Jordan Peterson - How To Find An Antidote For Chaos With 12 Rules For Life

Full transcript: Jordan Peterson on London Real

5:48 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jordan B. Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Your book 12 Rules for Life: Antidote to Chaos provides practical principles on how to live a meaningful life.

6:03 From setting your house in order before criticizing others to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not someone else today. The New York Times recently called you the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now. And last night at the O2 Arena in London, I watched you draw a crowd of 7,000 people to your live speaking event with Sam Harris and Douglas Murray. It felt like a watershed moment. Jordan, welcome to London Real.

6:24 Thank you very much.

6:26 What was going on last night? 7,000 people, no Justin Bieber, three people on stage having a two-hour discussion. Just the fact that that happened.

6:36 What do you make of that?

6:37 Well, I’ve thought about that a lot and I think that it’s the consequence, mostly the consequence, of a technological revolution. The media forms that we had, as a society, had been utilizing up till 5 years ago were very limited in their bandwidth, whether that was print journalism or TV or radio, limited in that because the production cost was so high and the distribution cost was so high that every second counted, and so there wasn’t room for long form. There wasn’t room for long form.

7:15 This wasn’t only true of journalism and public affairs and that sort of thing. It was also true of drama, like on television, and 90 minutes was a long time, right? And I think everybody came to assume that the media forms actually reflected our capacity for attention and depth, and they didn’t. They narrowed it. So look what happened when Netflix popped up and HBO.

7:41 No bandwidth restriction, right? In terms of time or distribution. Well, it turned out that people would be perfectly happy with 40 hours of drama in continuous. People would even binge on that, right? With multiple plot lines.

7:54 There was a huge demand for that. So, you had very high quality series like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad emerged that were very complex to the level of literature, I would say. So, turns out people were smarter than we thought. They had longer attention spans. And now the new media forms, YouTube, podcasts, have revealed that there’s a tremendous hunger for long-form dialogue.

8:17 Your program does the same thing. These live events are an extension of that. No one knew that that market existed. Well, apparently it exists. People are in for two and a half hours of relatively deep, deep as we could make it anyways, philosophical inquiry.

8:35 Who knew? Well, so there’s the content. So obviously Sam and I have focused on issues that there’s a market for from an issues perspective, but then there’s also the other issue, which is that people come to these live events to see the process of inquiry unfold. And so there’s the results of the process, which is whatever content we manage to generate, whatever conclusions, but there’s something very engaging about being involved in an engaging conversation.

9:06 And so we’re providing that apparently, and that’s also great because it turns out that people want that and need it and can participate in it and can benefit from it. And so great, hopefully it means the political dialogue could be elevated, the philosophical dialogue could be elevated. And then, well, I, so I see it partly as driven by content but also an emergent consequence of this technological revolution in information provision, which is a big deal, right?

9:39 On-demand video of indefinite length with almost no production cost. Then also people can chop that up. They can comment on it themselves. They can listen to it with podcasts. They can do that while they’re walking around.

9:52 It’s a big deal. These are big changes. And so we’re seeing that reflected.

9:56 You said before it’s not obvious that everyone can read or everyone who wants to engage in long-form reading, and yet this is accessible. And it’s just, it’s a huge…

10:05 Well, there’s a couple of possibilities. One is maybe more people can listen than can read, because reading is somewhat of a barrier. It also, reading is something you have to learn how to make part of your life, you know, and avid readers do that, but not everyone does that for all sorts of reasons, cultural and otherwise. And so not only reading is like that, but buying books is also like that now, but listening, man, everybody can listen, and so, and especially with podcasts, you can listen while you’re doing other things.

10:37 So that gives podcasts, audio, an advantage over books and over video because of course you have to more or less sit there to watch a video, and you definitely have to sit there and do nothing else to read a book. So the audio allows people to listen and they can speed it up now. So that’s also, that’s also non-trivial, and they can do it while they’re doing other things. So that means all of a sudden people have an extra hour a day that they never had before, and they can use that to educate themselves with absolutely no cost, right?

11:07 No personal cost, no financial cost to speak of, no additional demand on their time. So these, so you figure, let’s say it’s an hour a day for the typical person. Well, you only have six to seven hours a day that you can make productive use of because you’re eating and cleaning and doing all the things you have to do to stay alive and sleeping for eight hours. Eats up most of the day. Now all of a sudden 10% of your life has been freed up so that you can investigate more complex issues if you have a mind to.

11:36 Turns out that people do have a mind to. So great, it’s really something.

11:41 Yeah, we’re becoming more educated then as a whole society. It looks like it looks like these new technology, and it’s kind of what you’d hope for from a new and revolutionary technology. You’d expect that it would provide

11:54 New information to larger numbers of people. And that’s exactly what seems to be happening. And I think these events, so Sam and I had four conversations, two with Douglas Murray, and the first two had 3,000 people, the third one 8,500, and the fourth one in London last night had about 7,000. And so obviously there’s a huge market for who knew, for untrable philosophical discourse.

12:20 How do you find debating religion with Sam on stage, you know, as he kind of takes the the atheist viewpoint and I guess you take kind of an opposing side. You know, he’s less emotional. Some people have said he’s the critic and you’re the creator. And it was very interesting watching you two last night. How has that played out over four different occurrences with him on stage?

12:43 What have you learned? Has anything become more obvious to you or less obvious?

12:47 Well, I think I understand his ideas more deeply and I’ve been studying them a lot since we’ve started this whole process because we did two podcasts together last year, I think, or maybe the year before, a while ago. And so I’ve really familiarized myself with his work, not least because Sam is an effective and articulate spokesperson for the rationalist atheist position, which is a very widely held. It might even be in some sense among intellectuals the normative position.

13:14 And so the fact that he can articulate it so well, see, I see it as a, I see it, I see its lack, I see what it lacks as a revelation of its fundamental insufficiency. You know, it’s not a motivating ethos, atheism. And you might say, well, that doesn’t matter because it’s still true. It’s like, well, yeah, fair enough in some sense, but it is crucial because people do need to be motivated. And so that gap, and Harris himself has said, well, atheism is fundamentally a doctrine of negation.

13:51 All it states is there is no God. It’s like, okay, fine. Well, what do we do from there? Well, then the story gets less compelling, and so I can see it as something that’s, well, it’s got a destructive element, which of course is something that Nietzsche pointed out when he discussed the death of God. He said, “We’ll never find enough water essentially to wash away the blood.”

14:12 Right? So, you lose something like that. You lose the motivating ethos of your community. And you might say, “Well, that’s okay because we’ve replaced it with objective truth.” And look, fair enough, man.

14:24 Objective truth is what’s provided us with this incredible technological power. And you have to be a fool not to see that as an advantage. But it’s an insufficient account in my estimation. And of course, that’s what all the discussions are about. I think we’re going to release all the discussions as videos and also as audio.

14:43 And I think there’s clear development of both of our arguments across the course of the events, and very little repetition in the content, some because of course it’s the same people. But I do think people will be able to track the development of thought across all the conversations. So I found it very worthwhile. Definitely made me sharper and also made me more cognizant of Sam’s arguments and why they’re so attractive to people.

15:14 Yeah. So,

15:14 But ultimately he’s denying something exists and you’re trying to say, “Okay, this thing needs to exist to move us forward and emotional.”

15:22 Yes. Well, and that there’s more to it than that than meets the eye. And there is much more to it than meets the eye. I mean, one of my experiences has been the more that I’ve delved into some of these fundamental stories, the more bottomless they become. The Cain and Abel story is particularly like that.

15:38 It’s 10 lines long. You could spend, you could spend 10 years thinking about that story. It’s so deep. It’s almost impossible for me to imagine how a story that profound could be reduced to something that finite. It’s mind-boggling.

15:55 And of course, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is the same. It’s like there’s a reason we can’t forget that story. Now, who knows what the re- there’s many reasons. Who knows what those reasons are?

16:06 Is it in our DNA somewhere?

16:08 Well, it’s, look, at minimum you could make a biological claim, something like, and it’s kind of the same claim that Richard Dawkins makes with regards to memes. See, I’ve always thought with Dawkins that if Dawkins thought a little harder, he would have turned into Carl Jung, because there’s very little difference between the idea of a meme and an archetype. An archetype is, Jung’s archetype is what you would consider a meme if you thought about what a meme was for 20 years, right?

