Jordan Peterson: Nietzsche, Hitler, God, Psychopathy, Suffering & Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #448

1. 0:00 – 0:08

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, his second time on this, the Lex Fridman podcast.

2. 0:08 – 7:49

   Nietzsche

   1. LFLex Fridman0:08

      You have given a set of lectures on Nietzsche as part of the new Peterson Academy, and the lectures were powerful. There's some element of the contradictions, the tensions, the drama, the way you, like, lock in on an idea but then are struggling with that idea, all of that. That feels like it's a, it's a Nietzschean-

   2. JPJordan Peterson0:26

      Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, he was a big influence on me stylistically and, like, in terms of the way I approached writing, and also many of the people that were other influences of mine were very influenced by him. So, I was blown away when I first came across his writings. They're so... They're so, uh, intellectually dense that I don't know if there's anything that approximates that. Dostoevsky maybe, although he's much more wordy. Nietzsche is very succinct, partly 'cause he was so ill, eh, 'cause he would think all day, he couldn't spend a lot of time writing, and he condenses his writings into very short... well, this aphoristic style had, and it's, it's really something to strive for. And, and then he's also an exciting writer, like Dostoevsky, and, and dynamic, and, and romantic in that emotional way, and so it's really something. And I really enjoyed doing the... I did that lecture that you described. That lecture series is on the first half of Beyond Good and Evil, which is a stunning book, and, uh, that was really fun to take pieces of it and then to describe what they mean and how they've echoed across the decades since he wrote them, and yeah, it's been great.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:40

      Taking each sentence seriously-

   4. JPJordan Peterson1:43

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:44

      ... and deconstructing it and really struggling with it. I think underpinning that approach to writing requires deep respect for the person. I think if we approach writing with that kind of respect, you can take Orwell, you can take a lot of writers and really dig in on singular sentences.

   6. JPJordan Peterson2:01

      Yeah, well, those are the great writers because the greatest writers, virtually everything they wrote is worth attending to. You know, and, and I think Nietzsche is, in some ways, the ultimate exemplar of that because (laughs) often when I read a book, I'll mark one way or another. I often fold the corner of the page over to indicate something that I've found that's worth remembering. I couldn't do that with a book like Beyond Good and Evil because every page ends up marked, and, and that's in marked contrast, so to speak, to many of the books I read now where it's... Uh, it's, it's quite frequently now that I'll read a book and there won't be an idea in it that I haven't come across before, and with a thinker like Nietzsche, that's just not the case at the sentence level, and I don't think there's anyone that I know of who did that to a greater extent than he did. So, there's other people who, whose thought is of equivalent value. I've, I've returned recently and I'm going to do a course on... to the work of this Romanian historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, who's not nearly as well known as he should be, and whose work, by the way, is a real antidote to the postmodern nihilistic Marxist stream of literary interpretation that the universities as a whole have adopted, and Eliade is like that, too. I, I was... I used this book called The Sacred and the Profane quite extensively in a book that I'm releasing in mid-November, We Who Wrestle With God, and it's of the same sort. It, it, it's endlessly analyzable. I mean, Eliade walked through the whole history of religious ideas, and he had the intellect that enabled him to do that, and everything he wrote is dream, dreamlike in its density. So, every sentence or paragraph is evocative in an image-rich manner and that also, what would you say, deepens and broadens the scope and that's part of often what distinguishes writing that has a literary end from writing that's more merely technical. Like, the literary writings have this imagistic and dreamlike reference space around them, and it takes a l- a l- it takes a long time to turn a complex image into something semantic. And so if your writing evokes deep imagery, it has a depth that can't be captured merely in words, and the great romantic poetic philosophers, Nietzsche is a very good example, Dostoevsky is a good example, so is Mircea Eliade, they have that quality, and it's a good w- way of thinking about it, you know? And it's kind of interesting from the perspective of technical analysis of intelligence, and there's a good book called The User Illusion, which is the best book on consciousness that I ever read. It explains the manner in which our communication is understandable in this manner. So imagine that when you're communicating something, you're trying to change the way that your target audience perceives and acts in the world, so that's an embodied issue, and... But you're using words which aren't... When obviously (laughs) aren't equivalent to the actions themselves. Can imagine that the words are surrounded by a cloud of images that they evoke and that the images can be translated into actions. Yeah, and, and the greatest writing uses words in a manner that evokes images that profoundly affects perception and action, and that's the... So, I would take the manner in which I act and behave, I would translate that into a set of images, my dreams do that for me, for example, then I compress them into words. I toss you the words, you decompose them, decompress them into the images and then into the actions, and that's what happens in a meaningful conversation. That's a very good way of understanding how we communicate linguistically.

   7. LFLex Fridman5:51

      So, if the words spring to the visual, full visual complexity and then that can then transform itself into action, that's, that's-

   8. JPJordan Peterson6:00

      Yes, and, and change in perception, enter- because-

   9. LFLex Fridman6:02

      Change in perception, yeah, yeah.

   10. JPJordan Peterson6:02

       ... well, those are both relevant and it's an important thing to understand because...... the classic empiricists make the presumption, and it's an erroneous presumption, that perception is a value-free enterprise, and they assume that partly because they think of perception as something passive. You know, you just turn your head and you look at the world and there it is. It's like, perception is not passive. There is no perception without action, ever, ever. And that's a weird thing to understand because even when you're looking at something, like your eyes are moving back and forth. If they ever stop moving for a 10th of a second, you stop being able to see. So your eyes are jiggling back and forth just to keep them active, and then there's involuntary movements of your eyes, and then there's voluntary movements of your eyes. Like, what you're doing with your eyes is very much like what a blind person would do if they were feeling out the contours of a object: you're sampling, and you're only sampling a small element of the space that's in front of you and the element that you choose to sample is dependent on your aims and your goals, so it's value-saturated. And so all your perceptions are action-predicated and partly what you're doing when you're communicating is therefore not only changing people's actions, let's say, but you're also changing the, the strategy that they use to perceive, and so you change the way the world reveals itself for them. See, this is why it's such a profound experience to read a particularly deep thinker, because you could also think of th- your perceptions as the axioms of your thought. That's a good way of thinking about it. A perception is like a, what would you say? It's a thought that's so set in concrete that you now see it rather than conceptualize it. A, a really profound thinker changes the way you perceive the world; that's way deeper than just how you think about it or how you feel about it.

3. 7:49 – 12:55

   Power and propaganda

   1. JPJordan Peterson7:49

   2. LFLex Fridman7:49

      What about not just profound thinkers, but thinkers that deliver a powerful idea? For example, utopian ideas of Marx or utopian ideas, you could say dystopian ideas, of Hitler. Those ideas are powerful and they can saturate all your perception with values, and they, they focus you in a way where there's only a, a certain set of actions.

   3. JPJordan Peterson8:16

      Yeah, right. Even a certain set of emotions, as well.

   4. LFLex Fridman8:20

      And it's intense and it's direct and they're so powerful that they completely alter the perception and the words spring to life.

