physically right so how are you going to avoid that the catastrophic temptations for example of drugs and alcohol because that pulls a lot of people down you need a plan for that you're gonna be a social drinker how much are you gonna drink how much is too much what about your drug use you gotta regulate that so it isn't a pitfall how are you going to use your time meaningful and productively outside of work you need plan for that so that's there's one other that yeah I think there are seven initial questions and I don't I don't remember the last one oh intimate relationship of course so you have do you want do you want a long-term stable intimate relationship and if you do then how would you like that to lay itself out you gotta have a vision for that because if you don't have a vision you're not gonna aim at it and if you don't aim at it then you won't even see the opportunities when they arise that's the thing that's so cool I wrote about this in chapter 10 which is be precise in your speech it's a chapter about the fact that aims structure your perceptions so for example once you aim at something your brain literally that perceptual structures in your brain in your visual cortex reorient themselves to calculate a pathway to the aim and then what they show you in the world is obstacles to that path and and open pathways to the path that's actually how the world reveals itself just like just like when you're driving in a car and you have a map and you or you aim at a particular place then all the things that are related to that place show up in the world it's exactly the same thing because you are traveling through time and space right and you need a map and so so after you answer these seven questions and you're encouraged to do it badly because you don't have to get a reaction is to just complete it right because a bad plan is better than no plan gives you something to improve so even if your a-game is vague and even if it's off target if you start aiming you see your off target then you can shift and you can make it more precise start to recognize what you don't want in that yes exactly so I thought I wanted this but I don't so let me read navigate and figure out what I do exactly and you might have to try a bunch of you know well you will have to you can be that's why you shouldn't get perfection this thing about it you will absolutely be wrong but you won't be as wrong as you would have been if you were aimless right right so it's a so there's a bit of no man's land no man's land is no worse than the old man's room is a bit worse than a bad path yeah that's exactly right like that's that's good that's a good one and it's right it's right you don't want to be in no-man's land why did you use that phrase because that's right that's exactly right I think um for me the idea of walking around aimlessly is like the worst idea in the world it's like zero purpose zero mission zero certainty at all it's like walking around in no-man's land right aimlessly but it's funny too because in no-man's land everybody shooting at you all right cuz that's a military term a no-man's land is the space in the middle when everyone's vicious you bet so if you're aimless you're also the place where everything is shooting at you yeah so it's a very good metaphor that came to mind yeah well that's why I worked on it that's very very cool so then we say to people okay look now okay now you've thought about this for a while it's nice to do this over a couple of days too because then you get to sleep on it and that helps reorient yourself so then okay now you write for 20 minutes don't worry about grammar or spelling this isn't a this isn't a composition exercise right you get to have what you want three to five years down the road what does your life look like hypothetically write it up okay so then that's the first part the second part of the exercise so now you've got your thing day mat think well I'm motivated because I got my thing to aim at it's like you're not as motivated as you could be because you don't yet have you think to run away from because if you really want to be motivated you want to be going somewhere and you want to be not going somewhere else which typically is a pain pain or anxiety yet some some domain of suffering and guilt legs don't want to feel this anymore yes exactly exactly so so the other thing we ask people is okay now take stock of your weaknesses and imagine that you let them multiply you got hopeless and you auger it in and things is bad for you as they could be in three to five years what are some examples of weaknesses that people might have they lie they procrastinate yeah they avoid their grandiose their narcissistic their undisciplined their nihilistic their aimless all of those things right victim mentality they take this they take the the quick way out they pursue impulsive pleasures they sacrifice meaning for expediency they don't take care of their basic responsibilities they fight stupidly with their parents they don't they don't negotiate properly with their spouse they're bitter at work because they haven't said what they have to say they haven't thought through what they're doing tomorrow they drink too much they smoke too much they take too many drugs they don't regulate their yeah just like everyone knows what it knows and everyone's got a set of weaknesses that they know about and so we say all right what are some of your weaknesses it like three weaknesses that you know right now you can still work on and then three things that you think are really well a lot of things a lot of things are things that I've taken care of in my life like I used to smoke when I was a kid I smoked a pack a day I used to drink a lot I didn't work out like there there there I wasn't nearly as disciplined as I should have been I wasn't just careful with what I was saying like and I suppose loose my most likely negative outcome probably would have been I really like to drink like alcohol was a really good drug for me Isis on that um well partly it was mostly because the opportunity came up for me to investigate drug and alcohol use but I came from a little town in northern Alberta it was a heavy drinking town and and that could have been a real trap for me right you know and and and so anyway so we have these people say okay now you know your weaknesses and you know what particular hell you would descend to if you allowed yourself to descend into it because you've probably had a taste of it it's like you really let that go and you're in a terrible place in three to five years because you haven't done what you should do what does that look like it's like write it down so you know because one of the things you want to have behind you let's say I have to do something difficult like go confront your boss it's like well maybe hope isn't enough to encourage you to do that you think well no if I don't encourage if I don't go confront my boss carefully right then I'm gonna hate my job and then I'm gonna drink more then I'm gonna end up in that little hell place that I designed for myself it's like oh I'm not going there well I don't want to talk to my boss or I don't want to confront my wife or my husband whatever it is or my father or my children for that matter but if I don't then I'll resent myself forever then at this time you end up going down this terrible pathway it's like because sometimes when you're moving forward you have to do something difficult you might think well why bother and the answer is well so I don't end up in hell yeah about that oh yeah oh yeah there's that because it's so deep if you don't experience the pain now or the difficulty now you're gonna have a deeper pain later yeah yeah that's life much deeper pain yeah yeah and that's why I think that you mentioned at one point is like putting ourselves in structured pain like structured sense of feeling pain throughout the day whether it be the tough conversation I don't want to do that it's painful but I'm going to because I know afterwards it's gonna probably feel better it's bit of a sacrifice right sacrifice stability in the present for a gain in the future that's the big discovery of human beings and we're gonna face works were you a big athlete growing up no no I was a lot of small