16:34 So, Dawkins came up with this interesting idea, the meme. It’s like, yeah, but that’s an idea that needs to be fleshed out a lot, because then you might think, well, there’s a hierarchy of memes. There’s some that are memorable for a while and then you forget them, and then there’s some that are way more memorable, and then right at the top there are memes that you will never forget. Then the question is why would you never forget them? There’s a reason for that, and the answer is something like, well, they’re structured so that they’re, well, just this is a truism in some sense, they’re structured to such that they’re maximally memorable.

17:10 But then that begs the question, why are they maximally memorable? Why is it that your memory is structured to not forget exactly that? And that’s where you get tangled into the evolutionary arguments like, well, your memory evolved. It’s actually a tool. The reason you have memory isn’t to remember the past.

17:30 The reason you have memory is to not do the same stupid things again in the future. That’s fundamentally the reason. And so you remember some things and you don’t remember other things. And there’s, your memory has a shape, and these stories fit into that shape. And so at minimum the stories have evolved to adapt to your memory.

17:51 Now I would say since your memory has evolved to adapt to the world, that implies that the stories have evolved to adapt to the world. And I think that that’s a perfectly credible biological case. One of the things I did manage to do, because Sam often is considered the scientist of the between him and I. He’s the scientist in the discussion, and that’s actually a misapprehension in some sense, because I’ve just never got around to the science in our discussions for all sorts of different reasons.

18:22 But I’m very familiar with the relevant neuroscience literature that underpins what we know about human cognitive processing, the neuroscience of emotion, motivation and cognition, and published quite widely in that field. So I managed to make at least the outlines of my biological case for the existence of such things as archetypes and profound narratives. And I think it’s the best reflection of the current science as well as working on the metaphorical dom- on the metaphorical level of analysis.

18:57 But people will be able to judge that for themselves once we release the videos. And that should be something in August, sometime in August, once they’re, you know, produced properly and the sound is edited and all of that. And these archetypes help us survive at the end of the day.

19:10 Well, that’s the argument is that, well, great, see, great stories are patterns of adaptive behavior. They’re representations of patterns of adaptive behavior, and they work at multiple levels of, that’s called, I don’t know how to pronounce it, I’ve only read it, polysemy, p o l y s e m y. The fact that a great story is true at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously. And you see this even in popular culture, like if you watch a show like The Simpsons, an animated show, kids can watch it, but there’s content for adults, you can interpret it at different levels of analysis.

19:44 And truly great stories can be interpreted at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously. That’s actually what gives them depth. So when you say a story is deep, here’s a meaning. Oh, look, here’s another. Oh, look, here’s another one.

19:58 And then the meanings often exist in parallel with one another, and great stories and the really archetypal stories are like that. The story of Moses, for example, that’s an archetypal story. The idea that people escape from tyranny, go through a crisis, spend time wandering in the desert, are moving towards a better place. It’s like that’s the story of life and it’s encapsulated in that story. I’m going to do a bunch of lectures on the Exodus stories sometime in the next year.

20:23 I already went through Genesis, which seemed to be very, was certainly very useful for me, and lots of people seem to like it.

20:29 You started talking about your father last night and said you really hadn’t talked about that before, and I think it kind of got lost, but talking about how sons kind of emulate and maybe meme their fathers and how this over time has kind of become maybe a representation of a godlike figure, but you kind of got cut off there and I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about that.

20:48 Well, you know, one of the things I tend to do is to look at symbolic representations through the lens of evolutionary biology rather than assuming that these representations are mere superstitions or play no functions. Like we have the idea that there’s a deity that’s fatherlike. So, it’s a disembodied spirit in some sense that’s eternal that has paternal characteristics. It’s like, okay, well, strip it of its metaphysics, only as, I’m not saying that you fundamentally you have to strip it of its metaphysics.

21:21 I’m not making that claim. I’m saying if you strip it of its metaphysics and just look at it as a biological phenomena, it’s like, well, what might the idea that there’s an eternal paternal spirit, what might that be a reflection of? Well, it’s like, well, there’s you imitating your father, but your father imitated his father, and his father imitated his father. And so, in some sense, what your father actually imitated was the pattern of fathers across time.

21:49 And you could think of the transcendent father as the pattern of fathers across time. And it’s the right way to think about it. And it’s even developmentally and neurobiologically correct, because when a child imitates his father in pretend play, you know, you think, well, when you’re pretending, you’re imitating. We’re pretending to be your father. When you’re playing house, for example, you’re imitating your father.

22:12 It’s like, no, if I’m imitating, so if I’m imitating you, I do this, right? So, I’m mimicking what you’re doing with my body. But when I’m pretending to be my father, I’m doing something way more sophisticated than that. I’m observing my father across multiple situations, and then I’m abstracting out the commonalities in behavior and attitude across those situations that make him father, and then I incorporate that and dramatize it in my pretend play. It’s unbelievably sophisticated.

22:44 And so it’s what the child is doing in pretend play, is coming to embody the disembodied spirit of the father. So, so that’s the disembodied spirit, but that disembodied spirit is a reflection in so far as the child is making contact with the father and not just the idiosyncratic personality of his particular father. He’s abstracting out the generality across all those situations. And that generality is in turn a reflection of the imitation of the father going all the way back in time.

23:15 And so you think, well, that is a disembodied spirit. It’s a disembodied spirit that’s incarnated in the collective of fathers across time. And what is that? Well, it’s a judge. That’s for sure.

23:28 It’s a judge. Even when you interact with the hierarchy of men who are currently alive, something can be abstracted out of that. That’s like the patriarchal spirit. And if you don’t think that’s judging you, you are not thinking. It’s absolutely judging you.

23:45 That’s what rank orders you in a hierarchy. That’s even what the feminists accuse our culture of being, that disembodied, judgmental, patriarchal spirit. There’s something to that. Of course, they think of it only as a tyrant, which is a big mistake.

23:59 And so, you’re saying there’s function to that. And that’s a natural selection.

24:03 Well, there’s function in it in so far as society itself is functional. I mean, the feminist critics, the radical leftist feminist critics, to be more precise, and not all of them are even feminist, make the argument that there’s nothing in our hierarchies except tyranny and exclusion. It’s like, well, that’s completely preposterous. They say that while sitting in comfortable armchairs with the electricity on and the water running and no riots in the street and well-fed and well-clothed and protected from their enemies.

24:35 I mean, it’s so preposterous. I can’t even believe we’ve even come to this point.

24:39 That’s because of hierarchies that they’re not looking at, of course. And of course, the hierarchies tend towards corruption and blindness, obviously. And when they become corrupt, then they’re more likely to be dominated by people who use power as their fundamental mode of being. But that doesn’t mean the bloody hierarchy is nothing but a corrupt tyranny of power to begin with. I mean, that’s the definition of the ultimate authoritarian state.

25:04 And if you think Western society is the ultimate authoritarian state, then your level of naivety is something on the order of miraculous. So

25:16 How come we need Jordan Peterson to defend this hierarchy and even to point it out? How come there was kind of a vacuum of this before? And now I’m waiting in line last night to go in there and men are talking about how these observations changed their lives and they’re turning them into, you know, different types of human beings. Why? Where was this before?

25:37 And why were you the one to step up and say, “Hey, wait a second. Look at this. What you’re saying is wrong. We need to, you know, take a look at this hierarchy and see it.”

25:45 I think that, well, Nietzsche claimed that Christianity died at the hands of its own insistence on truth. So imagine that we produced a religious structure across time that elevated truth to the highest level. So then truth became everything, well, and our capacity for truth expanded, you know, and we discovered objective truth and we discovered scientific truth. Then we noticed technology, then we noticed that all of these

26:14 Stories upon which our faith in truth were based weren’t objectively true, or not in any simple sense, and we started to take the stories apart. Well, where do you stop? You take the stories apart. You take the stories apart. You take the stories apart till you’re left with no superordinate value structure.

26:32 Well, then when do you stop with the criticism? Well, we haven’t stopped with the criticism. The West has embarked on a radical self-critique and my sense is it’s gone too far. It’s like we’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Well, what’s the baby?

26:47 The baby is not a skeleton. That’s the thing about the West, is that we have enough food for everyone. We’ve produced cultures. We’ve produced structures, hierarchies that certainly have an oppressive element because hierarchies do, but every human society is a hierarchy. And most hierarchies produce nothing but misery.

