Jordan Peterson - How To Add Urgency & Purpose To Life

1. 0:00 – 1:09

   Intro

   1. JPJordan Peterson0:00

      You're in this job you hate, and it's 10 years from now. How does that look? Think about that. You already know you're in a little hell. You know perfectly well it's gonna get worse. Which is more frightening, action or inaction?

   2. CWChris Williamson0:17

      Dr. Jordan Peterson, welcome to the show.

   3. JPJordan Peterson0:20

      Hi, Chris. Thanks for the invitation.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:22

      Have you got bored of people telling you that they're glad you're back yet?

   5. JPJordan Peterson0:26

      No. You'd, I think you'd have to be foolish to be bored about that. I mean, eh, I don't ever want to get to the point where I take people's s- s- sincere well-wishes, uh, you know, casually. I'm always, uh, stunned and grateful that people care. And so, no, it's definitely not. And I'm surprised that I'm, seem to be moving towards some health. And so, no, (laughs) definitely not.

   6. CWChris Williamson0:53

      Well, add another one to the list. I'm glad that you're back.

   7. JPJordan Peterson0:56

      Thank you. Thank you. I'm, I'm looking forward to this, to, to, to being back and to doing all the things that are in front of me that I couldn't do if I was healthy.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:06

      So are we. So are we.

2. 1:09 – 7:00

   Jordan as Red Skull

   1. CWChris Williamson1:09

      What's the story with you and Red Skull?

   2. JPJordan Peterson1:12

      (laughs) Well, I don't know. I mean, I came across this last week, and, and someone tweeted me this, this cartoon, this comic, Captain America comic. And I saw this screenshot of Red Skull looking at a computer screen, and it said, "10 rules for life." That was one text box. It said, "Order and chaos." And there was a couple of other boxes. And I thought, wow, that seems to be making a reference to my work. I mean, 10 rules for life is pretty close to 12 rules for life. And of course, the main themes I discuss are order and chaos. Um, I mean, one book is about order, and the other's about chaos. And my first book is about both. So it was a joke, you know, associating my ideas with this arch-villain, magic, super-Nazi Red Skull. And then, as I looked into it more deeply, and as people sent me more information, it became clear that at least some of the inspiration (laughs) for this Red Skull character in this Captain America, uh, variant was, appeared to be targeting, let's say, or satirizing, or warning about, um, my ideas. And so I've been playing with that ever since, I suppose, on Twitter. Uh, people are producing memes now of Red Skull o- superimposed upon the picture of him things I've actually said instead of the hypothetical things that the people who don't like me wish I said and then purposefully misinterpret. And so that's that. And, um, it's, I'm trying to make it into something playful. It, it's so absurd. It shocked me to begin with. I couldn't believe it, to begin with, it, especially when I found out who the author of the comic book was. So, um, you know, he's a intellectual figure among the leftist community, uh, relatively well-known, um, and politically correct. And, um, I, I didn't expect it. It, it really threw me for a loop to begin with. I mean, it's really something to see yourself portrayed, let's say, parodied, satirized, um, as a n- I've been called a Nazi before. It's not pleasant, but this is one step beyond that. I mean, Nazi apparently isn't enough. I have to be a magical super-Nazi-

   3. CWChris Williamson3:38

      (laughs)

   4. JPJordan Peterson3:39

      ... and you know, by implication. Well, really, it's so, it's so, it's so surreal and absurd that, that I couldn't believe it to begin with. And it, and then I think what's happening with it is so comical because Red Skull is a demonic character. I mean, he's a satanic character and in his looks and in his actions. And people are putting my words over his representation. And there's a jarring discontinuity between the visual image and the actual words, especially for the quotes that have been derived from my talks that are, in some sense, more straightforward and, and commonsensical, like, you know, clean up your room, or, or don't lie. Um, they're not exactly the sorts of messages that the most malevolent imaginable Nazi super-villain would dream up and promulgate. So I think we're doing a, a T-shirt based on this image a kid developed in Eastern Europe, which is a variant of the Hail Hydra logo, except it's transformed into a lobster. We're going to market a limited edition poster and then donate all the proceeds to charity. That's, that's today's plan. That should be launched by tomorrow. So that'd be, what's, today's Thursday, April, what is it today?

   5. CWChris Williamson5:06

      8th.

   6. JPJordan Peterson5:06

      11th or so? (laughs) I don't even know what date it is.