   5. JPJordan Peterson8:27

      Yeah, it's like a form of possession. So there's two things you need to understand to make that clear. The first issue is that, as we suggested or implied, that perception is action-predicated, but action is goal-predicated, right? You act towards a goal. And these propagandistic thinkers that you described, they attempt to unify all possible goals into a coherent singularity, and there's advantages of that. There's advant- the advantage of simplicity, for example, which is a major advantage, and there's also the advantage of motivation, right? So if you provide people with a simp- simple manner of integrating all their actions, you decrease their anxiety and you increase their motivation. That can be a good thing if the unifying idea that you put forward is valid, but it's the worst of all possible ideas if you put forward an invalid unifying idea. And then you might say, "Well, how do you distinguish between a valid unifying idea and an invalid unifying idea?" Now Nietzsche was very interested in that and I don't think he got that exactly right. But the postmodernists, for example, especially the ones, and this is most of them, with a neo-Marxist bent, their presumption is that the fundamental unifying idea is power, that everything's about compulsion and force essentially, and that that's the only true unifying ethos of mankind, which is... I don't know if there's a worse idea than that. I mean, there, there are ideas that are potentially as dangerous. The nihilistic idea is pretty dangerous, although it's more of a disintegrating notion than a unifying idea. The hedonistic idea that you live for pleasure, for example, that's also very dangerous, but if you wanted to go for sheer pathology, the notion that, and this is Foucault in a nutshell, and Marx for that matter, that power rules everything, not only is that a terrible unifying idea, but it, it fully justifies your own use of power. And, and I don't mean the power Nietzsche talks about. His will to power was more his insistence that a human being is an expression of will rather than a mechanism of self-protection and security. Like he thought of the life force in human beings as something that strived not to protect itself but to exhaust itself in being and becoming. It's- it's like a, it's like an upward-oriented motivational drive even towards meaning. Now he called it the will to power and that had some unfortunate consequences, at least that's how it's translated, but h- he didn't mean the power of motivation that people like Foucault or Marx was, became so hung up on.

   6. LFLex Fridman11:06

      So it's not power like you're trying to destroy the other, it's powerful flourishing of a human being, the creative force of a human being-

   7. JPJordan Peterson11:14

      Yeah, yeah.

   8. LFLex Fridman11:15

      ... in that, in that way.

   9. JPJordan Peterson11:15

      Well, you could imagine that... And, and you should, you could imagine that you could segregate competence and ability. Like, imagine that you and I were going to work on a project. We could organize our project in relationship to the ambition that we wanted to attain and we can organize an agreement so that you were committed to the project voluntarily and so that I was committed to the project voluntarily. So that means that we would actually be united in our perceptions and our actions by the motivation of something approximating voluntary play. Now you could also imagine an- another situation where I said, "Here's our goal and, uh, you better help me or I'm gonna kill your family." Well, the probability is that you would be quite motivated to undertake my bidding, and so then you might say, "Well, that's how the world works. It's power and compulsion." But the truth of the matter is that you can force people to-... see things your way, let's say, but it's nowhere near as good a strategy, even practically than the strategy of, that would be associated with something like voluntary, voluntary joint agreement of pattern of movement strategy towards a goal. See, this is such an important thing to understand because it, it helps you start to understand the distinction between a unifying force that's based on power and compulsion and one that is much more in keeping, I would say, with the ethos that governs Western s- Western societies, free Western societies. There's really a qualitative difference, and it's not some morally relativistic illusion.

   10. LFLex Fridman12:54

       So

4. 12:55 – 17:55

   Nazism

   1. LFLex Fridman12:55

      if we just look at the nuance of Nietzsche's thought, uh, the idea he first introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, uh, of the Ubermensch-

   2. JPJordan Peterson13:05

      Yeah.

   3. LFLex Fridman13:06

      ... that's another one that's very easy to misinterpret because it sounds awfully a lot like it's about power.

   4. JPJordan Peterson13:12

      Yeah, right.

   5. LFLex Fridman13:13

      For example, in the 20th century was misrepresented and co-opted by Hitler to advocate for the, uh, extermination of the inferior non-Aryan races.

   6. JPJordan Peterson13:24

      Yeah, and the dominion of the superior Aryans, yeah, and, yeah, well, and that was partly because Nietzsche's work also was mi- misrepresented by his sister after his death.

   7. LFLex Fridman13:33

      Yeah.

   8. JPJordan Peterson13:33

      But definite... But I also think that there's a fundamental flaw in that Nietzschean conceptualization. So, Nietzsche, of course, famously announced the death of God, but he did that in a manner that was accompanied by dire warnings, like Nietzsche said, because people tend to think of that as a triumphalist statement, but Nietzsche actually said that, he really said something like, "The unifying ethos under which we've organized ourselves psychologically and socially has now been fatally undermined by..." well, by the rationalist proclivity, by the empiricist, empiricist proclivity. There's a variety of reasons. Mostly it was conflict between the enlightenment view, let's say, and the classic religious view, and, and that there will be dire consequences for that, and Nietzsche knew, like Dostoevsky knew that, see, there's a proclivity for the human psyche and for human societies to move towards something approximating a unity because the cost of disunity is high. Fractionation of your goals, so that means you're less motivated to move forward than you might be 'cause there's many things competing for your attention, and also anxiety because anxiety actually signals something like goal conflict. So there's an inescapable proclivity of value systems to unite. Now if you kill the thing that's uniting them, that's the death of God, they either fractionate and you get confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness, or you get social disunity, or and you get social disunity, or something else arises out of the abyss to constitute that unifying force. And Nietzsche said specifically that he believed that one of those manifestations would be that of, um, communism and that that would kill... He said this in Will to Power, that that would kill tens of millions of people in the upcoming 20th century. Like he pre- he, he could see that coming 50 years earlier. Dostoevsky did the same thing in his book The Demons. So this is the thing that the areligious have to contend with. It's a real conundrum because, I mean, you could dispute the idea that our value systems tend towards a unity and our, and our, and society does as well 'cause otherwise we're disunified. But the cost of that disunity, as I said, is goal confusion, anxiety, and hopelessness. So it's like a real cost. So you could dispense with the notion of unity altogether, and the postmodernists did that to some degree. But they pulled off a sleight of hand too where they replaced it by power. Now Nietzsche did... He's responsible for that to some degree because Nietzsche said Wa- with his conception of the overman, let's say, is that human beings would have to create their own values because the value structure that had descended from on high was now shunted aside. But there's a major problem with that, many major problems. The psychoanalysts were the first people who really figured this out after Nietzsche because imagine that we don't have a relationship with the transcendental anymore that orients us. Okay, now we have to turn to ourselves. Okay, now if we were a unity, a clear unity within ourselves, let's say, then we could turn to ourselves for that discovery. But if we're a fractionated plurality internally then when we turn to ourselves we ha- we turn to a fractionated plurality. Well, that was Freud's observation. It's like, well, how can you make your own values when you're not the master in your own house? Like you're a war of competing motivations or maybe you're someone who's dominated by the will to force and compulsion. And so why do you think that you can rely on yourself as the source of values? And why do you think you're wise enough to, to consult with yourself to find out what those values are or what they should be, say, in the course of a single life? I mean, you know it's difficult to organize your own personal relationship, like one relationship in the course of your life, let alone to try to imagine that out of whole cloth you could construct an ethos that would be psychologically and socially stabilizing and last over the long run. It's like... And of course Marx, people like that, the, the re- the people who reduce human motivation to a single axis, they had the intellectual hubris to imagine that they could do that. Postmodernists are a good example of that as well.

5. 17:55 – 34:19

   Religion

   1. JPJordan Peterson17:55

   2. LFLex Fridman17:55

      Okay. But if we lay on the table religion, uh, communism, Nazism, they are all unifying ethos. They're unifying ideas but they're also horribly dividing ideas. They both unify and divide. Religion has also divided people.

   3. JPJordan Peterson18:16

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman18:16

      ... because, I- in the nuances of how, uh, the different peoples wrestle with God, they have come to different conclusions and then they use those conclusions that perhaps the people in power used those conclusions to then start wars, to start hatred, to divide.