27:08 Our hierarchies produce a certain amount of misery and a bunch of wealth. It’s like that’s something unless you’re a fan of starvation and misery. And so my sense is let’s temper the criticism with a little bit of open-eyed gratitude. I mean, Jesus, things are pretty good. Even though things are still terrible, they’re way better than they were.

27:28 And not only that, and this is one of the things that’s so amazing and remarkable and that we really haven’t woken up to. Not only are they way better than they were, they’re getting better around the world for everyone at a rate that’s nothing short of miraculous. It’s absolutely beyond belief. So, you know, the life expectancy in Africa, no, that’s not right. The child mortality rate in Africa is now what the child mortality rate was in Europe in 1950.

28:00 I was like, that should be a headline on every newspaper. It’s absolutely miraculous, you know, and it looks like given the UN definition of absolute poverty that there won’t be anyone in the world who’s absolutely poor by 2030. We’ve halved the number of people in the world who are in absolute poverty between the year 2000 and the year 2012. Three years faster than the most optimistic UN projection suggested that we should have it cut it in half. So,

28:29 So you want to tell these social justice warriors and feminists to say, hey, let’s give credit for what this hierarchy is doing and not just rip it down.

28:37 Well, exactly. It’s like, well, let’s be sensible about this. Okay. So, let’s talk about hierarchies, which I do in the first chapter. I first of all, I say, look, let’s start with the notion that hierarchy is not the secondary consequence of the West or the patriarchy or capitalism.

28:55 That’s wrong. Okay. How do we know it’s wrong? Well, animals organize themselves into hierarchies. So, it’s obviously not a mere consequence of human construction, much less human construction of Western society over the last 500 years.

29:10 It’s in animals. Well, how long has it been around? Well, how about 350 million years? How’s that for not a consequence of capitalism? Yeah, that’s pretty damn solid.

29:22 And so that’s why I talk about the relationship between crustacean hierarchies and the simple crustacean nervous system and our nervous system, which share a number of quite remarkable similarities. And the point isn’t that we should behave like lobsters, of all the idiotic criticisms. It’s that there’s a neurobiological continuity that demonstrates that hierarchies are so ancient that our brains have adapted to them as if they are permanent elements of reality.

29:51 And that’s part of the archetype of the father, actually, is the permanent reality of the hierarchy. So the question is, well, why are there hierarchies? And the answer is, well, there’s an answer for animals and there’s an answer for humans. It’s you have to organize a hierarchy when you’re pursuing scarce resources because otherwise it’s just a war. That’s the alternative.

30:10 There’s either a hierarchy of access, which is why chickens have a pecking order. The top chickens eat first. Doesn’t mean the bottom chickens don’t eat. Although it does mean that if there’s not enough food, and all the chickens accept the pecking order because otherwise they have to fight. Say, well, that’s pretty rough on the bottom chickens, and yeah, but not as rough as being pecked to death.

30:31 Like it’s rough, but it’s not as rough as constant battle. So a hierarchy in no small part is the alternative to Hobbes, to the Hobbesian state of everyone against everyone else. And so that’s one part reason for hierarchy. Another reason is, well, if you’re going to pursue, let’s assume that you have to pursue something useful to stay alive. I don’t think anybody’s going to disagree about that because if you just sit around, you’re going to die.

30:57 So you have to go out there and do things. Well, where? Well, in the social environment. Oh yes, with other people. So you have to cooperate and compete with other people to do something useful.

31:06 Well, then you’re going to make a hierarchy around that goal. And in that hierarchy two things are going to happen. A small number of people are going to be the best at doing that.

31:15 So that’s an iron law.

31:16 That’s why there’s hard for people to accept some not everyone is a basketball star. Not everyone is a soccer star. Not everyone is a great musician. Not everyone is an artist. There’s lots of hierarchies.

31:28 But in each hierarchy, it’s a small number of people at the top who do most of the productive work.

31:32 Everyone can’t win first and not, and certainly not in every game, right? Maybe if we had enough games, there’s a game for everyone where they could be first. And a pluralistic society does in fact manage that quite well. But then the other thing that happens is not only does a small minority of people do most of the productive work in the hierarchy, but most of the gains of the hierarchy go to a small percentage of the people. You see that with wealth distribution.

31:55 Okay? So, and that’s a problem. The problem is dispossession. Here’s the creative hierarchy. Most people aren’t contributing.

32:02 Okay? What the hell are they going to do? That’s a big problem. Here’s the wealth hierarchy. Most people aren’t wealthy.

32:08 So what are the people at the bottom going to do? The left has a role in serving as a voice for those who are dispossessed by the hierarchy. But the left goes too far when it says, “Well, then let’s get rid of the hierarchy.” It’s like, “No, because the hierarchy is the tool that enables people to do productive labor in a social environment.” So that’s just that’s too much.

32:30 You’ve gone too far. You need to be grateful for the hierarchy at the same time that you’re wary of its proclivity for tyranny. And that’s what you do. You tell people when they’ve gone too far.

32:41 Well, that’s what I’m trying to do is to say, trying to delimit. Well, we’ve kind of figured out when the right-wingers go too far. You know, right-wing identity politics devolves into claims of ethnic and racial superiority and moral justification on the grounds of those for actions based on those categories.

32:58 When do the left-wingers go too far? Oh, we don’t know. Well, first of all, we certainly know that they can go too far. If you don’t re- if you don’t understand that the left has gone too far, then you’re woefully ignorant or you’re willfully blind. Those are the two categories.

33:14 Example of that was C-16, which when we first started hearing you about, you two years ago, was just to do with transgender pronouns.

33:21 Well, it was for me. Yeah. Because my sense was, well, what’s this law about? Well, it’s about transgender rights. It’s like, well, that’s one of the things it’s about, but it’s also about the government’s decision that they can use that there’s a certain morality of compassion.

33:37 Hypothetical compassion can be used to compel the contents of voluntary speech. It’s like, sorry, no, I’m not going there. You guys jumped out of your box. You’re in a domain you shouldn’t be playing with. I don’t give a damn if you’re justifying it with your false compassion, because what I saw it as was an extension of this leftist, this leftist hierarchical critique rather than anything that had to do with true compassion.

34:00 And so I might have been wrong about that. But I was correct in a couple of assumptions. One is that had never been attempted before in the history of British common law, of English common law. It was also made illegal by the Supreme Court in 1942 in the United States, and there was no precedent for that sort of thing in Canadian law. So the idea that that was an extension of governmental power beyond what had been attempted previously in Canadian society and in English common law history was definitely true.

34:29 And it’s the free speech thing that really bothered you when people try to regulate the free speech.

34:34 That was a big alarm.

34:35 Well, it wasn’t even that they were trying to regulate it. We have some regulation of free speech already, right? Libel laws, for example, defamation and so forth. And those are justifiable. Free speech doesn’t mean you can lie about someone in a harmful way, for example.

34:53 But maybe you could even make a case that hate speech laws are justifiable, even though I don’t think they’re justifiable, because it raises the specter of who defines hate. And that’s actually a fatal flaw. But it’s a whole different thing to say, “Well, here’s some things you can’t say,” than to say, “Here’s some things you have to say.” It’s like, “No, sorry. What do you mean by have to?”

35:17 Exactly. It’s like, and my sense in that situation was, “I’m not doing that. So, you are not compelling what I’m going to say. You’ve gone too far.” And I think of that, I think that I have a responsibility to the content of my speech that as far as I’m concerned is sacred.

35:36 It’s like no politics in the realm of compelled speech. Period. There’s no way you’re going there. Especially not if you’re motivated by your goddamn ideology. So that was a line as far as I was concerned.

35:50 You could have been fired. You almost were.

35:53 Well, the university was in an awkward position. I know because there was already provincial legislation that compelled such speech, and so now it was moving to the federal level. I made the case in the videos that I might have been breaking the law by making the videos criticizing the legislation, because as far as I could tell when I read the surrounding policies, that was one implication. And so then my critics came out of the woodwork and said, “Oh, Peterson is exaggerating the danger of this law,” which is of course possible.