   7. CWChris Williamson5:09

      April 8th.

   8. JPJordan Peterson5:10

      It is the 8th. So yeah, I think that'll be up on the 9th or 10th of April. So I'm playing with it.

   9. CWChris Williamson5:19

      Well, if that's not, if that's not turning chaos into order, I don't know what is.

   10. JPJordan Peterson5:22

       Well, it's kind of an interesting challenge, you know. And, and when, because I've been so ill, it's been very difficult for me to maintain my sense of humor, which is a terrible loss. Um, you know, the, it's the best response to that sort of thing is, is a deft play, you know, rather than e- than outrage, even though it, it is outrageous. It's, it's outrageous to the point of being surreal. And that's partly why it was so shocking to me. I, I couldn't believe that that could possibly be real, but there it was, you know. And many people who fancy themselves as my enemies have pointed out that while I'm probably so much like this Red Skull character...... that I'm just imagining that it's a parody of my ideas. But I'm afraid that's a pretty weak argument given the, you know, virtual word-for-word similarity of ten rules for life and chaos and order. Uh, no, that's not a coincidence. Sorry.

   11. CWChris Williamson6:23

       We can just add it to the list of weird things that's happened over the last 18 months or so that you've now ended up in a Marvel comic.

   12. JPJordan Peterson6:31

       Yeah, well, it's like a weird thing seems... I, I don't know. Yes. My life seems to predictably consist of unpredictably weird things. And I don't really know what to make of that. And neither... My family as well, 'cause it tends to throw them for a loop as well. Although, my daughter at the moment is having some fun playing with this.

   13. CWChris Williamson6:49

       (laughs)

   14. JPJordan Peterson6:49

       She's also healthy enough to have regained her sense of humor. So she's quite enthusiastic about the opportunity that this lays out. But it is quite interesting

3. 7:00 – 18:22

   The Evolving Media World

   1. JPJordan Peterson7:00

      that... Well, it's... I guess it's an indication too of the, the affordances provided by this new technology. You can respond. Everyone can now respond. You know, for so long, to have access to broad-scale media meant that you were a corporation and generally a very rich one. And now everyone has that at their fingertips. And it's, and it's a whole new world. Like, it's so new, it's so different. No one knows what to make of it. Everyone's a TV producer. Everyone's a radio host I- it's stunning. It's stunning. I've been looking at TikTok lately, um, you know, 'cause I, I try to investigate all these social media forums as they arise, because while I'm interested in communicating with people and I'm curious about the technologies. And one of the things I've seen on TikTok is, there'll be a, a video clip, say, of something I said. Uh, something went viral on TikTok the other day. I was talking to my daughter about this study that indicated that for every 15 points in IQ a woman gains over 100, her probability of being married declines by about 30%, and the opposite is true for men. And so, that's only about a 60-second video, which is par for the course for TikTok. But then people are pairing it with a video of someone listening to that and reacting to it. And so all of a sudden you have this possibility for dialogue in video. And that's a... You know, that's, that's never been the case. So what does that mean? Well, God only knows. It's a whole, it's a whole new means of broad-scale communication. It's two-way video, two-way permanent video with no bureaucratic infer- in- interference. So it, it, it m- it l- radically levels the media playing field. It... And, and you can see, and I, I see this is so interesting too, the, the legacy media, uh, types are... They're done. They're so done. It's, and it's happened so fast. I notice among young people that the legacy media, the big magazines, the newspapers, the TV stations, the radio stations for that matter, all of whom had a monopoly on this kind of information flow, are so dead to people under 30 that it's as if their death isn't even noticed. And that's fascinating. And yesterday, I, I interviewed Richard Tremblay. And Richard Tremblay is, uh, is in his 80s, and he's a scientist who studied male aggression, a research scientist who studied male and female aggression for 40 years. And he's won the criminologist's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in the Order of Canada, which is Canada's knighthood for all intents and purposes. Um, hundreds of publications. A, a very distinguished scientist. And we had a two-hour conversation, and I thought... Afterwards I thought, "You know, I've only been able to have conversations like that in graduate seminars, in the highest quality graduate seminars, in the most elite universities, now and then, even though I was placed to have those conversations." Two hours on a single topic, covered in as much depth as possible, um, by a, by someone who's a world authority. And now I can have that conversation with people, and 150,000 to 1 million people can have access to it instantly. It's like, I think... (sighs) God only knows what the... is gonna be the consequence of that. So it's so fun to, to play around with this and to experiment with it. And, and it's such a privilege to be able to do it, and there's so much possibility in it. So... And I, I've also been trying to figure out what I'm doing with the podcasts themselves, because that's really what I've been doing a lot of for the last four months. And I listened to this... I was interviewed by a Wall Street journalist last week, and I asked him what he liked about podcasts, 'cause he listens to them a lot. And he said, "I really like to see where they're going." And I thought, "Yeah, that's exactly it." Because in a legacy media interview everything is scripted and you're never talking to a person. You're talking to the corporation, essentially.