   5. JPJordan Peterson18:32

      Yeah, well it's one of the key subthemes in the Gospels, is the subtheme of, uh, the Pharisees. And so, the fundamental enemies of Christ in the Gospels are the Pharisees and the scribes and the lawyers. So, what does that mean? The Pharisees are religious hypocrites. The scribes are academics who worship their own intellect, and the lawyers are the legal minds who use the law as a weapon, and so they're the enemy of the Redeemer. That's the plot, that's a subplot in- in- in the Gospel stories, and that actually all means something. The Pharisaic problem is that the best of all possible ideas can be used by the worst actors in the worst possible way, and maybe this is an existential conundrum is that the most evil people use the best possible ideas to the worst possible ends. And then you have the conundrum of how do you separate out, let's say, the genuine religious people from those who use the religious enterprise only for their own machinations? We're seeing this happen online. Like, one of the things that you're seeing happening online, I'm sure you've noticed this, especially on the right wing troll s- right wing psychopathic troll side of the distribution is the weaponization of a certain form of Christian ideation, and that's often marked, at least online, by the presence of, what would you say? Cliches like Christ is King, which has a certain religious meaning, but a completely different meaning in this sphere of emerging right-wing pathology. Right wing. The political dimension isn't the right dimension of analysis, but it's definitely the case that the best possible ideas can be used for the worst possible purposes, and that also brings up another specter which is like, well, is there any reliable and valid way of distinguishing truly beneficial unifying ideas from those that are pathological? And so that's another thing that I tried to detail out in these lectures, but also in this new book is like how do you tell the good actors from the bad actors at the most fundamental level of analysis?

   6. LFLex Fridman20:39

      And good ideas from the bad ideas in your lecture on truth that Nietzsche also struggled with. So, how do you know, how do you know that communism is a bad idea versus it's a good idea implemented by bad actors?

   7. JPJordan Peterson20:55

      R- Right, right. That's a more subtle variant of the religious problem, and that's what the, that's what the communists say all the time, the modern day communists are like, "Real communism has never been tried." And you could say, I suppose, with some justification, you could say that real Christianity has never been tried because we always fall short of the ideal mark. And so w- I mean, my rejoinder to the communists is something like every single time it's been implemented, wherever it's been implemented, regardless of the culture and the background of the people who've implemented it, it's had exactly the same catastrophic consequences. It's like I don't know how many examples you need of that, but I believe we've generated sufficient examples so that that case is basically resolved. Now, the general rejoinder to that is, hmm, it's really something like, well, if I was in charge of the communist enterprise, the utopia would have come about, right? But that's also a form of dangerous pretense. Part of the way... See, that problem is actually resolved to some degree in the notion of, in the developing notion of sacrifice that emerges in the Western canon over thousands and thousands of years. So one of the suggestions, for example, and this is something exemplified in the Passion story, is that you can tell the valid holder of an idea because that holder will take the responsibility for the consequences of his idea onto himself, and that's why, for example, you see one way of conceptualizing Christ in the Gospel story is as the ultimate sacrifice to God. So you might ask, "Well, what's the ultimate sacrifice?" And there- there are variants of answer to that. One form of ultimate sacrifice is the sacrifice of a child, the offering of a child, and the other is the offering of the self, and the story of Christ brings both of those together because he's the son of God that's offered to God. And so it's an archetypal resolution of that tension between ultimate sacrifice. Ultimate because once you're a parent, most parents would rather sacrifice themselves than their children, right? So you have something that becomes of even more value than yourself, but the sacrifice of self is also a very high order level of sacrifice. Christ is an archetype of the pattern of being that's predicated on the decision to take, to offer everything up to the highest value, right? That pattern of s- self-sacrifice, and I think part of the reason that's valid is because the person who undertakes to do that pays the price themself. It's not externalized. They're not trying to change anyone else, except maybe by example. It's your problem. Th- Like, Solzhenitsyn pointed that out too, um, when he was struggling with the idea of good versus evil, and- and you see this in more sophisticated literature, you know, in really unsophisticated literature or drama, there's a good guy and the bad guy, and the good guy's all good, and the bad guy's all bad. And in more sophisticated literature, the good and bad are abstracted. You can think of them as spirits, and then those spirits possess all the characters in the complex drama to a late- greater or lesser degree, and that battle is fought out both socially and internally. In the-... high order religious conceptualizations. In the West, if they culminate, let's say, in the Christian story, the notion is that battle between good and evil has fundamentally played out as an internal drama.

   8. LFLex Fridman24:35

      Yeah, so the, uh, for a religious ethos, the battle between good and evil is fought within each individual human heart.

   9. JPJordan Peterson24:44

      Right. It's your moral duty to constrain it, to constrain evil within yourself, and while there's more to it than that, because there's also the insistence that if you do that, that makes you the more, most effective possible, like, warrior, let's say, against evil itself in the social world, that you start with the battle that occurs within you, in the soul, let's say. The soul becomes the battleground between the forces of good and evil. Th- the idea there, there's an idea there too, which is if that battle is undertaken successfully, then it doesn't have to be played out in the social world as actual conflict, right? You can rectify the conflict internally without it having to be played out as fate, as Jung put it.

   10. LFLex Fridman25:28

       So what would you say to Nietzsche who called Christianity the slave morality?

   11. JPJordan Peterson25:34

       (sighs) Yeah.

   12. LFLex Fridman25:34

       And his critique of religion in that way was slave morality versus master morality, and then you put an ubermensch into that.

   13. JPJordan Peterson25:40

       Well, that, that... See, I would say that the woke phenomenon is the manifestation of the slave morality that Nietzsche criticized, and that there are, there are elements of Christianity that can be gerrymandered to support that mode of perception and conception. But I think he was wrong and he was wrong in his essential criticism of Christianity in that regard. Now, it's complicated with Nietzsche because Nietzsche never criticizes the gospel stories directly. What he basically criticizes is something like the pathologies of institutionalized religion. And I would say most particularly of the, what would you say, of the sort of casually too nice Protestant form, you know. That's a thumbnail sketch and perhaps somewhat unfair, but (laughs) given the alignment, let's say, of the more mainstream pro- Protestant movements with the woke mob, I don't think it's an absurd criticism. It's something like the degeneration of Christianity into the notion that good and harmless are the same thing, or good and empathic are the same thing, which is simply not true and, and far too simplified. And so... And I also think Nietzsche was extremely wrong in his presumption that human beings should take it to themselves to construct their own values. I, I think he made a colossal error in that presumption.

   14. LFLex Fridman27:13

       And that is the idea of the ubermensch that the great individual, the best of us-

   15. JPJordan Peterson27:17

       Yeah.

   16. LFLex Fridman27:18

       ... should create our own values.

   17. JPJordan Peterson27:20

       Well, and I, I think the reason that he was wrong about that is that... So when God gives instructions to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he basically tells them that they can do anything they want in the walled garden, so that's the kind of balance between order and nature that makes up the human environment. Human beings have the freedom vouchsafed to them by God to do anything they want in the garden except to mess with the most fundamental rule. So God says to people, "You're not to eat of the fruit, of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil," which fundamentally means there is an implicit moral order and you're to abide by it. Your freedom stops at the foundation. And you can think about that, I'd be interested even in your ideas about this as an engineer let's say, is that there is an ethos that's implicit in being itself, and your ethos has to be a reflection of that, and that isn't under your control. You can't gerrymander the foundation because th- your foundational beliefs have to put you in harmony, like musical harmony, with the actual structure of reality as such. So I, I can give you an example of that. So our goal, in so far as we're conducting ourselves properly, is to have the kind of interesting conversation that allows both of us to express ourself in a manner that enables us to learn and grow such that we can share that with everyone who's listening. And if our aim is true and upward, then that's what we're doing. Well, that means that we're going to have to match ourselves to a pattern of interaction, and that's marked for us emotionally. Like you and I both know this. If we're doing this right, we're gonna be interested in the conversation. We're not gonna be looking at our watch. We're not gonna be thinking about what we're aiming at. We're just gonna communicate. Now, the religious interpretation of that would be that we were doing something like making the redemptive logos manifest between us in dialogue, and that's so- something that can be shared. To do that, we have to align with that pattern. I can't decide that there's some arbitrary way that I'm gonna play you. I mean, I could do that if I was a psychopathic manipulator, but to do that optimally I'm not going to impose a certain mode of... a certain a priori aim, let's say, on our communication and manip- and manipulate you into that. So the constraints on my ethos reflect the actual structure of, of the world, and I can't... This is, this is the communist presumption. It's like we're gonna burn everything down and we're gonna start from scratch, and we've got these axiomatic presumptions and we're gonna put them into place and we're gonna socialize people so they now think and live like communists from day one, and human beings are infinitely malleable, and we can use a rational set of presuppositions to decide what sort of beings they should be. The transhumanists are doing this too. It's like, no, there's a pattern of being that you have to fall into alignment with and it... I think it's the pattern of being, by the way, that-... if you fall into alignment with, it gives you hope. It, it, it protects you from anxiety and it gives you a sense of harmony with your surroundings and with other people, and none of that's arbitrary.