kids get my grade although I skied and I went cross-country skiing and it's individual sports mostly with my dad you understand that in order to improve as an athlete or in any sport you have to put yourself through daily pain yeah right if you want to achieve that model of excellence that you watch someone playing basketball as a child and you see someone living this model it's gonna be 15 years of deliberate pain yeah that's a discipline that's it yeah well I worked out for a long time with weights you know what so you know ya dealt it every day yeah I didn't want to push through the pain but yeah you knew that would get you a greater result yeah well then it's easier not to do it than to do it but not in the long run yeah exactly you know I really seen the benefits for example for weightlifting because I've watched people because I'm fifty eight fifty how old am i 56 the great no I'm soon as I'm getting older and I really noticed the difference between people and when they aged between people who laid down a good physiological platform when they were young and those who didn't because by that if you haven't worked out weights particularly say you start to get pretty soft in your 30s and your cardiovascular system starts to go and really early the other thing too is the best thing you can do to maintain cognitive ability isn't to do exercises like Lumosity it's not brain exercises that keep you sharp it's exercise so if you're 50 both cardiovascular have weight lifting if you're 50 you can restore your cognitive function to the level of the 30 year old through exercise your mental function hmm through physical eyes yeah well your brain is a very demanding organ and if your cardiovascular system is compromised then you get stupid and so yeah it's really cool because as you move and the bigger you get the more stupid you become yeah well you compromise you compromise its function because the brain is a it's a it's it's the organ that uses more it's very metabolically demanding and so if you're not in good physical shape then one of the things that suffers most greatly is your cognitive function and so that's quite an interesting thing to see how tight that linkage is so in the next part of the program we have people now it's okay now you got your vision yeah even if it's a bad one it's yeah that's right what's better than no vision at all right some know maybe you could improve well think you're trying to get through a territory you don't understand and here's your option no map a map that's not so good but has some things about it or a great map well obviously the great map is the thing you want but the the map that something is way better than the map that's nothing Plus as you explore because of your map you could start to fill in the details you start to learn you start to overcome stuff you learn to master skills no journey right hmm yeah well that's the other thing too is like let's say you you aim at something and you and you develop some skills along the way and then you get like a third of the way there and you think oh that's not for me it's like well yeah fair enough but now you've still got the skills you developed you know exactly why it's not for you now instead of vague you don't the kid going after those exactly exactly well and you have a rationale and then you can bring that wisdom back even though it's not perfect you can bring it back to your next plan and so and take responsibility yes the next step yes yes and so as you plan you get better at planning which is the crucial thing so so then we say to people take your positive vision and make it into eight stainable goals right so and then rank them in a hierarchy because you need to know what like a top goal and and incremental goals yeah and and that well that's the other thing is break the goals into incremental goals so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding so because what you want to do this is also what you want to do with the kid you don't tell your kid here is an impossible thing why don't you go out and fail you say here's something worth going after here's a step you could take that would push you beyond where you are but that you also have a reasonably high probability of succeeding at right they called that within a time frame if then some time frame that's the other thing you have to parameterize it with regards to time frame that's right and that puts you in the zone of proximal development and that says that's a concept that was generated by a guy named Vygotsky he was a Russian developmental psychologist and the smart one it's where the idea of the zone comes from to be in the zone and when you're in the zone you're expanding your skills in a manner that's intrinsically rewarding because you're succeeding and so you want to set if you're good to yourself you think okay I need to set a goal but I need to set a goal that someone is stupid and useless as me could probably attain if they put some effort into it and then you got then you've got it perfectly because it's not so high that it's grandiose or impossible that you fail necessarily and then justify your bitterness it's like well I couldn't do it well because that happens to Pete how much all the time yeah it's like this all the time you know it's like it's yes exactly well I set a goal and I didn't attain it so I'm not gonna set any more goal right it's like no you set a goal that was inappropriate for the time frame that's right you didn't calibrate it properly and and you're playing a trick on yourself because you wanted to fail so that you could justify not having to try that's why being a victim mmm yeah which isn't in helpful you're still gonna be a victim right there's no way out of that so you know because life is this life is a challenge that in some sense can't be surmounted so there's no way out of your problem but there are certainly proper ways of dealing with it and so you lay out eight those eight steps yeah lay them out and then the next thing is okay you need a rationale for them because you're gonna have doubts and other good of people are gonna put up obstacles a rational means I mean yeah yeah justification yeah it's like okay so here what sort of justification is a good justification for your goals it's easy why would it be good for you okay why would it be good for your family if you attain that goal why would it be good for the broader community because if it's a good goal it should be good for you that's fine but if it's a really good goal it should be good for you in a way that's good for other people in a way yes exactly and you went if you're gonna decide what your goals are why not set up the ones that benefit the largest number of people simultaneously yes if you can do that you should start with your own concerns cuz you have to take care of yourselves in these first yes put your own oxygen mask on then put your child's oxygen mask on yeah right and then you can as you as you build up a the basis of competence locally you might develop enough skills so that you can expand that outward and it also gives your goal a certain amount of nobility and so if someone challenges you and says well why are you doing that that seems stupid you could say I'm doing that because it helps me take care of myself but it benefits my family and here's the reasons why and this is the repercussions out into the broader community and like people aren't people who are putting up objections and doubts aren't aren't armed to deal with that kind of response and then when you have those doubts in your mind that plague you which they and go back to your reason go back your reasons you slide that's right say why am I doing this oh yeah it's because well I have to take care of myself because otherwise I'm pathetic and useless and hitter and cruel and then and I'm going somewhere terrible so that's a bad idea and here's how it would help my family and here's how it would help the community and that's good enough set of reasons for it unless I can think of better ones without better ones that's good enough because I think the question comes back to after you know someone can go down the rabbit hole and say why why am I doing this and why is this you know meaningful for me and I think a lot of people go