   2. CWChris Williamson11:12

      (laughs)

   3. JPJordan Peterson11:12

      And I'm not being cynical about that. It had to be that way because bandwidth was so expensive. But now you can sit down with someone and you can risk exploration. Of course, that's what Joe Rogan has be- been doing so well for so many years. You can risk exploration. You can have two people having a genuine discussion about a complex issue, and so they're, they're engaging in dialectical thinking. And if they're good at it, they're modeling it. So they can model high-quality dialectical thinking and pull people along on an exploratory journey and make it permanent. And that's completely revolutionary. That's never been possible before. And, and, and the possibilities are, um, limitless. And then... Sorry, I'm gonna rant about this a bit, because I, I am so st- continually staggered by this. The next thing is you could take those conversations and you can chop them up into 30-second-... pieces of minute-long pieces, five-minute-long pieces, 20-minute-long pieces. And each of those can find a specialized home that can attract millions of views. And so, it's as if you could write a book and sell it by the sentence. It's, it's really something, so. Well, so that's, you know, all response to Red Skull, I suppose.

   4. CWChris Williamson12:27

      (laughs) The interesting thing that I think I enjoy about podcasts, and a lot of audiences do as well, is that unscripted nature. But it's not just the fact that the topics are unscripted, it's the, the cadence and the, the timber of the, the tone of the way that the conversation flows as well. If you struggle to work something out, if you're battling at the forefront of your own cognitive capacity to try and get-

   5. JPJordan Peterson12:52

      Yep.

   6. CWChris Williamson12:52

      ... something from brain to mouth, we get to hear.

   7. JPJordan Peterson12:56

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson12:56

      I'm brought along and we're ... it's almost like a football match or a sports game. We're willing the person-

   9. JPJordan Peterson13:01

      Yep.

   10. CWChris Williamson13:01

       ... to get to the goal.

   11. JPJordan Peterson13:02

       Ab- absolutely. Yep. It is exactly like that. It's a ... it, it, it, it's, it, it's a ... you're ... the analogy is directly appropriate. That's why people like football and soccer games. Look, those ... they ... the players are trying to put something into the goal. Well, that's what you're doing when you're having a genuine dialogue, you know. It isn't necessarily clear what the goal is. It's more implicit, 'cause you're, you're starting to make that more and more clear too. But, but ... and, and there is something engaging about participating in that, apparently as a listener as well as a participant, and I can tell perfectly well when a podcast discussion is going well, and it's a dance, right? I mean, there's, there, there has to be this continual reciprocity, and that requires you to attend very carefully to your guest and to listen. I have some trouble with not interrupting, because ... for a variety of reasons. But some of that's the technological lag produced by the ... by Zoom and Skype. It makes you a little less, uh ... what? The dance is a little more awkward, 'cause the timing is off. But i- it's, it's really fun when it works, and it's working m- much of the time when I'm talking to my guests. It's really exciting. I have all sorts of people lined up, I'm so excited about it.

   12. CWChris Williamson14:23

       Yeah. Yeah. Long may it continue. I really do think that it's, it's such an answer to so much bad media and bad thinking, and it gives a platform to people who can't hide behind media training-

   13. JPJordan Peterson14:35

       Anything.

   14. CWChris Williamson14:35

       ... and scripting.

   15. JPJordan Peterson14:36

       You can't hide behind anything.

   16. CWChris Williamson14:37

       No. There is no place to hide.