36:24 But then the university lawyers viewed what I was doing and they looked at the policies and they thought, “No, what he’s doing might be illegal and we could be held responsible for it.” Because that was part of the legislation, that your employer is as liable for what you say as if you said it. Even if you didn’t know that your employee said it, and even if the results of what they said weren’t intended by the employee, that’s the law. Absolutely appalling law, but that’s the law.

36:52 So obviously the university lawyers read the law and they thought, oh, we can’t let them do this, because if it’s illegal then we’re also breaking the law. So they sent me two letters saying you have to stop. So then I read those letters online because they were very badly crafted. Now I told the university when they gave me the letters, I told my chairman, I said, I read the letter, I said this isn’t accurate. You should, if you’re going to go after me, you should take this letter back and rewrite it properly.

37:24 So I gave them due warning. She said, “No, the letter stands, like, fine.” So then I read it online with all of its inaccuracies and internal contradictions. So and then, well, then I negotiated with the dean. The dean was a fine guy, like, and there weren’t malevolent people behind this at the level of the senior administration, although there was plenty of that at the level of the activist types, which are, you know, the universities are full of.

37:50 Then they agreed that we could have a debate about the issue, and that turned into a discussion rather than debate, but that, you know, whatever, that was a step in the right direction, and then they left me alone. And then I know from what I’ve heard, this is all scuttlebutt from behind the scenes, that the consequence of that was that the University of Toronto has actually quite intensely reaffirmed its commitment to free speech rather than equity and so forth. So in the aftermath of all that they tilted in the right direction.

38:19 That’s been what I’ve been made aware of. So they didn’t do too bad. I understand why the scandal erupted because they were put in a rough place. Now, I don’t feel that sorry for the university, because the university has also generated the sort of people who made those damn laws. So, they’re hoisted by their own petard, so to speak.

38:42 And that’s increasingly happening, because when you make bad rules, then the people who make the rules get tangled up in them, too.

38:49 And this is that leftist agenda that’s promoted at universities that’s kind of ripping down these hierarchies without actually giving them proper thought process.

38:56 Yeah. No respect. No, no respect. No gratitude. No understanding.

39:00 No respect. No gratitude.

39:01 How did you get from there to where you are now? I mean, the last two years has kind of been a whirlwind. This book, I think, is the bestselling book in the whole world in the last 6 months.

39:10 Yeah.

39:11 How did this all happen?

39:14 Well, that’s a good question. You know, one answer is, well, it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. You know, I mean, it’s sort of like this, but it’s sort of like this, you know, like I wrote a book before this. It’s a difficult book, but it had its domain of impact.

39:33 That’s a meaning.

39:33 Yeah. I mean, I taught from that book for 30 years. So, I have lots of students distributed out there. It’s, you know, what would, how many, 300 a year for 25 years. So, it’s 7,500 people.

39:45 7,500 to 10,000 people. So that’s not no people. There was a television series made about Maps of Meaning in Canada, and so that would have been another 100,000 people, something like that. I was a commentator on a television program, a very good news program on public television again, and accrued a certain viewership because of that. I did a number of lectures for a show called Big Ideas, and there were several hundred thousand people, I would say in total, perhaps more, that were exposed to those, and those turned out to be quite popular.

40:16 Even though there were 200 such lectures, they were always in the top 10. And so there was this, and then when I made these videos, I’d also put pretty much all of my courses for the last three or four years plus a course I taught back in 1993 online on YouTube.

40:32 Early adopter of YouTube. All of your IP was out there. All your thoughts were out there publicly.

40:36 That’s right. A few people did that.

40:38 That’s right. And by April of 2016, which was 6 months before the political stuff broke, I’d already had a million views. And a million is, well, if you sell a million books that’s an overwhelming bestseller. So what’s a million views on YouTube worth? Who knows?

40:54 But the answer isn’t nothing. So there was all, and then when people came after me, when I took my, let’s say political stance, which is really a philosophical, I really think it’s a theological stance, not even a philosophical stance, because what I saw in that legislation was a sin against logos. Like it was a crime against free speech. So there was, it was legally inappropriate. It was philosophically inappropriate, but it was inappropriate all the way down.

41:26 Do not constrain people’s conscience. It’s expressed in their voluntary dialogue. You’re messing around with their soul. It’s like you don’t get to do that. And so, well, so when this scandal erupted around that, you know, and I was pilloried by some journalists and vilified by many students and faculty members who wrote petitions trying to get me fired and all of that, I had 300 hours of YouTube content.

41:53 And so people could go, well, who is this man who’s probably crazy, because like any Canadian that criticizes the Canadian legislative system is probably unhinged because it’s a pretty good country. It’s not the sort of thing we’re accustomed to in Canada, worrying about our legislation. So, if you stand up and say there’s something crazy going on here, the crazy thing that’s going on is probably you. But I have…

42:16 You’re not the typical Canadian.

42:17 Yeah. Well, perhaps not, but I had all those YouTube videos online so people could go and see what kind of reprehensible creature I was. And it turned out that, you know, I’d made everything I said to students fundamentally in my whole teaching career completely accessible publicly, and there were no smoking pistols. So that put people in a kind of a conundrum. It’s like, well, he isn’t obviously a radical of any sort.

42:44 Well, I am in some sense, but not in any conventional sense, an unconventional radical, I suppose.

42:51 And then on top of all this, you kept doubling down and going and putting yourself out there, putting your ideas out there, developing everything further, writing books. So, you know, you kind of put the pedal to the metal when you…

43:00 Yeah. Well, the book was well underway when all of this happened, you know, because I’ve been writing 12 Rules for about the last four years, something like that. But yeah, you know, things, well, what the first event that was really part of the snowball, there’s this old saying, you know, from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. And it’s the Matthew principle, to those who have everything more will be given. At some point you hit this positive feedback cycle where one thing reinforces another thing.

43:29 And the first of those, the first manifestation of that was probably the views on YouTube. The million views, or maybe it was a million and a half by the time I made those other videos. It’s like that’s a lot. A million. It’s one in every 7,000 people.

43:45 It’s a lot. It’s a big number. So that was already there. But then there was a demonstration, a first of all demonstration against me at the university and then a pro-free speech demonstration that I was invited to speak at. So I went and spoke at it and the activists really disrupted it.

44:01 They swiped the microphone and blasted white noise, and most of them were just, you know, kids, young adults protesting. But there were some nasty people there and I could see who they were and they were out for serious trouble. Most of them were men and they were there in the hope that mayhem would emerge, and so I could see, and one of them was the guy who was blasting the white noise and so forth. And that was all filmed not by me but by people who were there, and a lot of it by the activists themselves.

44:33 And then afterwards I came down after the demonstration was over to talk to the cops to make sure that nothing too stupid had happened. And I was accosted on the way back into the building by a group of activists and they filmed the whole interaction. And the reason they filmed it was to discredit me, and so then they put the film up and that went viral. But it didn’t discredit me, it discredited the people who made the video.

44:54 This happens a lot with your media parents.

44:56 Yeah, it does. Including one on Channel 4 in London.

44:58 Yes, it’s happened a lot.

44:59 What does that say when they record something and don’t realize it’s discrediting them?

45:04 Well, that’s another example of the utility of free speech. It’s like, here’s what happened. Everybody had their say. Everybody got to listen. What’s the verdict?

45:16 Well, hopefully, the hope is that the collective opinion is sovereign. Wise and sovereign. Well, hopefully it is. What does it say? It says that people evaluated the occurrence in its totality and decided who they were going to believe.

45:40 And so far, I’ve been fortunate in those encounters. And I would say, without serious exception, everyone that’s gone after me has done themselves in to some degree.

46:00 Why are you so vilified and misrepresented?

46:03 Oh, well, that’s easy. I mean, first of all, some of that’s justifiable, you know, like if I stand up and say a huge swath of the university has become corrupt and there’s these legislative occurrences in Canada that are unacceptable. The first response is, why the hell should we assume that you’re not just crazy? And so then how do you find out? Well, you say, “Well, you might be crazy like this or like this or like this or like this or like this or like this.

46:30 Prove you’re not.” Okay, so that’s harsh, but there’s an element of it that’s reasonable inquiry, right? Because the stakes are high. So, there’s that, and that would just be part of normal investigation in some sense, like characterological testing. And then the next part is, well, the people that I’m really going after, the ideas that I’m really going after are those that animate the radical collectivist leftists.

