YOU ARE STRONG! An Incredible Speech by Jordan Peterson

and you know people are very very very very tough and it turns out that if you face things it turns out that if you face things that you can put up with a lot more than you think you can put up with and you can do it without becoming corrupted and she did recover quite quite fully and much as a consequence of her own Nationals because she figured out what was wrong with her and then took the necessary steps to fix it which is nothing short of a bloody miracle as far as I'm concerned and anyway as part of the the the cat bit is I actually start by talking about our dog who actually died about a year ago but he's still alive in the book I you know I let people know because dog lovers love dogs and if you love cats then they think you don't like dogs and they don't like you so I also point out at the beginning of the chapter that you know if you want to pet a dog on the street that's okay too so you don't have to get up in arms about it but but the idea is that you know you have to be alert when you're suffering you have to be alert to the beauty in life the unexpected beauty in life and that's kind of what I was trying to get across with the idea of the cow there's this cat that lives across the street from us called ginger and Ginger's a Siamese cat and cats really aren't domesticated a technically speaking they're still wild animals but they kind of like people god only knows why but they do you know and so ginger will come wandering over and our dog looks at her but they're friends and she rolls over on his back and Siegel used to you know nose or a bit and and then she kind of mosey over and let you pet her if she was feeling like it's out day and you know you have to look for those little bit of that little bit of sparkling crystal in the darkness when things are bad you have to look and see where things are still beautiful and where there's still something that's sustaining and you know you narrow your timeframe and you'd be grateful for what you have and that can get you through some very dark times and maybe even successfully if you're lucky but even if unsuccessfully then maybe it's only tragic and not absolute hell and you can do that you know in the worst situation you can make it only tragic and not held and there's a big gap between tragedy and hell you know there's nothing worse at a deathbed than to see the people there fighting the death is bad enough but you can take that as terrible as it is and make it into something that's absolutely unbearable and maybe I think and this is sort of what I closed the book with is this idea is that if we didn't all attempt to make terrible things even worse than they are then maybe we could tolerate the terrible things that we have to put up with in order to exist and maybe we could make the world into a better place you know and it's what we should be doing and what we could be doing because we don't have anything better to do and that's what the book is about and that's the end of 12 rules for life every time you learn something you learn because something you did didn't work and that exposes you to the part of the world that you don't understand every time you're exposed to part of the world that you don't understand you have the possibility of rebuilding the structures that you use to interpret the world that's often why it's more important to notice that you're wrong than it is to prove that you're right one of the things that you're supposed to learn in university is precisely that it might be useful to listen to people that annoy you on the off chance that they know something that if they tell you you can use instead of dying talking to people who agree with what you say is like walking around in a desert you already know everything that they say the reason you're associating with them in that situation is so that they never say anything that challenges you because you're afraid that if you go outside of what you understand that you won't be able to tolerate the chaos but it isn't the case people have an unbelievable capacity to face and overcome things they don't understand and not only that that's essentially what gives life its meaning the Buddhists say life is suffering and you think well if that's the case why bother with it and people do ask that question and they ask it in ways that result in their own destruction and worse in the destruction of others so for example people who become particularly cruel particularly in a genocidal manner are more than willing to dispense with as many human beings as they can possibly train their sights on because they're so disgusted by the nature of human limitation that they'd rather eradicate it and lots of people become suicidal because they can't bear the conditions of their own existence and suffering is real and it's inescapable so the question is what do you do about it people do get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you let's say which would even be better than what you want right because you know you might be what wrong about what you want easily but maybe you could get what would really be good for you well why don't you well because you don't try you don't think okay here's what I would like if I could have it and and I don't mean I don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that that isn't what I mean I mean something like imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for and then you thought okay I'm caring for this person I would like things to go as well for them as possible what would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case what people don't do that they don't sit down and think all right you know let's let's figure it out you've got a life it's hard obviously it's like three years from now you can have what you need you got to be careful about it you can't have everything you can have what would be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it well my experience with people as being is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it then they get it and it's strange because they don't necessarily tan idea about what would be good for you and then you take ten steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you know you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever setup the criteria for success and so since success is a very near line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and so there's a proposition here in the proposition is if you actually want something you can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want and the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious about it you have to think okay like I'm taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation and I don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that I would aim at sit on your bed one day and ask yourself what's what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life and if you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl it's not an accident that the axiomatic Western individual is someone who was unfairly nailed to a cross and tortured it's like yes right exactly so what do you do about that well I thought about that for a long time too it's like well you don't get together in a damn mob because all that does is allow you to be as horrible as you could possibly imagine and suffer from none of the consequences that's a bad idea so how about we don't do that well there's a deep idea in the West too it's like pick up your damn suffering and bear it and try to be a good person so you don't make it worse well that's a truth you know I read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other you just cannot even imagine it it's so awful so you don't want to be someone like that no do you have a reason to be yes you have a lots of reasons to be god there's reasons to be resentful about your existence everyone you know is gonna die you know you too and there's gonna be a fair bit of pain along the way and lots of it's gonna be unfair it's like yeah no wonder you're resentful it's like act it out and see what happens you make everything you're complaining