back to what why am I here in the first yes yes why am I here hmm what is the meaning of my life and is this real or is this just some dream world well in that people do go back to that and then they get stuck on that yeah what none of this even matters because why am I even here well the thing is is that that's a self-defeating set of propositions in some sense because the consequence of being stuck there is no reason you stuck there to begin which is because you're not very happy about the fact that life is intrinsically tied up with suffering because you wouldn't be asking that question to begin with okay so if you let that pull you in and take you down all it does is make the suffering worse it's not helpful and then and then the cascade that we talked about happens you suffer stupidly and pointless in her you get bitter give curl yeah you make everything worse it's like that's your answer is it you're gonna make everything worse it's bad enough you're gonna make it worse mostly people won't do that consciously yes so you think well what's the alternative well here's one if you have a sufficiently noble purpose the suffering will justify itself and I think I think that's empirically testable and I do believe it's the case because I've watched people do very difficult things like people who work in palliative care wards so all they're ever dealing with is pain and death right and they can do it I get up in the morning they go to work and they take care of those people they lose people on a weekly basis and yet they can do it and what that shows is that if you turn around and you confront the suffering voluntarily you find out that you are way tougher than you think it's not that life is better than you think life is as harsh as you think it might even be worse but you are way tougher than you think if you turn around and confront it and so then what you discover is that there's a spirit within you that pursues something that can pursue something meaningful that has the resilience and the strength to contend properly with the catastrophe of existence without becoming bitter that's actually the central so and then I would say that's one of the central themes of the 12 rules for life is that make no mistake about it like the first noble truth of Buddhism life is suffering this is true and it's worse than that because it's suffering contaminated by malevolence that's the baseline but and so that's very pessimistic but the optimistic part is that you are so damn tough you can actually not only deal with that you can improve it it's like oh well that's a horrible situation but it turns out that I'm armed for the task well that's that's a great thing for people to know and I do believe I think the fact that we're armed for the task is even more true than the fact that life is Rafik contaminated by malevolence we're stronger than things are terrible so and things are pretty terrible so that means we're pretty damn strong Wow yes it's a very good thing to know and it's not naive optimism it's a very different thing it's like no things are terrible they're brutal and you are so damn tough you can't believe it so wow what's what's been the biggest challenge in your life that you've had to overcome or the biggest suffering that took me the longest to get beyond to improve you having them bring you down is not helping the person it has the problem it's the same with with my daughter it's like had my wife and I deteriorated as a consequence of her condition a that would have been horrible for her because then she would have had to bear the weight of watching her illness destroy her family right which have that guilt oh Christ yes I mean that's one of the terrible things about having a a very bad illness is that not only does it do you in but you can see it taking its toll on the people around you I think that might even be worse welcome everyone back to the school of greenness podcast we've got the legendary Jordan Peterson in the house good to see you sir good to see you very excited about this you've got a book out called twelve rules for life make sure you guys check this out you've probably already got it but if you don't I'm telling you to go pick it up right now an antidote to chaos what's been the biggest challenge in your life that you've had to overcome or the biggest suffering that took me the longest to get beyond to improve oh I think that was probably I wrote about this in the last chapter in my book which is called pedicab when you encounter one in the street and it's about it's about dealing with you know you think what's the worst thing that can happen to you well I think the worst thing is that you do something really horrible and you screw up your life and everyone's life around you that's that just live with it yes yes so you have to live with knowing you did it it's like that's rough man that's it worse than dying yes and then you don't remember there are worse things dying yeah but I think the the hardest existential situation that I've been in is the situation with my daughter because she was very very ill and she had rheumatoid arthritis she had arthritis it wasn't rheumatoid type and she had 40 affected joints that has started to bother her when she was 2 but really manifested itself fully when she was 6 and some of the medical treatment helped but when she was 15 14 14 through 16 first her hip disintegrated and then her and so she had that replaced after walking around on it for like a good year and then her ankle disintegrated on her other foot and she had to have it replaced and so there were two years of absolutely brutal pain for her like brutal daily excruciating pain and and we were really running around trying to figure out what to do about it because the hip wasn't too hard to replace you know because surgeons are actually pretty good at hip replacements but ankles are still so many balls touching oh yeah yeah and so and just watching that and and and while watching what it was doing to her because she was in enough pain at one point just about broker you know and I mean you know you and I you have a situation where you were in pain for a night and couldn't sleep it's like yeah fine so multiply that by five and extended over two years Jesus Christ yeah and she was on like huge doses of opiates and so that was sedating her and so that made her look drunk in public and she can only stay awake for about six hours a day and she had to take ritalin to stay awake because otherwise she was just sleeping all the time and and it was a very bad autoimmune condition and so wasn't only manifest in in the joint deterioration and the pain because arthritis is also very painful and forty joints happens to be quite a loss so one joint was brutal yeah right no it was absolutely brutal beyond belief as a father or a parent how do you navigate that emotionally yourself yeah well that's what that chapters about I mean so were there so what do you do when when things are too much well one of the answers is you narrow your timeframe and the other answer is you look for occasions of grace and beauty where you can get them so when she had a dog that really helped yeah you know so that was something that was with her all the time and we tried to put things in her life that that she could care for she had a whole raft of pets although she was allergic to almost everything so most of them were lizards oh yeah I know what people say guinea pigs like oh I love this kitty Vegas okay and then you know three hours later she'd have a big role like Harry's dogs right so the dog luckily the dog she could tolerate and so we had the dog for her and but what are one of the things you do when you're in the situation like that it's just a bloody ongoing nightmare is that you you shrink your timeframe it's like well what are we gonna do in a year it's like oh god you can't even think about that it's about six months yeah a week tomorrow today the next hour yeah so that's what you're really doing great you shrink your timeframe till you can tolerate it so you're not planning out year yes because then you'll go crazy yeah it's too much uncertainty yeah you think okay how can I make the next hour the least amount of awful possible that's what you do at someone's deathbed no you