46:59 And I’m not a friend of that ideology, even a little bit. And so it’s in the best interests of the people who’ve identified themselves with that ideology, or who have allowed themselves to become possessed by the ideology, which is a better way of thinking about it, to make the case that I’m so far on the other end of the spectrum out there with the Nazis that no one reasonable ever has to listen to me. So that’s what they claim, because if I’m reasonable, or even worse seen to be reasonable, and I’m criticizing their ideology, then what that indicates is that reasonable people who are seen to be reasonable have an issue with that ideology.

47:41 And so, of course, they’re completely terrified about that, because a, to take that seriously would be to question the ideology, and b, it’s not in their best interest from the perspective of power. So that’s the plus, it’s easier. That’s the final thing. It’s like, well, and I’ve done many television interviews now where the entire dialogue is about my alt-right views, which are non-existent. But it’s a lot easier to think, well, here’s the left.

48:09 I kind of understand that. Here’s the right. I kind of understand that. This person is here. I don’t need to know anything about them because I know everything about the context.

48:18 And so I actually don’t have to think during the discussion. And so a lot of mainstream television interviews in particular are exactly of that form. Here’s a bunch of things you think. It’s like, well, no, that happened in Channel 4.

48:30 Right.

48:31 But what was so amazing about that interview, what should have happened really was that the interviewer should have tried that on me six times, noticed that it didn’t work, and had a conversation. But what happened was, I think it was 40 minutes. The entire interview was nothing but groundless accusations, and then one failure on her part because she asked me why I had the right to offend people and I said, “Well, that’s the same right you exercise as your profession.

49:04 So, what do you do?” I said, “Essentially that. What the hell are you doing asking me that question?” And she had no answer for that. And I think the reason, because that was another one of these events that went seriously viral, right?

49:17 I think 10 million people have watched that online and at least another 40 million in cuts of it in various forms.

49:24 Yeah.

49:24 And I think what that was in some sense was the revelation of the dying gasps of the mainstream media. It’s like, oh, this is what it’s like. It’s like, oh, we’re done with that.

49:37 What’s it like being the bad guy and having everyone try to take pot shots at you? Because I see a lot of videos and you’re on stage and people seem like they’re just trying to be the guy that attacks Jordan and gets one over on him. Yeah, that must be exhausting.

49:52 Well, it is. It is. It is exhausting. I would say the most stressful thing I do is do mainstream media interviews. It’s really stressful.

50:02 And it’s so stressful that while I’ve curtailed a fair bit of it and I’m really thinking of not doing them, there’s still, I’m doing far fewer of them, right?

50:13 And I think I’ve hit the point of diminishing utility anyways in terms of communication.

50:18 But even the ones that go wrong, quote unquote, even end up going right.

50:22 Well, that’s the thing. That’s the thing, is like it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to allow those who consider themselves your enemies to make their case. Now, it’s hard because many people who have come after me are far from stupid. And so, it’s not like they can’t make their case with a fair bit of force and, what would you call it, rational structuring. So, and then there is, you know, if you’re in a boxing match, having to defend yourself is effortful, you know, because people could definitely land a punch and sometimes do, but

50:58 And you’ve said before, you’re not perfect. You get emotional sometimes.

51:00 Oh, yeah. React.

51:01 Well, I’m wrong about all sorts of things and I’m not perfect in my character either. So, you know, and well, no one is. And so the accusation there’s something wrong with you is like, yeah, true enough, man. And so usually you’re not pushed to the point where that becomes a fatal flaw, let’s say, but if you’re making a wide public claim, then even a small flaw might be regarded as fatal. But you know, the other thing too is that I generally assume goodwill on the part of the people that I’m talking to.

51:34 And sometimes that really works because it’s not like all the journalists I’ve talked to have gone after me. There’s been lots of, especially columnists, people who have independent opinions in media. They’re few and far between now, but there’s a handful of them in Canada who are still very influential. Virtually all of Canada’s great independent journalists have come out in support of me in one way or another. So, you know, it’s not journalists, it’s some journalists, maybe a higher proportion of journalists than certainly than of the general population.

52:08 And then of course I have unbelievably widespread public support and my tour is like ridiculously positive. It’s still the lectures, the discussions I have with the people who are coming to see me in this 12 Rules for Life tour. It’s so positive. It’s way better than the bad things are bad. So that’s really helpful.

52:33 You get emotional when these people come and tell you their stories afterwards, right?

52:37 Well, God, how could you not? You know, I mean, I think, you know, last night after the O2 thing, there was at least five people, I would think, five people in the lineup who, you know, they leaned in and said, just above a whisper, said, “I would be dead if I hadn’t encountered your material.” You know, and they’re emotional when they say that. It’s not like they’re broadcasting it to their friends, you know, it’s they were at the brink of suicide. And that’s a very common comment.

53:05 And even if that isn’t the comment, then it’s very, very frequently, you know, I was in a bad place in my life for these reasons. And

53:14 I think I could have used this book about 20 years ago, Jordan. You know, I had kind of grown up with the American dream and I was trying to really amass as much personal wealth as I could possibly get. And as you know, went to Wall Street and pretty much picked up, you know, an alcoholic habit along the way. A bit of nihilism, depression, ended up with a heroin habit and an overdose. And I’m looking at these things and I kind of solved the drug problem and then came to London and kind of played it out again to where it came to where I was single, no family, depressed, still alcoholic.

53:49 And it wasn’t actually till I started doing this, which was lesson seven, pursue what’s meaningful, where everything changed and all of those things melted away. I became a father of two. I don’t have any issues with substances anymore. And as I read your book, I’m thinking I really needed this 20 years ago.

54:05 Yeah. Well, that chapter seven, you know, in some sense that’s the linchpin of everything that I’ve written. And one of the things I’ve been discussing with my audience is, well, why do meaningful things? Well, first of all, what is meaning? But then why do meaningful things?

54:20 And the answer is, well, because life is suffering and malevolence. It’s ineradicable at its core. It’s like that will take you out. Make no mistake about it. You need to be armed with virtue in order for that not to turn into hell.

54:41 Really, you really need that. And it isn’t just your hell. That’s bad enough. And that can be really bad, especially when you’re contributing to it, right? Because then not only are you suffering, but you know you’re the agent that’s producing the suffering.

54:54 And then maybe that’s not just for you. It’s like you’re taking out your family if you’re really good at it. You’re taking out large swaths of your community. That’s hell. It’s like, and that’s real.

55:03 And no one with any sense and any experience has any doubt that that’s real. And then they all could easily think of how even though it’s already bad, you could make it way worse. Everyone knows that. So what’s the bulwark against that? Nobility of purpose.

55:20 That’s it. You have that, then you have something to set against the suffering and the malevolence, and you need it, it isn’t optional. That’s not optional. You cannot live without it. Not without…

55:33 It’s not optional. Right.

55:34 Well, that’s why it’s such a deep instinct, right?

55:36 It’s an instinct, meaning it’s the instinct of life. My life is meaningless. It’s the spirit has gone out of you. It’s like, well, me, but you know, modern people, it’s part of this process of criticism. We’ve criticized the idea of meaning so much that we don’t really believe in it anymore.

55:52 It’s like, well, that’s fine. You cannot believe it, but try living without it. See how far you get with that. So, in the case that I’ve been making to people, which they find entirely credible, it’s partly the hell case that I just laid out. It’s like, okay, you need a reason to get out of bed on a terrible day.

56:10 Okay, what’s that reason going to be? Well, let’s think it through. You know people who can get out of bed on a terrible day. Do you admire them? Yes.

56:19 What are those people like? Are they taking responsibility for themselves? Definitely. Do they have excess capacity? So, they’re taking responsibility for other people?

56:29 Yeah. Are they doing difficult things? Yes. Obviously, the more you respect them, the more you also see that they’re doing difficult things and doing them well. So, what does that mean?

56:39 Do some difficult things. Do them well. Then you justify your miserable existence. And people, you can lay that argument out to an audience of 3,000 people. A lot of them are there because they’re trying to set their houses in order philosophically and religiously and practically all at the same time.

57:01 It’s what they want. You say, you lay out that argument to people, they go, “Yep, right.” So, pick up your goddamn burden and walk up the hill. Yep. I get it.