about infinitely worse there's this idea that hell is a bottomless pit and that's because no matter how bad is some stupid son of a [ __ ] like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse so you think well what do you do about that well you accept it that's what life is like it's suffering that's what the religious people have always said life is suffering yes well who wants to admit that well just think about it well so what do you do in the face of that suffering try to reduce it start with yourself what good are you get yourself together for Christ's sake so that when your father dies you're not whining away in a corner and you can help plan the funeral and you can stand up solidly so that people can rely on you that's better don't be a damn victim of course you're a victim Jesus obviously put yourself together and then maybe if you put yourself together you know how to do that you know what's wrong with you if you'll admit it you know there's a few things you could like polish up a little bit that you might even be able to manage and if you're insufficient present condition and so you might shine yourself up a little bit and then your eyes will be a little more open then you can shine yourself up a little bit more and then maybe you could bring your family together instead of having them either faithful spiteful neurotic infighting batch that you're like doomed to spend Christmas with so then you fix yourself up a little bit kind of humbly because you know God you're a fixer-upper if there ever was one and then you got to figure out well can you figure out how to make peace with your idiot brother and probably not because he's just as dumb as you so the how the hell are you gonna manage that and so then you've maybe you get somewhere that way and your family sort of functioning and you find out well that kind of relieved a little bit of suffering although it reduced the opportunities for spiteful revenge and that's kind of a pain in the neck and so then you get your family together a little bit and you're a little clued in then at least a bit because you've done something difficult that's actually difficult you're the wiser and so then maybe you could put a tentative finger out beyond the family and try to change some little thing without wrecking it it's like our society is complex and we teach our students that they could just fix it it's like go fix a military helicopter and see how far you get with that it's like you're going to get a do you're like a chimp with a wrench whack whoa look it's better it's like no it's not better things are complicated and to fix things is really hard and you have to be like a golden tool to fix things and you're not so and that's the other message of the West it's like how do you overcome the suffering of the of life and I'm not saying it's only the message of the West how do you overcome the suffering of life is be a better person that's how you do it well that's hard it takes responsibility and I think you know if you said to someone you want to have a meaningful life everything you do matters that's the definition of a meaningful life but everything you do matters it's gonna have to carry that with you or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing and then you don't have any responsibility because who the hell cares and you can wander through life doing whatever you want gratifying impulsive desires for how well useful that's going to be and you're stuck in meaninglessness but you don't have any responsibilities which one do you want well ask yourself which one are you pursuing and you'll find very rapidly that it isn't the majority of your soul that's pursuing the whole meaning thing because well look what you have to do to do that you have to take on the fact that life is suffering you have put yourself together in the face of that well that's hard Christ it's amazing people can even do it I'm stunned every day when I go outside and it isn't a riot with everything burning because really God you talk to people it's like I knew this guy he'd been in a motorcycle accident and it really ruined him and he was like a linesman you know working on the power and he was working with someone who had Parkinson's disease and they had complementary inadequacies and so two of them could do the job of one person and so they're out there fixing power lines in the freezing cold despite the fact that one was three-quarters wrecked with a motorcycle accident the other one had Parkinson's it's like that's how our civilization works it's like there's all these ruined people out there they've got problems like you can't believe off they go to work and do things they don't even like and look the lights are on my god it's unbelievable it's it's a miracle it's a miracle and we're so ungrateful college students the postmodern types they're so ungrateful you know they don't know that they're surrounded by it just a bloody miracle it's a miracle that all this stuff works but all you crazy chimpanzees that don't know each other can sit in the same room for two hours sweltering away without tearing each other apart because that's what chimps do so anyways so what happened well I made some videos and I got to the bottom of some things at least as far as I could tell so I told you what the bottom is and then I got this idea about what you might do about it which isn't my idea it's like it's not my idea it's an old old old old idea it's far older than Christianity it's old it's the oldest story of mankind get yourself together transcend your suffering see if you can be some kind of hero make the suffering in the world less well that's the way forward as far as I can tell if there is any way forward final rule it's called pedak out when you encounter one on the street and it's it's a very it's the most personal chapter in the book it's a lot about my daughter and my daughter was very ill when she was well when she was a kid but particularly when she was a teenager she had a very terrible time of it she had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and when she was between the ages of 14 and 16 at first destroyed her hip which had to be replaced and then it destroyed the ankle on her other leg which had to be replaced and she walked around for two years on broken legs and she was taking massive doses of opiates and could hardly stay awake and like and she had this advanced autoimmune disease which produced all sorts of other symptoms that were just as bad as the joint degeneration but which are harder to describe and so it's just bloody brutal you know and as a test of your faith there's almost nothing that's more direct than a serious illness inflicted upon an innocent child right and so the chapter is a meditation on that and also on well what to do in a situation like that because everyone is going to have a situation like that in some sense you know because you'll be faced with illness and the people that you love and in crisis and so it's a disc it's a practical guide to coping with those sorts of things like and one of the things you do when you're overwhelmed by crisis is you shorten your time frame you know it's like you can't think about next month maybe you can't even bloody well think about next week or maybe not even tomorrow you know because now is just Oh overwhelming that that's all there is it's like and that's what you do you cut your timeframe back until you can cope with it and if it's not the next week that you see how to get through then it's the next day and if it's not the next day then it's the next hour and if it's not the next hour then it's the next minute the internal problem is how do you deal with tragedy and malevolence and you can say well I'm not prepared it's like yeah fair enough unsurprising especially if you were over protected as a child it's not a good idea to over protect your kids because the snakes are going to come into the garden no matter what you do and so then you instead of trying to keep the damn snakes away what you do is you arm your child with something that can help them chop them into pieces and make the world out of them so that the trick for