shrink your timeframe and that and that's what you have to do how does that play into the self authoring program if you have this vision for yourself and you're mapping out a year to three five years ahead yeah well sometimes you know we navigate yeah that's right you have to read navigate you have to say no better than that yeah because even the best laid plans of mice and men go astray you know I mean that's part of being alive and so you have your mouth but you know if you get a flat tire along the way is to have to stop and fix your car or maybe the bloody thing bursts into flames you have to get in there you know so I mean your your your ascent towards your goals can be punctuated by unexpected catastrophe and then well then hopefully you've made yourself into a resilient person at that point and the catastrophe is no worse than it has to be and you're not making it worse I mean one of the things we were fortunate about is that by the time she got really ill my my relationship with my wife was pretty well put together and my relationship with my son my who's younger than her was also well put together and so he was an absolute trooper man because most of her a lot of his teenage life in particular there was a huge amount of focus on the suffering of his sister and we were like right up to here with that it was just it was enough and he conducted himself admirably he didn't if he cause trouble we didn't know about it he kept it to himself you know and I don't mean he was hiding I mean he dealt with it and he spent a lot of time at home and he didn't do any unnecessary stupid things and he put up with his sister and his parents who were on an jallat without adding a dish you know catastrophe and misery and grief to it and when she was a little bit crazy and was leaning on him too hard or bothering him he was there to support her and it was massively helpful and you know I wasn't any more my wife and I were any more crazy towards each other than we had to be and so there wasn't like any additional stress during those periods of time cos yeah any extra would have been like that's right that's right how are you able to compartmentalize or just focus on your your career at that time you know lecturing or writing or whatever maybe it well that's also part of the vision of Hell it's like well what's the alternative you let things go and you make them worse it's like not showing up and yeah just know there's no excuse for that it's like how did you how did you say was it a compartmentalizing of like okay it's 9 o'clock or 8 o'clock in the morning I'm going to work yeah and then yeah well we made rules and we talked about some of them like some of the rules were we didn't talk about my daughter daughter's illness after 8 o'clock at night that was the rule it's like no sanity well we it's it's a war you wear yourself out in a week you're dead and everyone suffers a lot so you got to keep going through however long this is going to be and so what yeah what do you have to do well you have to sleep you have to sleep it's time to stop talking and go to sleep yeah yeah well and I had learned some of that because I've been a clinical psychologist for a long time and so I've been dealing with people's problems and you learned how to you know you think well how can you go home when when you have all of those problems to contend with it's like well eh they're not your problems they're not going away right no and they're not going away and and having them bring you down is not helping the person who has the problem it's the same with with my daughter it's like had my wife and I deteriorated as a consequence of her condition a that would have been horrible for her because then she would have had to bear the weight of watching her illness destroy her family right which have that guilt oh Christ yes I mean that's one of the terrible things about having a very bad illness is that not only does it do you in but you can see it taking its toll on the people around you I think that might even be worse I mean this is gradations of Hell but still that's so you also can't allowed that to happen if you have a loved person around you and they're ill you have a moral obligation not to let it tear you down because then it's on them that's no good and you think well how can you remain healthy and strong in the face of the terrible suffering of someone who's close to you it's like well you want well that's it the alternative is worse you want me to get saved and get a read and not be able to take care of you or me right and then we when we both surround faster right not helpful what about did she ever go through a play server I guess I guess some people do this where you know kids who have some type of autoimmune or some type of disease or whatever maybe they didn't necessarily you know they were born with it or aren't happy you know somehow it's not like they ate something themselves they weren't necessarily response and himse right I mean yeah was she responsible for causing all these you know all the pain in her body or was it just something that happened well that's what we told her is just well this life kid is a lot it's not you we also told her very very many many times and we're very careful about this do not use your illness as an excuse as soon as you do that you can't tell the difference between the illness and your character that's right so don't let it turn you into a victim even though it's good obviously it's a catastrophe like we were very clear about that and that wasn't her fault you know but that she still had to bear up under it as well as possible and to do everything she could and not use it as an excuse and we talked to her about that a lot and we're clear about it because and I've seen this is one of the things I really just like about what the universities are doing with disability it's like everybody gets a disability it's like well no wonder because people have hard lives you know it's like it's very rare to find someone who isn't suffering under an undue load of some sort there's something wrong with or there's something wrong in their family that's serious or they have terrible economic pressure like there's something wrong it's like okay we should make allowances for you it's like oh yeah what allowances what exactly does that entitle me to well I tell you man that's a murky place you do not want to go because then you don't know anymore it's like well what's my responsibility I mean I have this undue burden to bear well how does that mitigate my responsibility well the answer is as little as possible you don't go there because you get confused and and as soon as you get confused well then the illness has not only got you physiologically it's got you psychologically and then you're in deep trouble and so we were also very very clear and to her great credit as far as I can tell like I wouldn't say she never used her illness as an excuse because never is a lot you know or never is an extreme but she certainly withstood the temptation to do it habitually and to warp her character as a consequence and she did figure out what was wrong with her and fixed it and so now she doesn't have any of these she's healthy now while she still has some residual damage from from everything that happened like I just found out yesterday she went to Chicago to have her ankle checked out because it isn't working very well and they told her that she had to have the old replacement taken out and a new one put in so but but in her realm of catastrophe that actually constitutes nor news that's not as bad as it could be right so strangely enough so it's not like she's out of the woods but so you taught her from an early age that I'm sorry to cut you off no no no Platt even though she had a you know let's just for this state of the conversation a physical disability right she wasn't as able-bodied physically as the majority of people who was that clear to say that you told her like never allow that to give you special privileges well never allow that to be never know it wasn't that exactly it was never used that as an excuse to not do something you could do even without stir things yes because it's the there's a deception element there it's like well I don't want to do that and I have this