   17. JPJordan Peterson14:38

       I don't think. I think ... No, there's no place to hide. I think that if, in two hours, you reveal your hand and everyone can see it, you reveal the weaknesses and strengths of your argument, you reveal the weaknesses and strengths of your character. You know, but, but in some sense, you can ... even if your character is flawed, like all of our characters are, you know, if you're engaged in something genuine, in a, in a genuine move forward, you're forgiven for that, right? It, if, if you're r- if you're actively rectifying your evident flaws during the discussion, people will forgive you for your flaws. But YouTube and podcast long-form seems absolutely unforgiving of any falsity-

   18. CWChris Williamson15:17

       (laughs)

   19. JPJordan Peterson15:17

       ... as far as I can tell. I mean, sometimes we do some editing. E- th- there's two conditions under which we'll edit. One is just to edit out some technical glitch. We also allow our guests, um, the option of not having something they said broadcast if they believe they've made a factual error or addressed an argument, um, in a misleading way. And that's a li- little bit more of moral quagmire, but our thought is that if we allow people that veto power to begin with, they're much more likely to be loose and to take risks in the exploration, and we've had to cut virtually nothing, except, I think, two factual errors of a few seconds. But it's so interesting, because in the comments section, if we ever edit anything, there's skepticism right away. And so, and so that's another indication of how unforgiving the medium is with regards to falsity. I'm trying to get politicians on my podcast. Uh, Senator Mike Lee, who's probably the most conservative senator in the United States, the, uh ... I'm releasing a podcast with him this weekend, and I think he acquitted himself well, um, and I'm hoping that ... I'm, I'm ... I've been in contact with a large number of Democrats, and I'm hoping that they'll take the big leap because they can talk directly to their constituents. Yep. They can talk directly to the people who they're responsible to, with no intermediation of bureaucracy, if they dare, hey?

   20. CWChris Williamson16:48

       That's the, that's the thing, because when it's unedited, when it's a flowing conversation for a long amount of time, the precipice on either side, you are walking a tightrope, as you said. There is no-

   21. JPJordan Peterson16:59

       Yep.

   22. CWChris Williamson16:59

       ... opportunity to go away and check what you actually want to say and rewrite it in a script. It is riding the crest of now.

   23. JPJordan Peterson17:07

       Yep.

   24. CWChris Williamson17:07

       Constantly surfing the wave of the crest of now. Um-

   25. JPJordan Peterson17:10

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson17:11

       I think it's going to find out-

   27. JPJordan Peterson17:12

       Yes.

   28. CWChris Williamson17:12

       ... who ... it's a genuineness test, like a canary in a coal mine for how genuine someone is, because there's no way that you can hold up a persona for two hours straight.

   29. JPJordan Peterson17:25

       Yeah. Well, or, or, or maybe somewhat more forgiving than that. It might be a canary test for how genuine they're, they're attempting to move towards. Because, like I said, I think you can make mistakes, but, but, but i- if, if you're bargaining in good faith, the audience will forgive you for your, for your mistakes. So, but, but you're punished brutally if you're false, so. And I don't know about you, but I'm really attentive to the comments. I watch how people are responding, and, you know, if 10 people point out something, I'm still working on this proclivity to interrupt, but if 10 people point out something, I try to address it, my team tries to address it, because ...Well, why not? You know, I mean, you're probably doing something wrong at some point, and enough people tell you. It's tricky, but, uh, it's at least worth considering. It, it's really

4. 18:22 – 25:00

   Preventing Over-Optimisation

   1. JPJordan Peterson18:22

      exciting.

   2. CWChris Williamson18:23

      Moving onto the book. Your new book is about the excesses of order. I've been thinking a lot about the-

   3. JPJordan Peterson18:28

      Yes.

   4. CWChris Williamson18:28

      ... perils of over-optimization for the individual. So, as you-

   5. JPJordan Peterson18:33

      Hmm.

   6. CWChris Williamson18:33

      ... sink into the productivity and the personal development world, it can lead to never feeling like you're done. Alan Watts has this quote-

   7. JPJordan Peterson18:42

      Yep.

   8. CWChris Williamson18:42

      ... where he says, "We can become so consumed with trying to improve our lives that we altogether forget to live them." Is there a way that people can learn to let go of this compulsion a little bit?