human thriving in the face of suffering and malevolence is strength not protection it's a completely different idea we also know this clinically we know for example that if you treat people with exposure therapy for Agra phobia which is roughly speaking the fear of chaos I would say the fear of everything you don't make them less afraid you make them braver it's not the same thing because with an agoraphobic see what happens to them is is the fall they never conceptualize death and suffering they're naive right it never enters their theater of their imaginations because they're protected from it but then something happens this this often happens to women in their 40s because they're the people most likely to develop Agra phobia something happens there they've been protected from chaos by Authority their entire life so maybe they had an overprotective father and then they went to an overprotective boyfriend and then they went to an overprotective husband and maybe they were willing to be subjugated to all three of those because of the protection right so so that's the bargain they stay weak and dependent and maybe they have to because that's the only way they can appeal to the person who's hyper protective but the price they pay for that is that they're not sufficiently competent and then something happens in their life often in their 40s they develop heart palpitations maybe as a consequence of menopause their heart starts to beat erratically and they think oh no death it's like well who are you going to talk to about that right there's no protection from Authority for that or maybe their friend gets divorced or maybe their sister dies or something like that it brings up the specter of mortality and maybe the specter of malevolence and mortality and it brings it up in a way that Authority recourse to Authority cannot solve and so then they have panic attacks what happens they go out they get afraid they feel their heart beating then they get afraid of their heart beating because they think oh no I'm going to die and they think oh no I'm going to die and I'm going to make a fool of myself while I'm doing it and attract a lot of attention so the two big fears come up mortality and social judgement and then they have a panic attack it's like fighter flights gone out of control very very unpleasant then they start to avoid the places they've had a panic attack then they end up not being able to go anywhere so then Tiamat has come back right a huge monster a little victim and so what do you do with them well there's no saying note there's no tire map that's done right there naivety is over they've had a direct contact with the threat of mortality and social judgment they've met the terrible mother and they met the terrible father and there's no going back there's no saying oh the world is safe it's not safe not at all it's not safe the fact that you think it's safe means that you were living in an unconscious bubble that was sort of provided to you by your culture it's a gift and now that's been shattered and so now what do you do well the answer is you retreat until you're in your house and there's nowhere you can go you're the ultimate frozen rabbit right and your life is hell because you can't function the alternative is let's take apart the things you're afraid of let's expose you to them you know carefully and programmatically and then you'll learn that you can you're actually tougher than you think you never knew that and maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because you know people play a role in their own demise so to speak when you had a opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid you chose to withdraw because you were afraid so it's not only that you were over protected often it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were over protected and run back there whenever you had the opportunity you know so maybe you're a kid in the playground right and you're having some trouble with other kids and you know in the back of your mind I should deal this with deal with this myself but you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene and you know that that's not right you know that you're breaking the social contract but it's easier and so that's what you do you run off to an authority figure and hide behind the Great Father right roughly speaking well the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself so then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40 so then you take people out you say well what are you afraid of rank it from 1 to 10 so 10 is make a list of 10 things you're afraid of the least the thing you're least afraid of will call number 10 so we'll start with that okay well I'm afraid of elevators ok well let's let's look at a picture of an elevator let's have you imagine being in an elevator let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open because that's how you're responding to it symbolically right and you're gonna do that at it at the the closest proximity you can manage you find out you go do that it works you're nervous as hell especially in from an anticipatory perspective shaking you go out you stop you watch it happen and you actually calm down you do that 10 times it no longer bothers you well what you've learned that you didn't die but more importantly than that you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death that's what you've learned and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator from a symbolic perspective it's a tomb right it's it's it's a place of enclosure and isolation and you learn hmm turns out I can withstand that and then you're met much more together much more confident and that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that I've seen this multiple times is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and and toughen them up they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before because they wouldn't stand up for themselves before because they weren't willing to undermine the protection see if you're protecting me I can't bother you because I can't afford to forsake your protection so if I'm gonna play that game I'm gonna be high hide behind you then I can't challenge you so that's no good because that's sometimes why people you see this with guys very frequently they're still deathly afraid of their father's judgment when they're in their 30s or 40s it's like well why not because they still want to believe that there's someone out there that knows and so they're willing to accept the subjugation because it doesn't force them to challenge the idea that there's someone out there that knows because that's the advantage of having your father as a judge right because he knows well what if he doesn't what if no one knows any better than you well that's a rough thing you don't until you realize that you're not an adult right that's really technically the point of realization of adulthood is that no one actually knows what you should do more than you do I mean it's a horrible realization because what the hell do you know it's a terrible realization and people will often pick slavery permanent slavery to the spirit of the great father let's say over that realization and it's completely understandable but the problem with it is is that there's more to you than you think and so if you continue to hide behind that figure then you never have a chance to understand that there's more to you than you think far more to you than you think maybe there's enough to you so that you can actually withstand the threat of mortality without collapsing maybe even withstand the threat of malevolence without collapsing who knows it's certainly possible and it's not an abstract question it's exactly the sort of question that you address in the psychotherapeutic process it's it's always the question that you address and the answer is often in the affirmative because people can get unbelievably tough and you know that because people work in emergency wards and hospitals right or they work in in palliative care Awards or they work as mortuary assistants I mean these people have bloody rough jobs you know or they're