illness and then I get away that's right I don't use your illness as a means of getting away with something yeah because you'll blur the line then you'll saucily use that the rest your life right and if you do that a hundred times you'll be so confused about what's illness and what's and what's not that you'll not know you won't know anymore and maybe you won't be able to figure it out again and then you're in a very bad place you know there was some things that she had to have done that were allowances like when she was doing exams she had to type because she couldn't write was writing you know and she couldn't sit on the floor cross-legged so she had to sit in a chair like things that she actually couldn't do but she still did it work yes she did I can't take the test yeah I can't do the exam at all yeah but she was able to do it with different circuits yes right right right and so and and the consequence of that was that once she she figured out that most of what was causing her what was bothering her all of it by the looks of it was a consequence of it a set of extreme sensitivities to almost every sort of food so she hardly eats anything now see only thing she eats is beef that's it beef salt water that's it nothing else that's it yeah that's it and she's been eating that way for well mostly for about three years but almost completely for a year and she feels fine she's a hundred percent she has no symptoms no vegetables no supplements that's it beef salt I'm serious she'll never cheats Wow never because she doesn't to feel pain and suffering yes well it takes it if she if she eats the wrong thing she has a terrible rut catastrophic emotional and physical reaction for a month Wow this actually limited all food and try one thing at a time yes yes yes and took about three years to figure out so yes Wow is right I can't it's absolutely beyond comprehension it's a diet that I follow almost almost entirely now just beef salted water yes I've been eating that way for about three months and I've been on an extremely little carb diet for about two two and a half years something like that so because I both my wife and I have autoimmune symptoms yeah and she got all of them your daughter yes she got all smacks behind by a yes that's right so and so but when she sorted out what was wrong she convinced me to also try what she was doing and it's being extraordinarily helped really need to yeah so you know who would who would have guessed it so anyway so what you do when when things are too much for you is you you narrow your timeframe I also an ruled in Chapter 12 you know what there's a there's a fair bit of discussion in there about fragility and vulnerability which is really what you confront when you have a sick kid it's like oh my god how can the world be constituted so that a child can unfairly suffer in this manner it's like okay here's a way of thinking about it all right take away everything from your child that makes them fall let's say I have a three-year-old it's like well three-year-olds they're kind of cute they run around their their little in there and they're vulnerable obviously but that makes them cute and attractive and and and and lovable all of the vulnerability that's built into that so you think well you move remove that one by one well they're 8 foot tall now and they're made out of steel and their parts are replaceable and they have artificially intelligent brain like you replace them obviously this is hypothetical with a with a superhuman robot that doesn't die it's like you fine but where's the three-year-old right so one of the things I thought about when I was writing this was you know when you love someone especially well when you love someone you love them not only despite their fragility but also because of it and so then that's the price you pay for it it's like well you wouldn't they wouldn't be who they were if they weren't they wouldn't be who they were if they weren't fragile and limited in their particular way and the fact you like to have them around you think oh well that I mean I guess you think that that fragility and vulnerability is justifiable it's like well then you can't allow that it's resistant to make you bitter because you can't have it both ways you can't have them being vulnerable and cute and and interesting and and small and and and needing care but striving to to to develop and grow you can't have that without them also being prone to pain and destruction and vulnerability and so yeah take your choice and then what do you do teach them to be strong that's what you do you don't get rid of the vulnerability you teach them to be strong yeah so and that's that that's also a theme that runs through the book and in many many ways is that's you don't protect your children in fact you do you do the opposite you expose them to the world as much as you possibly can and you make them strong that's the best antidote to their vulnerability not to protect them there's no protecting people we already established that life's a fatal game there's no protecting people but you can definitely make them strong and maybe you can make them strong enough to transcend that that's the goal man so is there anything that you wish you would have done differently with your daughter or son that you didn't do not have any Greek not have any great significance I mean I I have I have wishes I suppose from time to time that things could have been different I I spent less time on the positive aspects of my son and my daughter because we were contending with catastrophe so frequently and so you know my both my kids have a variety of interesting talents and it would have been better perhaps to have had the time to develop those more thoroughly but you know and my son well he I wouldn't say he didn't get as much attention as he needed he didn't get as much attention as I would have liked to have paid him mm-hmm but by the same token it isn't obvious that it's being bad for him because it required him from a very early age to grow the hell up and we relied on him right from the time he was a young kid to make intelligent decisions we assumed he would make intelligent decisions he was consulted with regards to decisions and so and it also made him into someone who is who is very self-sufficient and capable of taking care of himself so it might have be nicer for me I suppose to have spent more time with him but but he lives down the street from me now and I spend time with him and we have a great relationship and so it's just it's you know and as he has a very good relationship with his sister and so it turned out as well as it could have right so but that didn't mean that those years in there they were brutal there was some brutal times madness but one night in particular like she was in absolutely absolute agony and I couldn't get it under control and I could see well because I am a clinician I could see I thought god damn it I'm gonna ender end up taking her to CAMH that's the psychiatric hospital cuz it looks like it's gonna break her really god damn it I couldn't see a way to to resolve it but it pushed her right to the brink but but not over so and there was another episode after after she have removed have hip replaced she was put in a rehab home hospital for a while and she was the youngest person in it by like 60 years and they treated her terribly it was a terrible place mean mean blind nurses and very very badly run and they traumatized her the hospital was a worse experience than the damn surgery and so that that was that took her quite a while to recover from but she did recover from it do you ever think now you know since your clinical kind of clinical psychologist and you've done all this research and work and studies do you believe that your daughter was meant to experience this for you to kind of test your ability to be with her and do you think she would have been able to grow in the way she is now as someone who didn't have the practice that you had well I think it was fortunate for all of us that well my wife too like my wife had worked in palliative care as a volunteer and she was a massage therapist for a long time she's very good at and my wife has it real she's a really tough person and if you don't need help and you want it