57:13 And people do get it. And it’s not surprising because that’s the alternative to hell. And so that is what’s expressed in our deepest religious ideas. That’s the idea of the, that’s the idea that’s symbolically represented in the crucifixion. It’s like, accept the burdensome condition of suffering voluntarily and you transcend it.

57:38 It’s like, wow, really? Is that how it works? It’s like, yes, that’s actually how it works. And that’s a miracle that that’s how it works.

57:46 And the only way it works. So, people need to take seriously right now getting meaning in their life because while they don’t have it, they’re destroying themselves

57:52 And others.

57:53 And others. And I can attest to that.

57:55 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, people can attest to that. Like if you’re really naive and a child still and a protected child at that, maybe you think, “No, life isn’t that hard.” It’s like, not only is it that hard, it’s even harder than you think.

58:10 So you’re going to be tested, that’s for sure. And if you have a sustaining meaning, then there’s, well, Nietzsche said himself, he who has a why can bear any how. Yes. And young men apparently in particular, I think, because young women are already being encouraged in a variety of ways, although they certainly have their own set of difficult problems in our society. We have failed to distinguish between the improper power drive of masculinity, let’s say, and the absolutely necessary drive to competence.

58:51 And so now we don’t encourage young men to the degree that we should to become competent because we’ve conflated that with contributions to the destructive patriarchal tyranny. And that’s of no use to anyone except those who wish to destroy competence under the guise of undermining tyranny. So, and you might say, well, no one wants to destroy competence. It’s like, that just shows how much you know about how the world works.

59:16 And that’s why you’re so vehement in these arguments because you see this being destroyed.

59:20 It’s the future of our…

59:22 Future.

59:23 It’s the future.

59:23 Oh, yes. For everyone. Absolutely.

59:26 Talk to me about malevolence. You’re one of the few people that tries to remind us of our own innate malevolence. And last night on the stage, I think Douglas asked you something that you hate. And I think you I think you said, it’s hard to hear. The fact that a prison guard at Auschwitz could do that job and be happy about it.

59:45 Could enjoy it?

59:46 Strangely enough, on Friday, I had a Holocaust survivor sitting in that chair and it was Eva Schloss. She’s 89 years old. On her 15th birthday, she was snatched out of hiding in Amsterdam and taken to Auschwitz.

59:58 She talked me through that day of being separated from her mother and her father and her brother and it was tremendous. But we tend to forget that there is this malevolence inside of us. A lot of us don’t want to talk about it. Don’t want to believe it. No…

1:00:11 Want to remind us of this.

1:00:12 It’s the only way you’re going to surmount it. You have to know it’s there first. You have to look in the darkest. This other theme that I developed with my audiences. Why would you look in the darkest places?

1:00:23 Because in the darkest places, you can find what still shines. If it can shine in the darkest places, then you know it’s a real light. And so you look at the things you don’t want to look at.

1:00:33 You have to look at the things you don’t want to look at. Everything. You have to look at death. You have to look at malevolence.

1:00:39 Well, wow, that’s a good question. I think you have to… My sense was that I wanted to understand why that happened so that I could at least minimize the probability that I would participate in it if the circumstances arose for such a thing to be possible again, because you know it seemed to me that there was a lesson to learn from the Holocaust. We’re always reminded that never forget, we’ve learned our lesson. There’s a lesson to be learned.

1:01:11 It’s like, okay, fair enough, man. What was the lesson? That’s the question. What was the lesson? And the lesson is you’re the Nazi.

1:01:21 That’s the lesson. It’s like, really, really? Oh God, that’s a terrible lesson. But I don’t see another lesson. It’s you.

1:01:34 Well, no one wants to learn that. I mean, that’s what I’ve been teaching my students since 1993. It’s like, if you were there, that would have been you. You think, well, I’d be Oscar Schindler. I’d be rescuing the Jews.

1:01:45 It’s like, “No, I’m afraid not.”

1:01:47 Yeah.

1:01:47 You’d at least not be saying anything, right?

1:01:49 And you might also be actively participating. You might also enjoy it.

1:01:56 You never know. So,

1:01:58 So when we notice that in ourselves or admit that, that should give us the power to get back to these 12 steps to…

1:02:05 Well, hopefully, you know, I’m sure that when you were recovering from your particular bit of hell, that some of that was a matter of being scared straight. It wasn’t only a matter of wanting to do the right thing. In fact, it was probably mostly being scared straight.

1:02:18 Yeah. Scared because I was society ostracized. I was shown by all my friends and family that they wanted nothing to do with me. My own health wasn’t of my concern. But that

1:02:28 That did it.

1:02:28 That was the pain and something clicked in my brain. But it was disciplines, daily disciplines that got me this far and then finding the meaning. Those are the two things that got me back.

1:02:39 Yeah. Well, you need both of those things. You need the overarching meaning and you need the structure, the discipline. You need both those things.

1:02:46 That’s why, you know, there’s calls in that book to set your house in order.

1:02:50 It’s like you’ve got a problem with the world. Hey man, no wonder you have a problem with the world. Like the world is a pretty rough place and it could use some work. It’s like, have you done all your work? If the answer to that is no, then I would say put in order what you can put in order.

1:03:09 So many people are looking to you for these lessons. Sometimes you seem more of a preacher than a teacher. Do you feel that way sometimes? And is that what you should be? Or are you becoming that person?

1:03:21 Well, whether or not I should be that, it’s hard to say. I mean, see, my sense as a professor, first of all, I am a clinical psychologist, and that’s indistinguishable for me from my identity as a professor, because I’m specifically a clinical psychologist and a professor, right? And so I take both of those roles, not only do you take them seriously, but they actually define me in many ways because I’ve been both of those things for a very long time now.

1:03:51 Well, and I’m a behavioral clinical psychologist, at least in part, that was my fundamental training. And so behaviorists have a kind of a rule, which is, make the abstract practically implementable. That’s the basic ethos of behavioral psychology. It’s like, well, you have a problem. Okay, what’s the problem?

1:04:08 What are its constituent elements? What are the smallest implementable steps that we could take to start to address the problem? That’s how a behaviorist thinks. So when I’m dealing with high-level abstractions, I’m always thinking, okay, how do we decompose this into the smallest possible unit of useful realization, which of course is what happens in 12 Rules, because it ranges from the very abstract theological, which is sort of the highest level of abstraction, to the intensely practical, tries to bridge the whole gap.

1:04:36 Well, there’s an ethical element to that which I suppose would overlap to some degree with the religious enterprise. I don’t know what to say about that except that I don’t see any way around it. You know, it’s my, I think that the purpose of education in the humanities is to produce ethical citizens. That’s the purpose. And so there’s the teaching of ethics that’s part and parcel of that.

1:05:12 Now in science it’s a slightly different story, but that’s okay because I also bridge, I also walk, I also function within both of those domains, but even when I’m talking about scientific data I’m usually putting it in a practical context. It’s like, well, here’s a piece of scientific information. Here’s why we know it’s true. Here’s hypothetically why knowing that would be useful to the things that you’re doing, because, well, because, well, partly because there’s a hundred thou-, I don’t know how many, there’s a thousand scientific articles published a day and no doubt that’s a radical underestimate.

1:05:47 It’s like, well, why should you read one of them? Well, why that one? Well, it has to be something like, because it has direct relevance to your life. Here’s a scientific fact. Why should you remember that?

1:05:58 Because if you know it, then it’ll change the way you look at things and it’ll change the way that you act in the world. That’s what makes it memorable. And so when I’m lecturing, it’s always like that. I don’t present information to people unless I believe that it will beneficially alter their perceptions or their actions.

1:06:17 That’s what makes it meaningful. And it seems to me that that’s otherwise you’re just listing dead facts,

1:06:25 Right?

1:06:25 So you want people to take action. If they don’t, it’s more of a waste of your time.

1:06:29 Well, it’s more of a waste of their time, right?

1:06:31 But they’re also not going to be engaged in it, because the people find information that’s useful to them engaging. That’s part of that manifestation of that spirit of meaning. And so my sense is that if the lecture isn’t engaging, then it’s… An engaging lecture can be wrong. Okay.

1:06:52 But if a lecture isn’t engaging, then it’s also wrong. It’s wrong in a more sophisticated way. Might be factually correct, but there’s still something wrong with it because a lecture is also, it’s a dramatic act. It’s a lecture theater. It’s not a theater by accident.