   18. LFLex Fridman30:40

       But don't you think we both arrived to this conversation with rigid axioms? That we have, maybe we're blind to them, but in the same way that the Marxist came with very rigid axioms about the way the world is and the way it should be. Aren't we coming to that?

   19. JPJordan Peterson30:54

       Well, we definitely come to the conversation with a hierarchy of foundational axioms. Right? And I would say the more sophisticated you are as a thinker, the, the deeper the level at which you're willing to play. So imagine first that you have presumptions of different depth. There's more predicated on the more fundamental axioms, and then that there's a, a space of play around those, and that space of play is going to depend on the sophistication of the player obviously, but those who are capable of engaging in deeper conversations talk about more fundamental things with more play. Now, we have to come to the conversation with a certain degree of structure because we wouldn't be able to understand each other or communicate if, if a lot of things weren't already assumed or taken for granted.

   20. LFLex Fridman31:43

       How rigid is the hierarchy of axioms that religion provides? This is what I'm trying to understand. The rigidity of that hierarchy-

   21. JPJordan Peterson31:51

       It's as rigid as play.

   22. LFLex Fridman31:53

       Well, play is not rigid at all.

   23. JPJordan Peterson31:54

       No, no. No, no. No, no, it's got a rigidity.

   24. LFLex Fridman31:56

       There's some constraints.

   25. JPJordan Peterson31:58

       It took me about 40 years to figure out the answer to that question, so it wasn't s- I'm serious about that.

   26. LFLex Fridman32:02

       Yes.

   27. JPJordan Peterson32:02

       So it wasn't, it wasn't a random answer. So, play is very rigid in some ways. So like if you and I go out to play basketball or chess, like there are rules and you can't break the rules because then you're no longer in the game. But then there's a dynamism within those rules that's, well, with chess it's virtually infinite. I mean I think, what is it? There's more patterns of potential games on a chess board than there are subatomic particles in the observable universe. Like it's an insane space, so it's not like there's not freedom within it, but by the, it's, it's a weird paradox in a way, isn't it? Because music is like this too, is that there are definitely rules and so, and there are things, you can't throw a basketball into a chess board and still be playing chess. But weirdly enough if you adhere to the rules, the realm of freedom increases rather than decreasing, and I, I think you can make the same case for a playful conversation. It's like we're playing by certain rules and a lot of them are implicit, but that doesn't mean that, it might mean the reverse of constraint. You know, because in this seminar for example that I was referring to, the Exodus seminar and then the Gospel seminar, everybody in the seminar, there's about eight of us, played fair. Nobody play, used power, nobody tried to prove they were right, they put forward their points but they were like, "Here's a way of looking at that. Assess it." And they were also doing it genuinely. It's like, "This is what I've concluded about, say, this story. And I'd l- and I'm gonna make a case for it, but I'd like to hear what you have to say because maybe you can change it, you can extend it, you can find a flaw in it." And that's, well, that's a conversation that has flow and that's engaging and that other people will listen to as well, and that's also a ... See, I think that one of the things that we can conclude now and, and we can do this even from a neuroscientific basis, is that that sense of engaged meaning is a marker, not only for the emergence of harmony between you and your environment, but for the emergence of that harmony in a way that is developmentally rich, that moves you upward towards, what would you say? A, well, I think towards a more effective entropic state. That's actually the technical answer to that, but it makes you more than you are and there's a directionality in that.

6. 34:19 – 40:04

   Communism

   1. JPJordan Peterson34:19

   2. LFLex Fridman34:19

      Well, I would like to sort of, the reason I like talking about communism because it has clearly been shown as a set of ideas to be destructive to, to humanity. But, I would like to understand from an engineering perspective the characteristics of communism versus religion-

   3. JPJordan Peterson34:39

      Mm-hmm.

   4. LFLex Fridman34:39

      ... uh, where you can identify religious thought is going to lead to a better human being, a better society, and communist, Marxist thought-

   5. JPJordan Peterson34:48

      Yeah, right.

   6. LFLex Fridman34:48

      ... is not.

   7. JPJordan Peterson34:49

      Yeah, no kidding.

   8. LFLex Fridman34:49

      Because there's ambiguity, there's room for play in communism and Marxism because they kind of had a utopian sense of where everybody's headed, don't know how it's gonna happen, maybe revolution is required but after the revolution is done, we'll figure it out. And there's an underlying assumption that maybe human beings are good and they'll figure it out when once you remove the oppressor-

   9. JPJordan Peterson35:11

      Yeah.

   10. LFLex Fridman35:11

       I mean, all of these ideas kind of, until (laughs) you put 'em into practice, you could, you'd be, it can be quite convincing-

   11. JPJordan Peterson35:18

       Very.

   12. LFLex Fridman35:18

       ... if you were in the 19th century. If I was reading, which is kind of fascinating, the 19th century produced such powerful ideas, Marx and Nietzsche.

   13. JPJordan Peterson35:28

       Oh, fascism too for that matter. Mm-hmm.

   14. LFLex Fridman35:29

       Fascism. So, you know, if I was sitting there, uh, like especially if I'm feeling shitty about myself, um, a lot of these ideas are pretty powerful a- as a, as a way to plug the nihilist hole. (laughs)

   15. JPJordan Peterson35:42

       Yeah, right, absolutely. Well, and some of them may actually have an appropriate scope of application. It, it could be that some of the foundational axioms of communism, socialism/communism are actually functional in a sufficiently small social group. Maybe a tribal group even. Like I, I also have a, I'm not sure this is correct but, I have a suspicion that the pervasive attractiveness of some of the radical left ideas that we're talking about are pervasive precisely because they are functional within say families, but also within the small tribal groups that people might have originally evolved into, and that once we become civilized so we produce societies that are united, even among people who don't know one another, different principles have to apply as a consequence of scale.So, that's, that's partly an engineering response but, but I think there's a more, a deeper way of going after the communist problem. So, I think part of the communist... The problem, fundamental problem with the communist axioms is the notion that the world of complex social interactions can be simplified sufficiently so that centralized planning authorities can deal with it. And I think the best way to think about the free exchange rejoinder to that presumption is, no, the sum total of human interactions in a large civilization are so immense that you need a distributed network of cognition in order to compute the proper way forward. And so what you do is you give each actor their domain of individual choice so that they can maximize their own movement forward, and you allow the aggregate direction to emerge from that rather than trying to impose it from the top down, which I think is computationally impossible. So, that might be one engineering reason why the communist solution doesn't work. Like I read in Solzhenitsyn, for example, that the, the central Soviet authorities often had to make 200 pricing decisions a day. Now, if you've ever started a business or created a product and had to wrestle with the problem of pricing, you'd become aware of just how intractable that is. Like, how do you calculate worth? Well, there's the central existential problem of life: how do you calculate worth? It's not something like a central authority can sit down and just manage. And you, you... There is a lot of inputs that go into a pricing decision, and the free market answer to that is something like, "Well, if you get the price right, people will buy it and you'll survive."

   16. LFLex Fridman38:14

       This is a fascinating way to describe how ideas fail. So communism perhaps fails because, um, just like with people who believe the Earth is flat, when you look outside, it's f- it looks flat.