she'll cut you into ribbons but if you need help she will really help you yeah so she's really good at differentiating between people who actually need help in which case she is right there and people who could stand up on their own and if you can't stand up on your own and you could if you could stand up on your own end you aren't you don't want to be around her because she will she will put you in your place and it was so funny because our kids used to bring their friends over all the time when they were teenagers which we actually quite liked and what we had rule for the teenagers which was we're really happy you're here but if you do something stupid and you never get to come back that's actually okay with us right so they knew that and it was no joke because we were happy they were there and they were welcome but we were perfectly happy to dispense with them if they misbehaved forever and so but what was really funny was that the kids would come over the teenagers would come over and they were pretty afraid of me to begin with but after being around for a couple of weeks they were way more afraid of my wife yes that was very funny yeah because she's you know she's some quite a pleasant person and she's not it she's only five foot two so she but although she's you know she's imposing enough because she's also in good physical shape but it was because I'm actually kind of soft-hearted and she's not soft-hearted although she can really take care of people who need to be taken care of so no so I think you know Mikayla had a fortunate fortunate circumstance in that sense because both of us had a lot of experience dealing with catastrophe and so when it came along we weren't we were overwhelmed by it what but it wasn't because we didn't know what we were doing we knew what we were doing it was just even though we didn't know what we were doing as much as might be possible that doesn't mean that we could deal with it because it was well it took us it took us what must have been seven or eight months to arrange the ankle surgery and there was a waiting list in Canada at that point of I think three years actually they wanted to fuse her foot which is a really bad thing for them for someone young and so we looked at India we looked in we looked all over the world for ankle surgery like really everywhere and finally the government in Canada was actually quite helpful we found a private clinic in Vancouver that did the surgery and the and and the Ministry of Health and Ontario was quite helpful to us at that point but we are scrambling to well what what should we do should we ever drink'll replacement what sort of replacement who do we talk to well what about this waiting list three years like no man I can't we got was a week oh yeah that's three years that was just beyond did you ever doubt yourself in terms of your ability and your research and your studies did you ever say to yourself like man if I can't you know figure this out then all of my work is for nothing well no I never thought it was for nothing but I certainly I certainly doubted whether or not we were going to be able to figure out figure this out Lee yeah one of you cuz you thought you know you know and at that time you're extremely educated research you know you see a lot did you did that give you a fear of like well if I can't figure this out then knowing of course of course well her her prognosis was multiple early joint replacements and and that was like that was the good news because the bad news is well how many and and how many can you stand and and when does that kill you like you know so her real prognosis was plenty of pain with an early death you know because well even now even now you know like the surgeon who talked to her yesterday said well because he talked to her about the risk of amputation in the future it's like well this is the second joint revision it's like maybe this would last 15 years we don't know what the hell is going to happen now well so our response to that is that's 15 years from now it's like who knows the other than well things are better now for how people understand how to replace an ankle then they were I think it was 10 years ago that she had this one replaced and it helped it wasn't perfect her hip is perfect the ankle has always been trouble but way less trouble than it was and so well you struggle forward the best you can and so I suppose she could adapt to an amputation if that was necessary but at the moment it isn't necessary but multiple amputations is not something to really be looking forward to when you're 16 you know when they were gonna put her on corticosteroids to control her her her inflammation and that would have produced Cushing's disease and so that makes your face all puffy and it makes you gain weight and so it's very physically disfiguring so we decided not to go down that route and Wow yeah well but you know it's it's worked out thank God it's quite the miracle and she had a baby a year ago and we were never sure that was going to happen so grass thank you yes yes that's for sure so now we have this respite where she's healthy and the last time I saw her she was looking great like she's just glowing she's so healthy I can't believe it it's just beyond belief Congrats on all the hard work you've done to make a make it a possibility yeah well we avoided the worst excesses of hell during the catastrophe so that's something and it did allow her the space to figure out and my wife and always thought that diet had a relationship to it and we investigated that like there's a good literature that shows if you have arthritic symptoms and you stop eating if you fast they go away so that's interesting it's like well food must be causing it yeah but once you start to eat again to survive what you eat it comes back it turns out no not no matter what almost no matter what because she's sensitive to virtually everything but she isn't sensitive to meat and so it turns out that if you eat meat you can live so that's a big difference between being sensitive to everything and not being sensitive to one thing yeah and so so it's it's harsh diet it's made travelling difficult although I can eat in restaurants because most restaurants can cook a steak with nothing on it and that's made things much easier while I'm traveling but whatever whatever it's working so thank God for that amazing do you believe do you think hypothetically if your daughter was healthy and never had any complications that you would be the man you are impacting people that the success you know the attention you beginning do you think you'd have as much when we've written the twelfth chapter riots for sure do you think in general you would still be able to have the ideals the belief the fortwo that you have to reach people and really impact yeah I think so but I I know what you're know what you're saying you know your question is well to what degree is adversity character building and the answer to that is plenty but I was already like I said and it was the same with my wife we weren't naive people you know I'm not because I had an extensive clinical practice I was dealing with with heavy level adversity always hours a week your daughter no no but there were you know there were other problems in my family and so forth that I dealt with as well and so we were already we'd already I think garnered most of what we could from confronting adverse situations you know now did that add a different level to it it probably probably fire tested our relationship our familial it probably brought our family closer together all things considered I saw the same thing happen when my wife's mother died died she died of pre-frontal dementia and she developed it quite young about it started to really manifest itself in her early 50s and she died when she was 70 and she fell apart over you know 18 years and she was very physically healthy and her husband who was quite the man about town when he was a young guy real extrovert he was a real character in our home town he took care of her so well it was absolutely jaw-dropping man every time she slipped he'd step up to the plate and he he took care of her until he couldn't lift her out of her chair anymore and he was getting old too and so she wasn't in an old-age