on the front line of police investigation into you know highness child abuse crimes and so they're confronting malevolence on a regular basis and you know those are very stressful jobs but people do them and and some people do them without even being damaged by them although that's a harder thing because you can see horrible things you know things you'll never forget the problem is it's true euro pressed you're oppressed you're oppressed you're oppressed god only knows why maybe you're too short or you're not as beautiful as you could be or you know your parent your grandparent was a serf likely because almost everybody's grand great-grandparent was it's like you know and you're not as smart as you could be and you have a sick relative and you have your own physical problems and it's like frankly you're a mess and you're oppressed in every possible way including your ancestry and your biology and the entire sum of human history has conspired to produce victimized you with all your individual pathological problems it's like yes true okay but the problem is is that it is true and so if you take the oppressed you have to fraction ate them and fraction ate them it's like you're a woman yeah okay well I'm a black woman well I'm a black woman who has two children well I'm a black woman who has two children and one of them isn't very healthy and then well I'm uh I'm a Hispanic woman and I have a genius son who doesn't have any money so that he can't go to university and you know I had a hell of a time getting across the border it was really hard on me to get my citizenship my husband is an alcoholic brute it's like well yeah that sucks too and so well so let's let's let's fix all your oppressive oppression and we'll take every single thing into account then we'll fix yours - we'll take every single thing into account it's like no you won't because you can't you can't it is technically impossible first of all you can't even list all the ways that you're oppressed second how are you gonna weight them third who's gonna decide and that's the bloody thing who's gonna decide that's the thing well what's the answer in the West it's like in free markets oh yeah Christ will never be able to solve this problem no one can solve it what are we gonna do about that we're gonna outsource it to the marketplace you're gonna take your sorry pathetic being and you're gonna try to offer me something that maybe I want and I'm gonna take my sorry pathetic being I'm gonna say well all things considered as well as I can understand them maybe I could give you this much money which is actually a promise for that thing and you've packed all of your damn oppression into the price and I've packed all my oppression into the willingness to pay it and that solution sucks it's a bad solution but compared to every other solution man it's why 10% of us have freedom and so there's a tremendous iya logic at the bottom of this it's like you have to fractionate the oppressed all the way down to the level of the individual oh that's what the West figured out you know there's a couple of figures who had the mythological roots of our culture and you know people get upset with me because I bring in religious themes but I understand some things about mythology and religion it's not an accident that the axiomatic Western individual is someone who was unfairly nailed to a cross and tortured it's like yes right exactly so what do you do about that well I thought about that for a long time too it's like well you don't get together in a damn Bob because all that does is allow you to be as horrible as you can possibly imagine and suffer from none of the consequences that's a bad idea so how about we don't do that well there's a deep idea in the West too it's like pick up your damned suffering and bear it and try to be a good person so you don't make it worse well that's a truth you know I read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other you just cannot even imagine it it's so awful so you don't want to be someone like that no do you have a reason to be yes you have a lots of reasons to be god there's reasons to be resentful about your exist everyone you know is gonna die you know you - there's gonna be a fair bit of pain along the way and lots of it's gonna be unfair it's like yeah no wonder you're resentful it's like act it out and see what happens you make everything you're complaining about infinitely worse there's this idea that hell is a bottomless pit and that's because no matter how bad is some stupid son of a [ __ ] like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse so you think well what do you do about that well you accept it that's what life is like it's suffering that's what the religious people have always said life is suffering yes well who wants to admit that well just think about it well so what do you do in the face of that suffering try to reduce it start with yourself what good are you get yourself together for Christ's sake so that when your father dies you're not whining away in a corner and you can help plan the funeral and you can stand up solidly so that people can rely on you that's better don't be a damn victim of course you're a victim Jesus obviously put yourself together and then maybe if you put yourself together you know how to do that you know what's wrong with you if you'll admit it you know there's a few things you could like polish up a little bit that you might even be able to manage in your insufficient present condition and so you might shine yourself up a little bit and then your eyes will be a little more open then you can shine yourself up a little bit more and then maybe you could bring your family together instead of having them be the hateful spiteful neurotic infighting batch that you're doomed to spend Christmas with so then you fix yourself up a little bit kind of humbly because you know God you're a fixer-upper if there ever was one and then you got to figure out well but can you figure out how to make peace with your idiot brother and probably not because he's just as dumb as you so the how the hell are you gonna manage that and so then you've maybe you get somewhere that way in your family sort of functioning and you find out well that kind of relieved a little bit of suffering although it reduced the opportunities for spiteful revenge and that's kind of a pain in the neck and so then you get your family together a little bit and you're a little clued in then at least a bit because you've done something difficult that's actually difficult you're the wiser and so then maybe you could put a tentative finger out beyond the family and try to change some little thing without wrecking it it's like our society is complex and we teach our students that they could just fix it it's like go fix a military helicopter and see how far you get with that it's like you're going to get to do you're like a chimp with a wrench whack whoa look it's better it's like no it's not better things are complicated and to fix things is really hard and you have to be like a golden tool to fix things and you're not so and that's the other message of the West it's like how do you overcome the suffering of the of life I'm not saying it's only the message of the West how do you overcome the suffering of life is be a better person that's how you do it well that's hard it takes responsibility and I think you know if you said to someone you want to have a meaningful life everything you do matters that's the definition of a meaningful life but everything you do matters it's gonna have to carry that with you or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing and then you don't have any responsibility because who the hell cares and you can wander through life doing whatever you want gratifying impulsive desires for how well useful that's going to be and you're stuck in meaninglessness but you don't have any responsibilities which one do you want well ask yourself which one are you pursuing and you'll find very rapidly that it isn't the majority of your soul that's pursuing the whole meaning thing because well look what you have to do to do that you have