1:07:11 Like it’s a theater because a lecture is a dramatic performance and drama lays out models to emulate. That’s what drama does. And so if you know partly when Sam and I and Douglas were having our discussion last night, part of what’s going on is the content, but a huge part of what’s going on is the modeling of the process by which dialogue occurs. And it’s certainly possible that that’s even more important than the content. You know, I truly believe that part of the reason that people are there, maybe even the primary reason, is to partake in that process of dialogue regardless of the outcome.

1:07:49 So the outcome is important, but it’s not the crucial issue. The crucial issue is to participate in the process. And that’s also the case for life. The crucial issue is to participate in the process.

1:08:00 Right.

1:08:01 So, no less than three times last night, the word psychedelics came up. I was kind of surprised and I wanted to ask you about that. Next week, actually, I’m taking a journey down to Costa Rica and I’m planning three ayahuasca ceremonies. Have you ever done that?

1:08:15 I’ve done it once. No, three times before, five or six years ago.

1:08:17 So, I am fairly terrified, as I think you should be when you…

1:08:22 Absolutely, man.

1:08:23 You know, and again, I feel like I just want to make sure I’m in touch with doing something meaningful. I think sometimes my human brain can trick me into thinking I’m doing something meaningful when in fact I’m doing something

1:08:34 Just beneficial to me.

1:08:35 And I was just wondering what your thoughts were, and that was weird that that came up so many times between you and Sam, and I just wondered what do you think about psychedelics and what do they do and what don’t…

1:08:45 I have no idea what they do.

1:08:47 Okay.

1:08:47 They’re what we don’t understand about psychedelics is a very thick book. They bend the structure of reality and I don’t, I can’t understand what they do. I have no conceptual framework for psychedelics. I have no idea what they are. They could be anything.

1:09:08 I have no idea. They’re unbelievably strange. What they reveal to me is how little we know about everything. And that’s a terrifying thing.

1:09:21 Okay. Something to be investigated further.

1:09:26 With great risk.

1:09:27 Okay.

1:09:28 Now, you know, I mean, it’s interesting. So, the scientific literature certainly indicates that under some circumstances, psychedelic use can produce outcomes that you could regard as beneficial. Psilocybin seems to be a very effective agent to help people stop smoking. So that’s quite interesting because that’s a hard problem and it does kill people. 85% success rate was what was reported in the last investigation if people had a mystical experience.

1:10:00 85% of them quit smoking. It’s like, it’s pretty interesting. I think that they can help you orient yourself morally. But look the hell out. So, you know, you should, in, when people used to approach the Holy of Holies in the Old Testament, they purified themselves ritually.

1:10:23 It’s like, that’s not a bad idea. If you’ve got a lot of unfinished business lurking around in your soul, you might want to clear some of that out before you try to attain wisdom that’s beyond your understanding.

1:10:38 Maybe a way to get in touch with the dark side, possibly.

1:10:41 Well, yes, or to have it get in touch with you. So

1:10:44 To be…

1:10:44 Were the experiences useful?

1:10:46 They were very traumatic and very useful. They pushed me further into giving more, starting a family, becoming less selfish. They were also, you know, difficult, but they taught me a lot about myself and I don’t think I would have figured that out on my own, or it might have taken me a long time.

1:11:01 Yeah. Well, I think that’s a common account of the consequences. What did they do to the way that you looked at the world?

1:11:10 Made me more grateful to be a part of this world. Didn’t feel like it was a burden. Again, I struggled a bit with nihilism as well, just what’s the point of this? It doesn’t matter. But I felt more connected to the human experience and that I played a part in it.

1:11:22 And I think as you probably know from studying alcoholism, I think a lot of alcoholics feel just detached from this world and they use that to soothe that pain. At least I did. And so for this, it got me back in the game and showed me that I needed to be a part of this game and not be on the outside. I thought I could function without being emotionally involved with the rest of the species and I couldn’t. So once I got that meaning online, that’s when nihilism goes away and I feel like a life has…

1:11:49 Well, you know, religious transformation is one of the well-documented modes of treatment for alcoholism. It’s one of the few things that the treatment literature actually indicates works.

1:12:00 Yeah.

1:12:00 So which is, you know, hard to fathom but appears to be the case. So not something that’s not worth serious consideration.

1:12:09 Yeah.

1:12:09 So…

1:12:09 What is Jordan Peterson doing in 5 years? I mean, you’ve been at a breakneck pace these last two years. You seem to be accelerating and accelerating. You’ve changed as a person. You know, I know you’ve got more energy, your diet has changed and all that.

1:12:23 What are your plans for the next 5 years? Can you keep up this pace? Do you need to keep up this pace? Because a lot of people need you at this point. Do you feel that burden sometimes?

1:12:32 Well, it’s a… I don’t feel it as a burden. I wouldn’t say, because the consequences of it are so positive, you know, it’s definitely a responsibility, but that’s okay because with responsibility comes meaning. So that’s the payoff, you know. So the pace I’ve always lived at, like my observation of myself has been that I have two speeds.

1:12:59 One is flat out and the other is off. And flat out is better than off. So, even before all of this happened, like I’ve always had the equivalent of something approximating three full-time jobs. So, because I was a professor and a clinical psychologist, I had pretty heavy practice and I had a lot of graduate students and I had at least one business, usually two, and I was writing and so like I was occupied all the time and I liked that a lot. And so, this is another form of being occupied all the time.

1:13:32 So I will probably keep that up because it looks like it’s in my nature. What that will consist of, I don’t exactly know because it’s not easy under these circumstances to figure out what the true priorities are right now. It’s these tours because it’s crazy not to do it. I have a book to I have a book to publicize, let’s say, to communicate about. There’s lots of people who are depending on that, obviously my publisher and the people who’ve put time and energy into it, and so I have a moral obligation to serve it properly and apart from its utility to me, and which is, and there’s plenty of utility, the lectures as far as I’m concerned, well, there’s this emerging market for long-form philosophical dialogue, why not participate in that?

1:14:24 I’ve always liked lecturing. I could be lecturing at the university but I can lecture in these theaters to a much larger number of people about anything I want. And so that’s a great opportunity. So I’m going to do that until it seems like it’s not the right thing to do. I want to start the lectures that I did on the Bible.

1:14:46 I just did Genesis. I want to do Exodus as soon as I possibly can in so far as I can do that with this touring schedule. I will be signing another book contract sometime in the next three or four months in all likelihood. And so then that’ll be on the horizon. So and other than that, mostly what I want to do is spend time with my family, you know.

1:15:08 So I think I can figure out how to do all that without wearing myself to without wearing myself to the point where I can’t continue to do those things, which is sort of the right limit, right? How hard should you work? As hard as you can sustain. So, but apart from that, like I have no idea what the hell is going to happen in the next 6 months or the next 3 months for that matter, because all of this is completely surreal, including like Dublin’s event, you know, because there was 8,500 people there.

1:15:42 8,500 people came out to hear a talk on the relationship between facts and values. It’s like, okay, that isn’t the world that I knew. So,

1:15:52 Who knows?

1:15:53 It’s exciting. I think it was a big moment last night. What would we be surprised to know that Jordan Peterson does in his spare time?

1:15:59 Build things.

1:16:01 Okay.

1:16:01 Like, I like to renovate houses and I’m a decent amateur carpenter, like with plenty of stress on amateur, but I like to build things and design things and so I like to work with my hands a lot. So, I find that very, one of the things I did when it was really stressful, when my job was on the line, is I must have built like 10 bookshelves for the house because I’d go back there and hammer and saw and drill and, you know, I really like doing that. So, and that’s probably surprising to people because, you know, I’m kind of an abstract academic type, but I can build things and I like doing that and I’ve done lots of house renovations, so I can do, well, I can do pretty much whatever you need to do to work on a house, you know, I can do some plumbing.

1:16:47 I can do some electrical work. I can do some carpentry, some plastering. I’m not good at, I can’t drywall. I can’t do the taping. That actually takes a lot of practice, but so I do like doing that.

1:16:59 I do a lot of that with my wife.

1:17:01 Okay. What scares you?

1:17:03 Saying something stupid and careless. I’m trying very hard not to be careless with my words. So that’s part of that. Well, that’s also partly why I wasn’t very happy with Bill C-16. It’s like I’m very careful with my words.