home for very long and then we were around when she died you know over the couple of days just before her death and her family her sister's a palliative care nurse her other sisters a pharmacist and Tammy's had the experiences that already described and then her father really stepped up to the plate so the whole family gathered around for that and they acted impeccably throughout it I would say they took care of their mother very carefully while she was dying and they pulled together and one of the consequences of that which was so interesting is that although their mother died and that was a terrible loss there Barnes that connected them all of them strengthened to the point where I would say that was almost compensation for the loss of their mother so that was really interesting to see what happens even in a dire circumstance if people do do what they can't no I'm not saying that that's gonna work for every situation because I know people get cut off at the knees and sometimes you hit a tragedy that well that's fatal you know that you cannot rectify it's a real catastrophe but it was very interesting watching that because they were alert and awake around the deathbed and they weren't fighting with each other at all there was no familial squabbling because you can imagine that that would happen because everyone's stressed and then you can just imagine how terrible that would make something that's already awful there was none of that they focused their attention on her you know they gave her water when she needed it and they watched her and they made they made this terrible thing the least amount of awful it could be and it definitely pulled them together like they're that whole family including me is closer because of what they went through and also how they went through it and it's probably the case well I would say it definitely advanced the maturity of my son because he was called and I told him look kid like you can't add anything to this we're up to here you have to conduct yourself properly because otherwise everything's going to shake and fall we can't have more of this you can't bring any and anything unnecessary into this and it was an all-star it was it was remarkable Shannon and he who is only in grade 10 when most most of this happened and your friends are pretty damn important when you're in grade 10 and he's stuck around a lot to be helpful so yeah it was really good for him man yeah well he yeah he's a good character he's he's he's quite quite something and it was very helpful he was very helpful to his sister they had their fights obviously Lawrence she was often unreasonable and nobody you know rod when you're strung out and you get a view of anything but pain yeah god she went through so much like even watching her withdraw from the opiates because she was on them for a year and a half but she just quit well as soon as she was done her sir just like I'm not taking these anymore and she had formication which is the sensation of ants crawling on you like a month god she just just sailed through it's like I'm done with these yeah yeah you guys have been through a lot yeah a lot yes your what's your biggest fear now moving forward in your in your own life Oh making a mistake at the moment because I got beam I've been the subject of so much public attention in the last two years and like I've been in this situation where well even things I didn't say have also almost been fatal because people take them out of context right you know but I'm my biggest fear has been that I do something careless and and that there are like serious cascading consequences to you like you've done something careless or well everyone's done something careless right you know but I've been pretty careful I mean I was fortunate so when this political scandal blew up around me and in Canada when I opposed some legislation that I thought was reprehensibly constructed you know the the the radicals on the left in particular came after me hard and but I was fortunate because you know they called me every name under the book and went after my character and you know I suppose there was some degree of that was understandable to some degree because if you stand up against something if you stand up against the radical right well maybe your communist might no probably not because you don't have to be a communist to not like the radical right but if you stand up against the radical left or maybe you're a Nazi well probably not but you might be and so it's certainly in the interest of the people who are proponents of the philosophy of the radical left to assume that you're a Nazi because then they don't have to deal with you and so that's what happens you throw yourself into the fray people try to localize you and they do that by saying well maybe you're this may be this may be this may be or this it's like well yeah maybe not to and but I already had 250 hours of lectures up on YouTube at that point so people could actually go and see what I had said because virtually every word I'd ever said to students in a professional capacity not not every word because I didn't tape every lecture sure but I taped multiple years of lectures and so people went over those with a fine-tooth comb trying to find out if there's anything I'd ever said that was and they couldn't find anything and that was because I'd be very careful with what I say ever since I was about 25 I started paying attention to what I was saying and not and trying very hard not to say things that I would trying not try very hard not to say things that something in me objected to so and well that seems to have been provided me with a buffer and so people came to my website because they were interested in well before the political stuff blew up I had a million views on YouTube which isn't nothing a million of anything is a lot but then when the political scandal started to break yeah then people came for them but stayed for the content and so and that's really useful yeah well it's well and it's not that surprising well you know because of what you do it's like people there's a great hunger for information that is practical and useful and that helps people find meaning in their lives and orient themselves there's a great hunger for that and most of my lectures were derived from solid psychology some of it experimental some of the biological some of it from from from the domains of neuroscience a lot of it from great clinicians it's not surprising that people find it helpful because well great clinicians were great because they were really helpful and so to distill that and to offer it to people in a digestible form to have that have a good effect on them well that's that's what you'd expect that's what the whole discipline is about and so that's been that's been great these these public lectures that I've been doing so I think I've done 50 of them in about 45 different cities now in about three months and the average theater size is between 2,500 and 3,000 people and they're unbelievably positive events because people come there and we talk mostly about the political spectrum and why there's room for voices on the left and why there's room for voices on the right and where the parameters of that should be because both of those can descend into extremism and that's not good and the role of individual responsibility and individual sovereignty and the necessity for people to develop a vision the sorts of things that we already talked about and virtually every one that's coming there they're not coming for political reasons even though that's the story you hear from the more ideologically possessed journalist types because they see the world that way they can't imagine anything else could possibly be happening but the people who are coming to these lectures are coming because they are doing everything they possibly can to make their lives better so and so and it's lovely to talk to people like that because mazing it is it's great it's literally great school greatness baby right exactly I've got six minutes to be mindful of your time in your schedule and I won't ask you three Falana o'clock okay so if that's okay yeah you bet so as much as I would love for you to go on for another few hours on these answers so I can get to the last