to take on the fact that life is suffering you have put yourself together in the face of that well that's hard Christ it's amazing people can even do it I'm stunned every day when I go outside and it isn't a riot with everything burning it could really God you talk to people it's like I knew this guy he'd been in a motorcycle accident and it really ruined him and he was like a linesman you know working on the power and he was working with someone who had Parkinson's disease and they had complementary inadequacies and so two of them could do the job of one person and so they're out there fixing power lines in the freezing cold despite the fact that one was three-quarters wrecked with a motorcycle accident the other one had Parkinson's it's like that's how our civilization works it's like there's all these ruined people out there they've got problems like you can't believe off they go to work and do things they don't even like and look the lights are on my god it's unbelievable it's it's a miracle it's a miracle and we're so ungrateful college students the postmodern types they're so ungrateful you know they don't know that they're surrounded by just a bloody miracle it's a miracle that all this stuff works but all you crazy chimpanzees that don't know each other can sit in the same room for two hours sweltering away without tearing each other apart because that's what chimps do so anyways so what happened well I made some videos and I got to the bottom of some things at least as far as I can tell so I told you what the bottom is and then I thought this idea about what you might do about it which isn't my idea it's like it's not my idea it's an old old old old idea it's far older than Christianity it's old it's the oldest story of mankind get yourself together transcend your suffering see if you can be some kind of hero make the suffering in the world less well that's the way forward as far as I can tell if there is any way forward when I was 25 or so I probably weighed about 138 pounds I smoked like a pack cigarettes day I drank tremendous amount of alcohol I was from northern Alberta this rough little town up northern Alberta called Fairview and you know there were long winters there and my friends were heavy drinkers and most of them dropped out of school by the time they were 15 or 16 went off to work on the oil rigs and you know it was a rough town and we drank a lot I started when I was 14 and you know and so I was I had a lot of bad habits let's say and things that were and I wasn't in great shape physically and I was also still intellectually obsessed by as I am now and so that would have been that would have been in 85 but when I but I decided around that about 85 84 or something like that maybe a little earlier that I was really going to try to get my act together and so I started doing that I you know I first of all I quit smoking well that took a long time because I eventually had to quit drinking to in order to quit smoking and I started working out starting playing sports which I'd never done I was a small kid I'd been skipped a grade and I was a small small for my age so sports were never especially team sports were never really a domain of expertise for me although I skied and went trapping with my dad went you know cross-country skiing and camping and all that so but when I went to graduate school I started swimming the first the first physical exercise routine I did I enrolled in a swim sir sized course I think it was called it was me and this like really overweight kid and like these 60 year old women and men they could out exercise me like Matt it was really embarrassing me and the overweight kid you know we'd be just panting ourselves 3/4 to death at the end of the bloody work out in these 60 year old women who weren't great shape or like you know chatting away as if nothing was going on at all in the pool so that was quite embarrassing and as was going to the weight room you know because when I started I could barely best benchpress 75 pounds and people used to keep coming over and helping me which was last thing I bloody well wanted but certainly needed I got to the point where I could benchpress 225 pounds I think that was the best I did and I gained about 30 pounds of muscle in a year and a half so that was good thing so like I was kind of a wild man and you know I'm a little bit manic in my in my temperament so you know I was I was kind of going every direction at the same time so and you know I don't regret that I had a fine town when I was a kid and but I needed really to get disciplined and I had to do it because I was working on these hard problems that you know that I've been discussing with all of you and I've been working on them really you know obsessively since I was probably about 18 maybe even earlier than that and got to the point around 25 when I was in graduate school trying to get my PhDs doing all my research like I published 15 papers by the time I graduated with my PhD which was by I think by a fairly large measure of the most papers that any undergraduate student at that time had ever published at McGill I think that's right might have been twice as many or maybe twice as many maybe even three times as many and at the same time I wrote maps of meaning which was a terrible terrible terribly difficult thing to do because I was writing about three hours a day doing that and I couldn't do all that and continue with my misbehavior you know my sort of what would you say my my hedonistic my hidden mystic my massive hedonistic consumption of alcohol and all of that I just couldn't keep it up and also work seriously on the issues that were at hand so you know I had to stop that's a sacrifice I had to stop messing about and straight myself oh I I got married while my the woman who's my wife Tammy who I've known since she was 8 years old she lived across the street from me in this little town called Fairview and I was in love with her like the first time I saw her which is quite bloody thing so that's worked out pretty well for me but she came to live with me about the same time and you know we decided jointly to get her act together and we swore that we tell each other the truth which I think she's actually done better than me like I don't think I don't think she's lied to me ever in our entire marriage which is unbelievable you know and it's been so useful because I can really tell her things that we can really talk so I tell you if you want to have a good relationship man you embedded in the truth because if you don't embed it in the truth you don't have a relationship it's it's just lies it's it's a tissue of lies and it will it will dissolve in the chaos as soon as the crisis comes along so the truth is a terrible thing but not not compared to falsehood so advice for students here yeah read great books mm-hmm really man you've got this four year period that has been carved out of your lives by society they it's given you an identity like a high quality identity and freedom at the same time and you're not gonna get that again in your life you've got a you've got a respectable identity University student and complete freedom associated with that or as near as you're ever going to get and you've got these unbelievable libraries that are full of the writings of people who are were intelligent and articulate beyond comprehension and you know and and you can go there and you can learn all this and you might think well why should you learn it well you learn it to get a job or you learn it to get good grades or you learn it to get a degree and that's all nonsense it's nonsense the reason that you come to university to be educated is because there is nothing more powerful than someone who is articulate and they can speak its power and I mean power of the best sort its authority and influence and respectability and competence and so you come to university to craft your highest skill and your highest skill is to be found in articulated speech and if you're if you're if you're a master at formulating your arguments you win everything and better than that when you win everything everyone around you wins too because to