   17. JPJordan Peterson38:26

       Mm-hmm.

   18. LFLex Fridman38:27

       But you can't see beyond the horizon, I guess.

   19. JPJordan Peterson38:29

       Yeah, right.

   20. LFLex Fridman38:30

       So in, in the same way with communism, communism seems like a great idea to my family and my... people I love, but it doesn't scale.

   21. JPJordan Peterson38:37

       And, and it doesn't iterate.

   22. LFLex Fridman38:39

       It doesn't, it doesn't iterate.

   23. JPJordan Peterson38:39

       And that's a form of scaling too.

   24. LFLex Fridman38:41

       Right. Well, I mean, whatever ways it breaks down, it doesn't scale.

   25. JPJordan Peterson38:44

       Yeah.

   26. LFLex Fridman38:44

       Uh, and you're saying religious thought is a thing that might scale.

   27. JPJordan Peterson38:49

       I would say religious thought is the record of those ideas that have in fact scaled.

   28. LFLex Fridman38:53

       Ah.

   29. JPJordan Peterson38:53

       Right. Right.

   30. LFLex Fridman38:54

       And iterated.
7. 40:04 – 42:13

   Hero myth

   1. JPJordan Peterson40:04

      the hero myth is really a quest myth, and a quest myth is really a story of exploration and expansion of adaptation, right? So Bilbo, the hobbit, he's kind of an ordinary everyman. He lives in a very constrained and orderly and secure world, and then the quest call comes and he goes out and he expands his personality and develops his wisdom, and that's reflected in human neuropsychological architecture at a very low level, way below cognition. So one of the most fundamental elements of the mammalian brain, and even in lower animal forms, is the hypothalamus. It's sort of the root of primary motivation, so it governs lust and, um, and it regulates your breathing and it regulates your hunger and it regulates your thirst and it regulates your temperature. Like really low level biological necessities are regulated by the hypothalamus. When you get hungry, it's the hypothalamus. When you're activated in a defensively aggressive manner, that's the hypothalamus. Half the hypothalamus is the origin of the dopaminergic tracts, and they subsume exploration. And so you could think of the human motivational reality as a domain that's governed by axiomatic motivational states: love, sex, defensive aggression, hunger; and another domain that's governed by exploration. And the rule would be something like, "When your basic motivational states are sated, explore." Well, then... And, and that's not cognitive. Like I said, this is deep, deep brain architecture. It's extraordinarily ancient. And, and the exploration story is something like, "Go out into the unknown and take the risks because the information that you discover and the skills you develop will be worthwhile, even in sating the basic motivational drives." And then you want to learn to do that in a iterative manner so it sustains across time, and you want to do it in a way that unites you with other people. And there's a pattern to that, and I do think that's the pattern that's... we strive to encapsulate in our deep religious narratives, and I think that in many ways we've done that successfully.

8. 42:13 – 52:25

   Belief in God

   1. JPJordan Peterson42:13

   2. LFLex Fridman42:13

      What is the belief in God? How does that fit in? What does it mean to believe in God?

   3. JPJordan Peterson42:20

      That's a good... Okay. So in... One of the stories that I cover in, uh, We Who Wrestle With God, which I only recently began to take apart, say, in the last two years, is the story of Abraham. And it's a very cool story.And it's also related, by the way, to your question about what makes communism wrong. And Dostoevsky knew this, not precisely the Abraham story, but the, the same reason. In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky made a very telling observation. So he speaks in the voice of a cynical, nihilistic, and bitter bureaucrat who's been a failure, who's talking cynically about the nature of human beings, but also very accurately. And one of the things he points out with regards to modern utopianism is that human beings are very strange creatures, and that if you gave them what the socialist utopians want to give them, so let's say all your needs are taken care of, all your material needs are taken care of and even indefinitely, Dostoevsky's claim was, "Well, you don't understand human beings very well because if you put them in an environment that was that comfortable, they would purposefully go insane just to break it into bits just so something interesting would happen." Right. And he says it's, it's the human pro- proclivity to curse and complain, and, uh, he says this in, uh, quite a cynic and caustic manner but he's pointing to something deep, which is that we're not built for comfort and security. We're not infants. We're not after satiation. So then you might ask, "Well, what the hell are we after then?" That's what the Abraham story addresses, and Abraham is the first true individual in the Biblical narrative. So you could think about his story as the archetypical story of the developing individual. So you said, "Well, what's God?" Well, in the Abraham story, God is characterized a lot of different ways in, uh, classic religious texts, like the Bible is actually a compilation of different characterizations of the Divine, with the insistence that they reflect an underlying unity. In the story of Abraham, the Divine is the call to adventure. So Abraham has the socialist utopia at hand. He's from a wealthy family and he has everything he needs, and he actually doesn't do anything until he's in his 70s. Now, hypothetically people in those times lived much longer, but a voice comes to Abraham and it tells him something very specific. It says, "Leave your zone of comfort. Leave your parents. Leave your tent. Leave your community. Leave your tribe. Leave your land. Go out into the world." And Abraham thinks, "Well, why? I've, I've got naked slave girls peeling grapes and feeding them to me." It's like, "What do I need an adventure for?" And God tells him, this is the covenant, by the way, part of the covenant that the God of the Israelites makes with his people, it's very, very specific and it's very brilliant. He says, "If you follow the voice of adventure, you'll become a blessing to yourself." So that's a good deal because people generally live at odds with themselves. And he says, God says, "That's not all. You'll become a blessing to yourself in a way that furthers your reputation among people and validly, so that you'll accomplish things that were real and people will know it and you'll b- be held high in their esteem, and that will be valid." So that's a pretty good deal because social people would like to be regarded as of utility and worth by others, and so that's a good deal and, and God says, "That's not all. You'll establish something of lasting, permanent, and deep value." That's why Abraham becomes the father of nations. And finally, he caps it off and he says, "There's a be- there's a better element even to it. There's a capstone. You'll do all three of those things in a way that's maximally beneficial to everyone else." And so the divinity in the Abrahamic story is making a claim. He says, "First of all, there's a drive that you should attend to, so the spirit of adventure that calls you out of your zone of comfort. Now if you attend to that and you make the sacrifices necessary to follow that path, then the following benefits will accrue to you. Your life will be a blessing, everyone will hold you in high esteem, you'll establish something of permanent value, and you'll do it in a way that's maximally beneficial to everyone else." And so, so think about what this means biologically or from an engineering standpoint. It means that the instinct to develop that characterizes outward moving children, let's say, or adults, is the same instinct that allows for psychological stability, that allows for movement upward in a social hierarchy, that establishes something iterable, and that does that in a manner that allows everyone else to partake in the same process. Well, you know, that's a good deal, and I, I can't see how it cannot be true because the alternative hypothesis would be that the spirit that moves you beyond yourself to develop, the spirit of a curious child, let's say, what? Is that antithetical to your own esteem? Is that antithetical to other people's best interest? Is it not the thing that increases the probability that you'll do something permanent? That's a, that's a stupid theory.

   4. LFLex Fridman47:33

      So God has called to adventure with some constraints.

   5. JPJordan Peterson47:38

      A call to true adventure.

   6. LFLex Fridman47:40

      To true adventure.

   7. JPJordan Peterson47:40

      T- true adventure. Yeah, and then tha- that, that's a good observation because that begs the question, what constitutes the most true adventure? Well, that's not fully fleshed out until, at least from the Christian perspective let's say, that's not fully fleshed out until the Gospels because the passion of Christ is the f- you could say, this is the perfectly reasonable way of looking at it, the passion of Christ is the truest adventure of Abraham. That's a terrible thing, eh, because it's a, it's a, the, the passion story is a catastrophic tragedy, although it obviously has its redemptive elements. But one of the things that's implied there is that there's no distinction between the true adventure of life and taking on the pathway of maximal responsibility and burden, and I can't see how that cannot be true. Like, 'cause the counter hypothesis is, well, Lex, the best thing for you to do in your life is to shrink from all challenge and hide.... right? To remain infantile, to remain secure, not to ever push yourself beyond your limits, not to take any risks. Well, no one thinks that's true.