question I'll do my dance my brief I wish I could go on longer so what to have you come back next time here in LA the first one is what is your purpose now moving forward and through everything you've had in your life what's your purpose moving forward well I have I'm specific I'm I'm what's my purpose what am i aiming at well I'm going to I did a series of biblical lectures last year I did 15 lectures on Genesis I'm going to continue doing that so in November I'm going to start with the Exodus stories and what I'd like to do over the next 15 years is make my way through the whole corpus of biblical writings so that's one major goal I want to write another book I've written half of it already which will be a follow up to twelve rules for life because I actually had laid out on a site called Korah forty rules and so I'll do that and and write in another couple of books I suspect over the next few years I the touring I'm going to continue I have ten cities coming up in Canada and another twenty in the US and then twelve in Europe and I'm going to go to Australia in February and then back to Europe I think in April so there's lots of touring on the horizon and it's it's for the reasons I already described I'm having I don't the lectures differ every night although there are themes that constantly emerge and I'm using those as an opportunity to have a detailed and engaged discussion with the audience about how we might proceed forward individually and collectively so that we can make things consciously better and why that's associated with necessary meaning and why that's a moral obligation so it's a dialogue about responsibilities and not rights even though right rights are only important insofar as they set up the space for you to shoulder your proper responsibility and as a sovereign citizen you have the responsibility for the integrity of the state resting on your shoulders and it's something that if you don't take seriously then the state shakes and that's not good and so I'm trying to convey that to people it's you have there's actually something that you need to do you need to take care of yourself you need to take care of your family you need to take care of your community and if you don't do that then they'll be hell to pay and it's on you right each of us and it's it's hard for people to grasp that because well they don't want to first of all me because they don't want the responsibility but then they don't get any meaning then they suffer then they get better that's not good so it's like which of these are you gonna pick but it's also salutary to people because it's useful for everyone to know that if you don't live up to your potential that you leave a hole in the fabric of being and it's filled by something approximating hell and unless that's what you want then you shouldn't be doing that and so and it's perfectly possible to have a serious discussion with 3,000 people about this and they're right on board with it all the way and so that's really something amazing to behold and one of the things I've realized is though these new technologies the technologies you're using that enable these long-form discussions turns out that people are smarter than we thought right right right TV narrowed it right so 30 seconds say your complicated thing in 30 seconds like like can't and so we were viewing the the population through this narrow window and everyone looked kind of stupid it's like now the windows fully open it's like oh look at that you people like 40 hour Netflix specials that are incredibly complex right and you like three hours Joe Rogan discussions that are complicated you'll follow the whole thing it's like oh good we're smarter than we thought thank God for that is we better be so yeah so that's that's where I mean oh yeah yeah yeah okay question number two this is called you've got the twelve rules for life make sure you guys again go pick it up get it right now what's the link as well oh now fourth ring dot-com and I put up a code which is greatness greatness 20% off you know suite two for one so you can give the suite to your friends to self yourself authoring calm yeah not some slash grandmas just the code is gracious the code is great it's yeah and say that and I would say to everyone if gonna try this exercise which I would recommend do it over a few days and don't do it perfectly just do it get it done do a bad first draft which is an important principle in life a bad first draft is a great thing to have that's good yeah you're also on Instagram Twitter or Facebook yeah yeah so we'll make all that stuff up okay yep and your website what's your main website Jordan B Peterson dot-com perfect okay so make sure you guys get the book subscribe to everything get the self authoring the the future offering for you University students out there the future authoring program decreases your probability of dropout if you're in a college program university program by somewhere between 25 and 50 percent especially if you're kind of aimless it works better if you if you already got a plan and you're implementing it you've got a good direction then you know it's not as helpful because you're already halfway there but if you're kind of lost and you do this it'll help you not only establish your goals but stick to them it really helps we've done three very detailed published peer-reviewed studies showing that this really works yeah and it doesn't hurt you either that's the other thing that's great so it's great you've got the 12 wolf left I've got something called the three truths it's a question I ask everyone at the end and so we're trying to boil this down for three truths for you you know imagine this is your last day you get to choose the day for you when you die yeah as many years away as we want it to be and you've achieved your purpose everything you set out you aim for you hit the target hmm and then you know you pass away it's the last day everyone's there it's a celebration yeah but for whatever reason there's no more videos of you up online there's no more lectures no more podcast no more books for whatever reason you have to take them with you mm-hmm so no one has access to your information mm-hmm but you get to a piece of paper and you get to write down three things you know to be true about your life that you would pass on I like to call it the three don't say things that make you weak I'm one who lifts your eyes above the horizon a name at the highest star that you can contemplate what's the third one put your family in order hmm yeah before I ask the final question I want to acknowledge you for a moment Jordan for your incredible wisdom and vulnerability with me we just met but I feel very connected to you and your mission and your purpose and I just appreciate everything you've been through as a father and as a husband for your for your daughter for your son for your wife to continue to move on in your own dreams in pursuit of bettering humanity while going through all that you've gone through so I really acknowledge everything you've been doing and what you stand for and your ability to use your words carefully to make sure to try to make the best impact on people who are listening so I'll make Knology for all that I hope we get to have you come back sometime when you're in LA because I think we can go for another album too and the final question is what's your definition of greatness well greatness is what reveals itself when you when you attempt to formulate when you attempt to carefully articulate and live out what you believe to be true it just happens because there isn't anything more powerful than truth right that's the antidote to suffering truth right so it's a strange thing because you think well yeah it produces a lot of suffering too it's like yeah in the short term yeah so yeah thank you sir you bet thanks for the invitation and the opportunity very nice to meet you yeah thank you all right you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 340,778

Rating: 4.9119391 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, jordan peterson lecture, the school of greatness, 12 rules for life, jordan peterson interview

Id: otsOXNidluo

Length: 84min 32sec (5072 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 18 2018