transform yourself into let's consider consider your transformation to something approximating the logos it means you shine a light on the whole world well there's nothing more exciting to do than that there's nothing better you can possibly do and to think that you're coming to university to be you know trained to have a job it's like great that's a hell of a lot better than being unemployed and covered with cheeto dust while you're snacking away in front of your video game in the basement but it's not it's not a and I don't have anything against video games by the way but it's hardly a triumphant call to to being in the world and that's what university should be calling forth it's like God you people you you know I know what Harvard students are like I taught here for five years you people are spectacular you're spectacular you're here you're all capable of being world beaters you transform yourself into something that's articulated and sensible and grounded in history and knowledgeable and wise man you can do anything you want and hopefully anything you want for good because if you have any sense everything you want to do would be for the good because there's nothing more compelling or meaningful or or useful in combating the tragedy that life than to than to struggle with all your soul on behalf of the good and the universities have forgotten that it's why everyone's bailing out of the humanities and they should the humanities is corrupt and they're corrupt because they're not telling students this it's a bloody obvious it's like learn to think learn to speak learn to read it makes you a superpower an individual superpower you have and I don't understand why that isn't just told to students it's not that hard to understand it everyone wants to hear it's like really I could I can do that like yeah really you could do that and the whole society around you is labored for really thousands of years to provide every single one of you with this spectacular opportunity that you have while you're undergraduates and graduate students here man they're just everyone's just praying that you would come here and manifest everything that you could manifest and that's what you should be doing instead of waving placards and complaining about how you're oppressed for God's sake you see these Yale students complaining about their oppression it's just it just leaves me aghast it's like what we're against the ruling class it's like no no no your baby ruling class members you're young the only reason you're not rich is because you're young you know that's the best really that's them if you look at the 1% even the dreaded 1% you know most of those people are old why well when you progress through life if you're reasonably successful you trade in your promising youth for your wealthy old age but you're still bloody old would you would you trade it would you trade your use for that like if you factor age out of the economic equation things look a lot different well of course older people have more money they have any sense they've been collecting it for their whole life is that somehow unfair it's not unfair unless you want to want to be poverty-stricken when you're 70 and you and you don't want to be poverty or poverty-stricken when you're 70 so I just don't understand what's happened to the universities I can't believe that you're not told when you come the first day look man you are out you're here on a heroic mission you're going to take your capacity to articulate yourself to levels that are undreamed-of you're gonna come out of here unstoppable you're going to be able to do anything you want it's like that's what you're here for instead you're taught that well you know the world is a pretty oppressive place and you're probably at the bottom of the dictum pilot and and and there's and there's there's virtually nothing you can do about it except little deconstruct the patriarchy it's so we need and so pathetic that that university should be embarrassed that that's what they're peddling to students I'm embarrassed by it you know I've gone on public record telling parents bloody well send your boys to train school because at least they'll learn something useful and that's a terrible thing for someone like me to say because I do believe that the argument that being articulated and educated in the highest possible manner is there's nothing that's better for you and for society and why are why have the universities forgotten this well that's postmodern neo Marxism before you you know then the philosophy of intense resentment and oppression and group identity and god it's just panic dr. Pearson I think a lot of students here would agree with you that one of the main purposes of Education at college particularly at Harvard is to develop their sense of articulation their ability to read their ability to create critically think but then what comes after particularly at Harvard there's a big discussion on what is a good life what does it mean to use those skills that we get here and then we graduate what do we do from there stop unnecessary suffering mm-hmm that's what you do you know that that's your calling it's like you say well what do you do after you graduate well if you graduate articulated and powerful there will be people giving you so many opportunities you won't even be able to keep up with them you know and I've worked with caught very very competent people in many different domains in my life hyper competent people and I can tell you some very interesting things about hyper competent people the first thing is they are not selfish and they're not greedy and one of the great pleasures in their lives is to find people who have the capacity to also be hyper competent and to open doors for them as rapidly as they can possibly be open they delight in that because there is there's nothing very few things that are more intrinsically meaningful if you're an accomplished person than to find young people who have the possibility of being accomplished and say hey look here's an opportunity for you it's like go out there man kill it and then they go up there and kill it you think right on man another opportunity for their nail back to you think no no they're holding their wealth and they're not going to share it with anyone it's like that's absolute complete rubbish and so you don't even have to worry about what you're going to do after you graduate from here if you if you turn yourself into half of what you could be because people will be dying to offer you every opportunity that you can possibly make use of so it's it's it's a moot point that the world is always desperately short of people who can think and speak and and you think well I know I won't be made use of first of all you can't say that if you're already figured out who you are you've already figured it out and they're offering you the world on a on a gold platter they take it it's yours take it it's like great man put yourself together and deserve it that would be great and that's what everyone wants it's what your parents want it's also what you want you've know it it's what you want it's what men it's what women want from man it's what men want from women it's like for you to be who you could be and then with the highest Faculty of the human being is articulated speech it's it's the divine faculty and there is nothing more powerful than that there was nothing that's even in the same league and so if you if you don't have faith in that then you're then your priorities are misplaced and I can't even understand why you wouldn't have faith in that being say Harvard students because the word scart you already know you're already sitting on top of the world so make deserve that make use of them all right go out there and fix things up that's what you need to do there's lots of things that need to be fixed up and what you want to do is burden yourself with so much responsibility that you can barely stand and then you'll get stronger trying to lift it up and you'll be won't be asking what should I be doing with my life or what's the meaning of life or any of that it will be self-evident it's self-evident at minimum