   8. LFLex Fridman48:48

      So basically, the maximally worthwhile adventure could possibly be highly correlated with the hardest possible-

   9. JPJordan Peterson48:56

      Well-

   10. LFLex Fridman48:56

       ... available adventure.

   11. JPJordan Peterson48:58

       The hardest possible available adventure voluntarily undertaken.

   12. LFLex Fridman49:03

       Does it have to be voluntary?

   13. JPJordan Peterson49:03

       It has to be vol- Absolutely.

   14. LFLex Fridman49:05

       How do you define voluntarily?

   15. JPJordan Peterson49:06

       Well, here's an, here's an example of that. Um, that's a, that's, that's a good question too. When Christ is, the night before the crucifixion, which in principle he knows is coming, he asks God to relieve him of his burden, and understandably so. I mean, that's the scene in famously in which he's sweating, literally sweating blood, because he knows what's coming. And the, the, the Romans designed crucifixion to be the most agonizing and humiliating possi- agonizing, humiliating, and disgusting possible death, right? So, there was every reason to be apprehensive about that. And you might say, "Well, could you undertake that voluntarily as an adventure?" And the answer to that is something like, "Well, what's your relationship with death?" Like, that's a problem you have to solve, and you could fight it, and you could be bitter about it, and (laughs) there's reasons for that, especially if it's painful and degrading. But, but the alternative is something like, (sighs) well, it's what's fleshed out in religious imagery always, it's very difficult to, to cast into words. It's like, no, you, you welcome, you welcome the struggle. That's why I called the book We Who Wrestle with God. You welcome the struggle. And, uh, Lex, I don't see how you can come to terms with life without construing it something like, construing it as something like, bring it on, welcome the struggle. And I d- I can't say that there's a limit to this. Like, well, I welcome the struggle until it gets difficult. Well-

   16. LFLex Fridman50:37

       So there's not a bell curve, like, uh, the struggle in moderation. Basically, you have to welcome whatever, as hard as it gets, and, uh, the crucifixion in that way is a symbol-

   17. JPJordan Peterson50:48

       Of that. Well, and it, well, it's, it's worse than that in some ways, because the crucifixion exemplifies the worst possible death. But that isn't the only element of the struggle, because mythologically, classically, after Christ's death, he harrows hell. And what that means, as far as I can tell, psychologically, is that you're not only required, let's say, to take on the full existential burden of life and to welcome it regardless of what it is and to maintain your upward aim despite all temptations to the contrary, but you also have to confront the root of malevolence itself. So it's not merely tragedy. And I think the malevolence is actually worse and the reason I think that is because I know the literature on post-traumatic stress disorder. And most people who encounter, let's say, a challenge that's so brutal that it fragments them, it isn't mere suffering that does that to people; it's an encounter with malevolence that does that to people, their own sometimes, often, by the way. A soldier will go out into a battlefield and find out that there's a part of him that really enjoys the mayhem and that conceptualization doesn't fit in well with everything he thinks he knows about himself and humanity, and after that contact with that dark part of himself, he never recovers. That happens to people and it, and, and it happens to people who encounter bad actors in the world too. If you're a naive person and the right narcissistic psychopath comes your way, you are in, like, mortal trouble because you might die but that's not where (laughs) the trouble

9. 52:25 – 1:05:03

   Advice for young people

   1. JPJordan Peterson52:25

      ends.

   2. LFLex Fridman52:26

      If there's a young man in their 20s listening to this, how do they escape the pull of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground? With their eyes open to the world, how do they select the adventure?

   3. JPJordan Peterson52:39

      So there's other characterizations of the divine, say, in the Old Testament stories. So, one pattern of characterization that I think is really relevant to that question is the conception of God as calling and conscience. Okay, so what does it mean? It's a description of the manner in which your destiny announces itself to you. And I'm, I'm using that terminology and, and it's, it's distinguishable, say, from Nietzsche's notion that you create your own values. It's like, part of the way you can tell that that's wrong is that you can't voluntarily gerrymander your own interests, right? Like, you find some things interesting and that seems natural and, and autonomous, and other things you don't find interesting and you can't really force yourself to be interested in them. Now, so what is the domain of interest that makes itself manifest to you? Well, it's like an autonomous spirit. It's like certain things in your field of perception are illuminated to you. You think, oh, that, that's interesting. That's compelling. That's gripping. Rudolph Otto, who studied the phenomenology of religious experience, described that as numinous. The thing grips you because you're compelled by it and maybe it's also somewhat anxiety-provoking. It's the same reaction that, like, a cat has to a dog when, when the cat's hair stands on end. That's an awe response. And so there's gonna be things in your phenomenological field that pull you forward, compel you. That's like the voice of positive emotion and enthusiasm. Things draw you into the world. Might be love. Might be aesthetic interest. It might be friendship. It might be social status. It might be, um, duty and, and, and, and industriousness. Like, there's various domains of interest that shine for people. That's sort of on the positive side, God is calling, right? That would be akin to the spirit of adventure for Abraham. But there's also God as conscience, and this is a useful thing to know too.Certain things bother you. They, they, they take root within you and they, they turn your thoughts towards certain issues. Like there are things you're interested in that you've pursued your whole life. There are things I'm interested in that, that I felt as a moral compulsion. And so you could think... And I think the way you can think about it technically is that something pulls you forward so that you move ahead and you develop, and then another voice, this a voice of negative emotion, says, "While you're moving forward, stay on this narrow pathway." Right? And it'll mark deviations, and it marks deviations with shame and guilt and anxiety, regret. And that actually has a voice, "Don't do that." Well, why not? While you're wandering off the straight and narrow path. So, the divine marks the pathway forward and reveals it, but then puts up the constraints of conscience. And the divine in the Old Testament is portrayed not least as the dynamic between calling and conscience.

   4. LFLex Fridman55:46

      What do you do with the negative emotions? You didn't mention envy. There's some really dark ones that can really pull you into some bad places. Envy, fear.

   5. JPJordan Peterson55:55

      Yeah, envy's a really bad one. Pride and envy are among the worst. Those were the sins of Cain, by the way, in the story of Cain and Abel. 'Cause Cain fails because his sacrifices are insufficient. He doesn't offer his best and so he's rejected, and that makes him bitter and unhappy. And he goes to complain to God and God says to him some- two things. He said if... God tells him, "If your sacrifices were appropriate, you'd be accepted." It's a brutal thing. It's a brutal rejoinder. And he also says, uh, "You can't blame your misery on your failure. You could learn from your failure. When you failed, you invited in the spirit of envy and resentment and you allowed it to possess you, and that's why you're miserable." And so Cain is embittered by that response and that's when he kills Abel. And so you might say, "Well, how do you fortify yourself against that pathway of resentment?" And part of classic religious practice is aimed to do that precisely. What's the antithesis of envy? Gratitude.

   6. LFLex Fridman56:57

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JPJordan Peterson56:58

      That's something you can practice. Right? And I mean literally practice.

   8. LFLex Fridman57:02

      I think envy is one of the biggest enemies for a young person, because basically you're starting from nowhere. Life is hard, you've achieved nothing, and you're striving and you're failing constantly.

   9. JPJordan Peterson57:16

      Mm-hmm.

   10. LFLex Fridman57:16

       Because...

   11. JPJordan Peterson57:17

       And you see other people whom you think aren't having the same problem.

   12. LFLex Fridman57:21

       Yeah, and they succeed. And they could be your neighbor, they could be succeeding by a little bit, or somebody on the internet succeeding by a lot. And I think that that can really pull a person down. That kind of envy can really destroy a person.