1:17:23 It’s like, and there as far as I’m concerned, and I do believe this is true. You know, when I decided, and I didn’t decide to make that video lightly, when I made the video and said that I was not going to abide by that law, I meant I don’t think there’s anything you can do to me to get me to abide by that law. Take away my job, you can do you can do whatever the hell you can dream up. It’s not going to make any difference because I’m not abiding by that law.

1:17:52 And so that’s part of the reflection of that fear. It’s like I do believe that you have a sacred responsibility in relationship to what you say. I think that is the sacred responsibility because I do believe that you bring the world into being through communicative speech. That’s the fundamental Judeo-Christian doctrine. I think it’s true.

1:18:13 And I think the world that you bring into being through truth is a good world. So if you want to mess around with your words, then basically what you’re doing is agreeing to bring a substandard reality into existence. And I think that you shouldn’t do that. There’s enough suffering in reality as it is. You want to bring a substandard reality into being, you do that through lies.

1:18:36 And I can’t see how, if you think about that, it’s like how could that not be true? You really, you think you actually really believe that the reality that you engender through lies is preferable to the one that you engender through truth. No one believes that. They might think, “Well, yeah, but it’s a lot more convenient right now if I get to lie.” And certainly that’s often true, but no one believes, not when you push them, that the world constructed through deception is preferable.

1:19:08 So, and I’ve gone right to the bottom on that as far as I’m concerned because I looked at what produced the conditions of Auschwitz, let’s say, and not just Auschwitz, but the enjoyment of Auschwitz, let’s say. That’s as low down into hell as I could go. What brings that about? Deception. So, what does that mean?

1:19:29 You don’t want to go there, don’t lie. So, and that also means you don’t mouth the words of other people. So, especially not if they’re ideologically possessed.

1:19:43 Language is so important.

1:19:44 What keeps you awake at night?

1:19:49 Well, right now, nothing. I pretty much I’m comatose the moment I hit the bed. You know, if something does keep me up at night, it’s usually concerns about whether or not I’ve undertaken my responsibilities properly. Sometimes it’s philosophical conundrums, like I will wake up in the middle of the night thinking about something. No, there’s a problem that I have to solve.

1:20:11 Maybe it has to do with a talk the next day or something. Then I have to get up and write something usually if that happens. So I will wake up because there’s a not so much because there’s a problem on my mind, but because a solution to the problem that’s on my mind has sort of emerged. So I wake up and it’s like, “Oh, I see how those fit together. Oh, I have to get up and write those down.”

1:20:29 Well, that’s what happened when I made those videos because usually I would have written it down. But that night I thought, I woke up and I thought, “Oh God, okay, I got to go and sort through this.” And so I thought, “Well, I’ll try doing that with video and see what happens.”

1:20:43 So I’ll try doing that with a video and see what happens.

1:20:45 This is what happened.

1:20:48 Yeah. No kidding.

1:20:49 And it’s an incredible thing to watch. Yeah. I was just very happy to be a part of that event last night because I think it does show us that something is changing, and like you said, people are smarter than we thought. They appreciate philosophy more than we thought. Nuanced ideas.

1:21:04 And for anyone who’s been involved in long-form content, it’s a great statement for the future.

1:21:07 Definitely. That’s for sure. It’s so, it’s that’s exactly right. You go to something like that and you think, “Hey, look at us, man. We’re not as stupid as we thought.”

1:21:16 Yeah.

1:21:16 You know, and not only that, that goes down way farther than you’d think. Which is why I also like the fact that people can listen because, you know, I do think that obviously reading opens up a huge landscape for people, but it’s a minority taste and a minority ability, but listening, who knows how far down the cognitive chain you could go with listening, a long ways. So, hooray. That’s so good.

1:21:40 Yeah.

1:21:40 And I mean, obviously, you’re discovering that because you have the audience for your video work and for the audio work and all of that. There’s a big market for that. Yeah, super powerful.

1:21:50 Yeah.

1:21:50 Jordan, I always ask everyone a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Jordan, and in the book, you talk about where you grew up in Alberta, and it’s fascinating to know. It was tough living up there. But if you could give that young man a bit of advice based on everything you know now, even the things in this book, what Last question to that 20-year-old that’s watching this out there right now.

1:22:51 You know, has all these ideas bouncing around in their head, so much content. Maybe they’ve read your book and looked into this, but they don’t know what to do sometimes.

1:22:59 Do something, man. Implement the best plan that you have at hand. That’s it. You’ll learn. It won’t be the right plan.

1:23:08 Doesn’t matter. You’ll learn implementing that plan. You’ll learn a whole bunch and then the next plan you make will be better. Implement the best plan you have at hand. Don’t remain in stasis.

1:23:17 You’ll be, you get old way, way faster than you think. Time ticks away, man. Get at it. Get out there in the world. Have your adventure.

1:23:26 It’s one of the things I really learned again when I was lecturing about the Abrahamic stories from Genesis. You know, Abraham in particular, God calls him to an adventure. And Abraham’s pretty old. He should have had an adventure long before. He’s a late starter, man.

1:23:40 He’s a failure-to-launch type, you know, and God basically says, “Get away from your comfort. Get out there in the world. Have an adventure.” And the adventures, man, it’s brutal. You know, the first thing he encounters is a famine.

1:23:53 And the next thing he encounters is a tyranny. They try to take his wife. It’s like, I’m sure he’s thinking, “God, I should go back to my tent.” You know, but that’s the thing, is get the hell out there. Do something.

1:24:05 Fail. Fail while you’re trying. Then you’ll learn why you failed. Then you won’t have to fail again. It’s like, aim at something and progress towards it.

1:24:16 And you know, be willing to change your aim because what the hell do you know? But aim at something and then at least you’re oriented. And you have to aim at something that you believe would be worth trying. So yeah, get at it, man. Don’t waste time.

1:24:31 Get off the sofa. Stop being a spectator. Yeah, get the hell, get the hell out of it

1:24:35 And do something.

1:24:36 Yeah.

1:24:36 The book is 12 Rules for Life. It’s an incredible read. I can’t wait to see what you’re going to be coming out with next. Please take good care of yourself. Stay strong.

1:24:44 And again, thank you for this event last night because it just proved to me that there can be much more of this in the future.

1:24:50 And I was just visualizing all these different types of people on stage and different types of formats, and you know, kind of what we do in here, but you know, for the masses, and it’s a beautiful thing.

1:25:00 It’d be good. Well, we need to figure out, we’ve got lots of changes to contend with coming up. Like I think we could make of the world. There’s so much possibility in front of us now. We could make things way better if we can decide what better would look like and how to do it.

1:25:16 And we need to have a big discussion about that. It’s like, because we’re going, our technological power is just ramping up, man. It’s ramping up and fast. It’s like, what can we do with that? We can make everything better and better and better and better.

1:25:28 It’s like, yes, we could do that. So, let’s figure out how to do it. Let’s have a conversation, the deep conversation necessary to figure out how to set things right. We could do that. So, that would be good.

1:25:42 It’s emotional. And you get emotional just thinking…

1:25:44 Well, I really believe it’s possible.

1:25:45 You know, it’s like it’s there in front of us. If we want to pick it up, we can make the world, we can level it. That’s certainly the case, too. With that much power, we could level it, make everything terrible. But we don’t have to.

1:25:59 We could make everything better. There could be no starving people. That could happen quite quickly. You know, things could be greener, things could be cleaner, things could be more beautiful, everyone could be more productive. You know, everyone could be better educated.

1:26:14 Like these are all things we could actually do. So, let’s talk about how we do it. And I think we do that by each of us. We get our houses together, get our acts together individually, go out in the world, make it better. So, who knows how good we could make it.

1:26:33 Yeah. But it involves a discussion and a real conversation where you’re actually listening to people.

1:26:37 Oh, yeah.

1:26:38 And exchanging ideas.

1:26:38 Oh, definitely. Yeah. That’s the mechanism. Yeah. Because we have to cooperate to do this.

1:26:45 So, we all have to be on board. So, and the only way you do that is through negotiation. So,

1:26:51 Yeah. Well, to this ongoing conversation and discussion. Thank you so much, Jordan. Appreciate it. I wish you all the best.

1:26:56 Come see us again when you’re in London.

1:26:58 Thanks very much.

1:26:58 All right. Thank you.