you can say there's more suffering in the world than there should be and I could probably do something about that and you can do something about that so go do something about him and then they'll be less suffering in the world and then when you're 80 you can look back on your life and say well you know there's less suffering in the world than there and there would have been had I know it exists and and you don't have to even have a sense of ultimate destiny or even any sort of theistic belief to regard that as a positive good like I think it goes beyond the mere pragmatic utility of addressing the world's ills because I think we do live in a you know in a world that has a transcendent reality as well as the reality that we can detect but even independently of that it doesn't matter it's like I mean this is part of the reason I like people like Bill Gates is a great example man that guy is he's after five major diseases at the same time right he's trying to wipe out polio he's trying to wipe out malaria yeah exactly he's trying to wipe out malaria it's like well what should you do with your life well you know take a look at Bill Gates and see if you can do something like that that would be good you know if you take people and I've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals their self defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the depth by your own definitions right within the value structure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they'd be get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world in a number another way that you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you and then the second part of that is well imagine that many people did that because we've done a lot as human beings we've done a lot of remarkable things and I've told you already I think before that today for example about 250,000 people will be lifted out of abject poverty and about 300,000 people attached to the electrical power grid we're making people were lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that's ever occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin and that's been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000 the UN a plan to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 and it was accomplished by 2013 so there's inequality developing in many places and you hear it lots of political agitation about that but overall the the tide is lifting everyone up and that's a great thing we have no idea how fast we can multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it because you know my my experience is with people that were probably running at about 51% of our capacity something mean you can think about this yourself I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like 4 to 6 hours a day you know inefficient studying watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done that's probably four hours right there know you think well that's 2025 hours a week it's a hundred hours a month that's two and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth twenty dollars an hour which is a radical under estimate it's probably more like 50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting $50,000 a year and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting 50 thousand dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because I'm not going to last nearly as long and so if your life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you be who knows how much more efficient ten times more efficient 20 times more fish that's the Pareto distribution you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely it's off the charts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to make things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocide alors all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if people start really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt and that's the thing that's interesting too is that and like one of the another thing I've often asked my undergraduate classes is you know there's this idea that that people have that people have a conscience and you know what the conscience is it's it's this feeling or voice you have in your head just before you do something that you know is stupid telling you that probably you shouldn't do that stupid thing you don't have to listen to it strangely enough but you go ahead and do it anyways and then of course exactly what the conscience told you was going to happen inevitably happen so that you feel even stupider about it than you would if it happened by accident because you know I knew this was going to happen I got a warning it was going to happen and I went and did it anyways and the funny thing too is that that conscience operates within people and we really don't understand what the hell that is so you might say well what would happen if you abided by your conscience for five years or for ten years what sort of position might you be in what sort of family might you have what sort of relationship might you be able to forge and you can be bloody sure that a relationship that's forged on the basis of who you actually are is going to be a lot stronger and more welcome than one that's forged on the basis of who you are now of course that means that the person you're with has to deal with the full force of you and all your ability and your catastrophe and that's a very very difficult thing to negotiate but if you do negotiate it well at least you you have something you have somewhere a solid to stand and you have somewhere to live you have a real life and it's a great basis upon which to bring children into the world for example because you can have an actual relationship with them instead of torturing them half to death which is what happens in a tremendous a tremendously large minority of cases well it's more than that too because and this is what I'll close with and this is why I wanted to introduce social nets as ratings to you you see because it isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know you think well there's nine billion seven billion people in the world we're going to peak at about nine billion by the way and then it'll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do but that's simply not the case it's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network you're a node in a network of course that's even more true now that we have social media you'll you know you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion and so that's how you're connected and the things you do there like dropping a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think and so if you act it way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that's better than living a meaningless existence it's better for it to matter but I mean if you really ask yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice I can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price I pay is that nothing mattered or I can reverse it and everything matters but I have to take the responsibility that's associated with that it's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path now when you say well nihilist suffered dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantages they have no responsibility so that's the payoff and I actually think that's the motivation say well I can't help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed it's like yeah maybe maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so that's a pretty good deal all things considered especially when they are when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world well what Solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the 20th century it's not just him even though he's the best example is that if you live a pathological life you pathologize your society and if enough people do that then it's hell really really and you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the fortitude fortitude to do that and you'll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit or even more importantly if it's a light if it's a place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends because that's what happened in the 20th century if you're hungry it's not a deterministic Drive it's a subpersonality that has a goal and then it has a bunch of action patterns that are going to work in reference to that goal it has a bunch of perceptions that that suit that goal and it organizes your emotional responses around that goal and so to think about it as a personality isn't much it's a much more intelligent way to look at it one other thing about Skinner's rats you know Skinner could get rats to do almost everything and he would reward them with food and so he had a simple rat model but his rats were starved down to 75% of their normal body weight so not only were they not social gregarious rats like rats are because they were isolated they're genetically altered from wild rats but they also weren't as complex as a rail route because they were starving and so but you know a starving rat is a pretty good model of a rat and a rat is a pretty good model of a person but are a lot of our models of simple behavioral learning were based on starving isolated rats so anyways how to think about motivation well think about it from the hypothalamic perspective so we could say one thing that motivation does is set goals we could say that emotions track progress towards goals and I'm gonna use that schema even though it's not exactly right so you say well motivation determines where you're gonna aim so if you're hungry you're gonna aim it something to eat and then that will organize your perceptions so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task which is almost everything you concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward when you encounter those things that produces positive emotion as you move through the world towards your goal and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward those things cause positive emotion and if you encounter anything that gets in the way then that produces negative emotion and it can be like threat because you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way it can be anger so that you move it away it can be frustration disappointment grief those would if you had a response that's serious to an obstacle it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence you know so you walk downstairs and I don't know the contracting company has set a wrecking ball through your kitchen like that's going to be disappointing you're not gonna keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble that little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is going to pop up it instead and you know one of the things we're gonna try to sort out is how do you decide when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big that you should just quit and go do something else because that's not obvious you know and you can you can get into counter productive persistence pretty easily so we don't know how people solve that problem it's a really complicated what so anyways we're gonna work on that scenario your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival that produces a frame of reference so it's not a goal it's not a drive and it's not a collection of behaviors it's of little personality and the personality has a viewpoint it has thoughts that go along with it it has perceptions it has action tendencies all of that you can see this in addiction most particularly so one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time and that's because when they're they've built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves or a big one it might maybe it's 90 percent of their personality and one of that one of the things that component consists of is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people and so the addiction has a personality you know and so when the person is off well maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that where we know the addiction is more it's more short term powerful than I would say that an alcohol addiction they'll say anything and that the words are just tools used to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive whatever it doesn't matter they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that you reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug and then the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar so okay so we're gonna say motivations one way of thinking about as they set goals but it's not the right way of thinking about it they produce a whole framework of interpretation and so we're going to think about that framework of interpretation and then emotions emerge inside of that so that's it so the world is framed motivation set goals you could say the world has to be framed so motivation sets that frame whose goals emotions perceptions and actions and then actions track progress so positive emotion says you're moving forward properly towards your goal and if you encounter something you don't expect you stop that's anxiety it's like oh we're not where we thought we were and so we don't know what to do so we should stop because we don't know where we are what we're doing stop frozen and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain they might make you get out of there so emotions forward stop reverse that's your emotions within that motivated frame so and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body you know emotions are like they're they're offshoots of action tendencies that's that's the right way to think about it because action is everything fundamentally so what are some basic motivations most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus by the way and that tells you just how important a control system it is the other thing that's useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much but if it's on in any serious way it's like it it wins so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the Dominion of your hypothalamus is to never ever be anywhere where it's action is necessary right you don't want to go into a biker bar because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary you probably don't want that you don't want the panic you don't want the terror you don't want the frenzied fight you don't want any of that you don't want to have to run away in absolute panic so you just don't go there and then a huge a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control and everything to do with staying where you belong so okay so basic motivations hunger thirst pain pain is not regulated by the hypothalamus that's a different circuit anger slash aggression thermoregulation panic and escape affiliation and care sexual desire exploration play and you can kind of break those in you can kind of break those into the classic Darwinian categories too and say well there's a set of motivations that go along with self maintenance gotta be your survival ingested and defensive see I've sort of coded them there so the the self maintenance there's an ax jest of set of basic motivations that go with self maintenance you say that's hunger thirst there's a set of defensive motivations paying anger thermoregulation panic and escape and then there's there's motivations that are associated with reproduction affiliation care and sexual desire and then I put exploration and plays sort of outside of that I would say because those two things serve both of these approximately equally

Channel: MULLIGAN BROTHERS INTERVIEWS

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Keywords: Mulliganbrothers, mulligan brothers, motivational videos, motivational speech, jordan peterson, jordan b peterson, peterson, jordan b. peterson, jordan peterson lecture, jordan, speech, jordan peterson strength not protection - you are stronger than you think, jordan peterson interview, psychology, jordan b peterson speech, jordan peterson speech, motivation, inspirational speech, best speech ever, best motivational speech, philosophy

Id: AR-86T8jpuQ

Length: 68min 50sec (4130 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Hotinthakitchen1]

Thanks for posting this! I'm going through things and I really needed to hear this right now