   13. JPJordan Peterson57:34

       Yes. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, the gratitude element would be something like, "Well yeah, you don't know anything and you're at the bottom, but, uh, you're not 80."

   14. LFLex Fridman57:45

       Mm-hmm.

   15. JPJordan Peterson57:45

       You know, one of the best predictors of wealth in the United States is age. So then you might say, "Well, who's got it better? The old rich guy or the young poor guy?" And I would say most old rich guys would trade their wealth for youth. So it's not exactly clear at all at any stage who's got the upper hand, who's got the advantage. And you know, you could say, "Well, I've got all these burdens in front of me because I'm young and oh my God..." Or you could say, "Every dragon has its treasure." And th- and that's actually a pattern of perception. You know, I'm not saying that people don't have their challenges. They certainly do. But discriminating between a challenge and an opportunity is very, very difficult. And learning to see a challenge as an opportunity, that's the beginning of wisdom.

   16. LFLex Fridman58:37

       It's interesting. I don't know how it works, maybe you can elucidate, but when you have envy towards somebody if you just celebrate them, so gratitude-

   17. JPJordan Peterson58:48

       Yeah.

   18. LFLex Fridman58:48

       ... but, actually as opposed to sort of ignoring and being grateful for the things you have, like literally celebrate that person, it transforms... It like, it lights the way. I don't know-

   19. JPJordan Peterson59:00

       Absolutely.

   20. LFLex Fridman59:00

       ... why that is exactly.

   21. JPJordan Peterson59:01

       The only reason you're envious is because you see someone who has something that you want. Okay, so let's think, let's think about it. Well, first of all, the fact that they have it means that in principle you could get it. At least someone has. So that's a pretty good deal. And then you might say, "Well, the fact that I'm envious of that person means that I actually want something." And then you might think, "Well, what am I envious of? I'm envious of their attractiveness to women." It's like, okay, well now you know something about yourself. You know that one true motivation that's making itself manifest to you is that you wish that you would be the sort of person who is attractive to women. Now, of course that's an extremely common longing among men, period, but particularly among young men. It's like, well, what makes you so sure you couldn't have that? Well, how about here's an answer: you don't have enough faith in yourself and maybe you don't have enough faith in, well, I would say the divine. You don't believe that the world is characterized by enough potentiality so that even miserable you has a crack at the brass ring. And, like I, I talked about this actually practically in one of my previous books 'cause I wrote a chapter called, uh, Compare Yourself To Who You Are And Not To Someone Else At The Present Time. Well, why? Well, your best benchmark for tomorrow is you today, and you might not be able to have what someone else has on the particular axis you're comparing yourself with them on, but you could make an incremental improvement over your current state regardless of the direction that you're aiming. And it is the case, and this is a law, the return on incremental improvement is exponential or geometric and not linear. So even if you start...This is why the hero is always born in a lowly, lowly place, mythologically. All right, Christ who redeems the world is born in a manger with the animals to poverty-stricken parents in the middle of a God-forsaken desert, in a nondescript time and place, isolated. Well, why? Well, because everyone young struggles with their insufficiency, but that doesn't mean that great things can't make themselves manifest. And part of the insistence in the Biblical text, for example, is that it's incumbent on you to have the courage, to have faith in yourself and in the spirit of reality, the essence of reality, regardless of how you construe the evidence at hand. Right? "Look at me, I'm so useless. I don't know anything. I don't have anything. It's hopeless. I, uh, I don't have it within me. The world couldn't offer me that possibility." Well, what the hell do you know about that? This is what Job figures out in the midst of his suffering in the Book of Job, 'cause Job is tortured terribly by God who makes a bet with Satan himself to bring him down. And Job's decision in the face of his intense suffering is, "I'm not going to lose faith in my essential goodness and I'm not going to lose faith in the essential goodness of being itself regardless of how terrible the face it's showing to me at the moment happens to be." And I think, "Okay, what do you make of that claim?" Well, let's look at it practically. You're being tortured by the arbitrariness of life. That's horrible. Now you lose faith in yourself and you become cynical about being. So are you infinitely worse off instantly? And then you might say, "Well yeah, but it's really asking a lot of people that they maintain faith even we- even in their darkest hours." It's like, yeah, that's, that might be asking everything from people. But then you also might ask, this is a very strange question is, if you were brought into being by something that was essentially good, wouldn't that thing that brought you into being demand that you make the best in yourself manifest? And wouldn't it be precisely when you most need that, that it would be, that you'd be desperate enough to risk what it would take to let it emerge?

   22. LFLex Fridman1:03:17

       So you kind of make it seem that reason could be the thing that takes you out of a place of darkness, sort of d- do finding that calling through reason. I think it's also possible when reason fails you to just take the leap. Navigate not by reason but by finding the thing that scares you, the risk, to take the risk, take the leap, and then figure it out (laughs) while you're in the air. (laughs)

   23. JPJordan Peterson1:03:44

       Yeah, well I th- uh, that, I think that's always part of a heroic adventure, you know, is that ability to cut the Gordian Knot. But, but you could also ask from an engineering perspective, okay, what are the axioms that make a decision like that possible? And the answer would be something like, "I'm going to make the presumption that if I move forward in good faith, whatever happens to me will be the best thing that could possibly happen, no matter what it is." And I thi- I think that's actually how you make an alliance with truth. And I, I also think that truth is an adventure, and the way you make an alliance with truth is by assuming that whatever happens to you, if you're living in truth, is the best thing that could happen, even if you can't see that at any given moment. 'Cause otherwise you'd say that truth would be just the handmaiden of advantage. "Well, I'm gonna say something tr- truthful and I pay a price. Well, that means I shouldn't have said it." Well that... Possibly. But that's not the only possible standard of evaluation. You can... Because what you're doing is you're making the outcome your deity, right? Well, I'd just reverse that and say, "No, no, truth is the deity." The outcome is variable, but that doesn't eradicate the in- initial axiom. Where's the constant? Right? Where's, what's the constant?

10. 1:05:03 – 1:25:01

    Sex

    1. JPJordan Peterson1:05:03

    2. LFLex Fridman1:05:03

       It may be (laughs) uh, when you said, uh, Abraham was being fed by naked ladies...

    3. JPJordan Peterson1:05:10

       That's an interpolation obviously, but-

    4. LFLex Fridman1:05:12

       Well, yes.

    5. JPJordan Peterson1:05:12

       ... would have been out of keeping for the times.

    6. LFLex Fridman1:05:14

       But it does make me think sort of in stark contrast to Nietzsche's own life-

    7. JPJordan Peterson1:05:18

       Mm-hmm.

    8. LFLex Fridman1:05:19

       ... that perhaps getting laid early on in life is a useful starter. Uh, step one, get laid, and then go for adventure. There's some basic-

    9. JPJordan Peterson1:05:30

       I, I w-

    10. LFLex Fridman1:05:30

        ... satiation of these desires-

    11. JPJordan Peterson1:05:32

        So I think it's perfectly reasonable to bring the sexual element in because it's a powerful motivating force and it has to be integrated. I don't think it's adventure. It's romantic adventure.

    12. LFLex Fridman1:05:42

        Right, right. But the, the lack of basic interaction, sexual interaction, I feel like is the engine that drives towards that cynicism of the incel-

    13. JPJordan Peterson1:05:54

        It is, but, and it, and, oh-

    14. LFLex Fridman1:05:54

        ... in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.

    15. JPJordan Peterson1:05:56

        Oh, there, there's, there's, there's very little doubt about that. We know perfectly well anthropologically that the most unstable social situation you can generate is young men with no access to women.

    16. LFLex Fridman1:06:07

        Mm-hmm.

    17. JPJordan Peterson1:06:07

        That's not good. And they'll do anything, anything to reverse that situation. So that's very dangerous. But then I would also say there's every suggestion that the pathway ad- of adventure itself is the best pathway to romantic attractiveness. And we, we know this in some ways in a very blunt manner. The Google boys, the engineers who are too, what would you say, naively oriented towards empirical truth to note when they're being politically incorrect, they wrote a great book called A Billion Wicked Thoughts, which I really like. It's a very good book. And it's engineers as psychologists. And so they'll say all sorts of things that no one with any sense would ever say that happen to be true. And they studied the pattern of pornographic fantasy and women like pornographic stories, not images.So women's use of pornographic- pornography is literary. Who are the main protagonists in female pornographic fantasy? Pirates, werewolves, vampires, surgeons-

    18. LFLex Fridman1:07:10

        Yeah.

    19. JPJordan Peterson1:07:10

        ... billionaires. Tony Stark, you know?

    20. LFLex Fridman1:07:13

        Yeah. Yeah. (laughs)

    21. JPJordan Peterson1:07:13

        And so the basic pornographic narrative is Beauty and the Beast, those five categories; terrible, aggressive male, tamable by the right relationship, hot erotic attraction. And so I would say to the young men who... and I have many times, to the young men who are locked in isolation, it's first of all, "Join the bloody club." Because the default value of a 15-year-old male on the mating market is zero, and there's a reason for that. You know, and zero is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much. And the reason for that is, well, what the hell do you know? Like, you're not good for anything, yet you have potential, and maybe plenty, and hopefully that'll be made manifest, but you shouldn't be all upset because you're the same loser as everyone else your age has always been since the beginning of time. But then you might ask, "Well, what should I do about it?" The answer is get yourself together, you know? Stand up straight with your shoulders back, take on some adventure, find your calling, abide by your conscience, put yourself together, and you'll become attractive. And we, we know this is... look, we know this is true. The correlation between male sexual opportunity and relative masculine status is about .6. That's higher than the correlation between intelligence and academic achievement. I don't think that there's a larger correlation between two independent phenomena in the entire social science and health literature than the correlation between relative male social status and reproductive success. It's by far the most fundamental determinant.

    22. LFLex Fridman1:08:52

        But what's the cause and effect there?

    23. JPJordan Peterson1:08:54

        It's a loop. Men are motivated to attain social status because it confers upon them reproductive success, and that's not only cognitively but biologically. I'll give you an example of this. Uh, there's a documentary I watch from time to time which I think is the most brilliant documentary I've ever seen. It's called Crumb, and it's the story of this underground cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who was in high school, was in the category of males for whom a date was not only not likely, but in- unimaginable. So he was at the bottom of the bottom rung, and almost all the reactions he got from females weren't- wasn't just, "No." It was like, "Are you out of your mind?" Right? With that contempt, right? And then he became successful. And so the documentary's super interesting because it tracks the utter pathology of his sexual fantasies because he was bitter and resentful and... Like, if you wanna understand the psychology of serial sexual killers and the like and you watch Crumb, you'll know- find out a lot more about that than anybody with any sense would want to know. But then he makes this transition, and partly 'cause he does take the heroic adventure path, and he actually has a family and a- and children, and he- he's actually a pretty functional person as opposed to his brothers, one of whom commits suicide, and one of whom is literally a repeat sexual offender. It's a brutal documentary. But he... what he d- did in his adolescence after being rejected was he found what he was interested in. He was a very good artist, he was very interested in music, and he started to pursue those sort of single-mindedly, and he became successful. And as soon as he became successful, and the documentary tracks this beautifully, he's immediately attractive to women. And, and then you might ask too, even if you're cynical, it's like, "Well, why do women... why do I have to perform for women?" And the answer to that is something like, "Why the hell should they have anything to do with you if you're useless? They're gonna have infants, they don't need another one." Right? Partly the reason that women are hypergamous, less they want h- ma- males who are of higher status than they are is because they're trying to redress the reproductive burden, and it's substantial. I mean, the female of any species is the sex that devotes more to the reproductive function. That's a more fundamental differ- definition than chromosomal differentiation, and that's taken to its ultimate extreme with, with humans. And so of course women are gonna b- want someone around that's useful because the cost of sex for them is an 18-year-old period of dependency with an infant. So-

    24. LFLex Fridman1:11:30

        So...

    25. JPJordan Peterson1:11:30

        ... so I think the adventure comes first.

    26. LFLex Fridman1:11:32

        ... heroic adventure comes first.

    27. JPJordan Peterson1:11:34

        Well, it's complex because the other problem, let's say, with the Crumb boys is that their mother was extremely pathological and they didn't get a lot of genuine feminine nurturance and affection. So-

    28. LFLex Fridman1:11:43

        Oh, of course. But the family and society are not going to help you most of the time with her- heroic adventure, right? They're going to be a barrier versus a catalyst.

    29. JPJordan Peterson1:11:53

        Well, in good families, they're both because they put up constraints on your behavior but they... Like, I've interviewed a lot of successful people about their calling, let's say, 'cause that's... I do that with all my podcast guests. How, how did the path that you took to success make itself manifest? And it's, it's very... the pattern's very typical. Almost all the people that I've interviewed had a mother and a father. Now, it's not invariant, but I'd say it's there in 99% of the time. It's really high. And both of the parents or at least one of them, but often both, were very encouraging of the person's interests and pathway to development.

    30. LFLex Fridman1:12:34

        That's fascinating. I've, I've heard you analyze it that way before and I, I had a reaction to that idea 'cause you focus on the positive of the parents.
11. 1:25:01 – 1:37:47

    Good and evil

    1. LFLex Fridman1:25:01

       Bathroom break? If we can descend from the realm of ideas down to, uh, history and reality, I would say the time between World War I and World War II was, uh, one of history's biggest testing of ideas.... and really the most dramatic kinds of ideas that helped us understand the nature of good and evil. I just want to ask you sort of a, a question about good and evil. Uh, Churchill, in many ways, was not a good man. Stalin, as you've documented extensively, was a horrible man. But you can make the case that both were necessary for stopping an even worse human being in Hitler. So, to what degree do you need monsters to fight monsters? Do you need bad men to be able to fight off greater evils?

    2. JPJordan Peterson1:26:11

       (sighs) It's everything in its proper place is the answer to that. You know, we might think that our life would be easier without fear, let's say. We might say that our life would be easier without anger or pain. But the truth of the matter is, is that those things are beneficial even though they can cause great suffering, but they have to be in their proper place. And that capacity that could in one context be a terrible force for evil can, in the proper context, be the most potent force for good. A good man has to be formidable. And partly what that means, as far as I can tell, is that you have to s- be able to say no. And no means, like... I thought a lot about no, working as a clinician, because I did a lot of strategic counseling with my clients in a lot of extremely difficult situations, and I learned to take apart what no meant. And also when dealing with my own children, because I used no sparingly, because it's a powerful weapon, let's say. But I meant it. And with my kids what it meant was: if you continue that pattern of behavior, something you do not like will happen to you with 100% certainty. And when, when that's the case and you're willing to implement it, you don't have to do it very often. With regards to monstrosity, it's like, weak men aren't good. They're just weak. That's Nietzsche's observation. That's partly, again, why he was tempted to place the will to power, let's say, and to deal with that notion in a manner that, when it was tied with the revaluation of all values, was counterproductive. And counterproductive in the final analysis. It's not like he, not like there wasn't something to what he was driving at. You know, formidable men are admirable, and you know. Don't mess with them. Douglas Murray's a good example of that.

    3. LFLex Fridman1:28:05

       (laughs)

    4. JPJordan Peterson1:28:05

       He's, you know, he's a rather slight guy, but he's got a spine of steel, and there's no- more than a bit of what's monstrous in him. And Jocko Willink is like that, and Joe Rogan is like that, and you're like that.

    5. LFLex Fridman1:28:17

       But there's a different level. I mean, if you look... To me, Churchill might represent the thing you're talking about, but World War II, Hitler would not be stopped without Stalin.

Episode duration: 2:23:04