   9. JPJordan Peterson18:56

      That, that's a really good question. Um, I think my, my second book implicitly answers some of that, um, and explicitly some of it as well. But the implicit part is there's an increased emphasis on social ties. And so, for me, I snap out of the improvement/productivity trap, to the degree that I'm able, when I'm playing with my family, let's say. When we're joking, when we're sitting around m- a meal time together. When, when there's peace there and we can joke and play. And I'm trying as, particularly, as I'm trying to regain my health, I'm trying to really rekindle that capacity to play and enjoy the moment, even if I'm not doing something s- productive. In, and there, that, that's a very difficult balance to attain optimally. Like any optimal balance is difficult to attain. Um, you know, it isn't obvious to me how much of, I have no idea the, the m- the multiple sources of my health troubles. I was diagnosed this month with severe sleep, central sleep apnea. And so that was a great relief, 'cause I have a machine now, so I breathe properly. I was waking up, uh, 25 times an hour, apparently. My sleep was d- so I was getting no restorative sleep. And so that was one contr- major contributor. And since I've been breathing at night, I've actually (laughs) been feeling quite a bit better, unsurprisingly. Um, but I've been scouring my conscience to determine, if you have an undiagnosed illness, especially if it's severe, it's very likely that you're going to tear yourself apart looking for what you did wrong to have this arise. And, you know, I think that, uh, it, so I've been considering did I take on too much responsibility? Did I work too much? E- et cetera, et cetera. Um, I don't know the answer to that yet. But what I do know is that since I've been trying to regain my health, I've been doing a lot of walking and that's been really good. And I'm not working while I'm walking. I'm walking. And I've been working out more, and I've been playing more, and I've been dancing more, and that's all useful. And that has to be balanced with that productivity. 'Cause what you're looking for, eh, you're looking for improvement, but you're looking for sustainable improvement. And so if you push yourself too hard, you, you destroy the sustainability across time. And, and you want this, that sustainability there, so you can't push yourself any farther than you're capable of going in the long run. I found, for example, because I've written diligently for a long time daily, and I learned quite early on that writing more than three hours in a day was counterproductive. Whatever I gained from a four-hour writing session, I'd lose the next day or two. So, but I also think you have to kind of push yourself past your limits before you can retract to the optimal place. And that can't be, sort of, defined a priori, because each person's limit is different. And I think, so I think what you do when you're young, in your 20s, if you're, perhaps, if you're operating in an optimal manner is you push yourself to your limits and then pull back and adjust for sustainability. And I helped lots of people do that in my clinical practice. Like, I worked with lawyers who were at the pinnacle of their profession. And the demands on them are incredible. They're working 60 to 80 hours a week. Um, generally, what I did with them was get them to take more days off. They couldn't work shorter days, but they could plan four-day weekends two months in advance, and they could do that every two months. And inevitably, if they did that, the number of billable hours they produced went up, not down. So they've maybe doubled their vacation time and increased their productivity, so it was a really good deal for them. They got their cake and eat it too. They got to have their cake and eat it too.

   10. CWChris Williamson23:20

       So do we lean to, need to learn to play, in a way? Play can be, uh, a-

   11. JPJordan Peterson23:25

       We need to remember how. We all know, right? I mean, w- our p- play is so deeply embedded in human beings. It's, it's one of our primary modes of, of, of cognition and a- adaptation. Mammals have a specialized play circuit that's, that's, that's, it's biologically, what would you say, specialized precisely for play. And so, and it, it's an interesting circuit because, a l- and, uh, a lot of this has been discovered by people who study animal behavior, especially among rats. But play in rats produces prefrontal lobe development, and that's the highest, that's the part of the brain that's responsible for highest-order cognition.So rats have to play a lot to mature properly, and, and they play socially. And social play is social integration. There's no difference between the ability to play socially and being socially integrated. Um, like c- a good conversation at d- dinnertime is a form of play, 'cause there's wit involved, and there's banter, and there's timing, and there's a dance, and there's, n- you know, there's the matching of your physical r- responses to the physical response of the other person. It's, it's play. But play is v- very easily inhibited by almost any other motivational state. And so you can also tell that if you can get yourself into a playful mood, that, that you're in an optimal place. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to do it. So it's a good sign that things are going right.

5. 25:00 – 30:49

   The Pain Of Unreached Potential

   1. CWChris Williamson25:00

      In rule two, you say to imagine who we could be and then to aim single-mindedly at that. But reality gets in the way of you reaching that potential, and it can hurt. How can people cope with the pain of unreached potential?

   2. JPJordan Peterson25:17

      Well, part of ... Oh, that's a really good question. Look, every ideal is a judge, right? So you pause at an ideal and instantly you're in inferior position in relationship to that ideal, and that can be crushing. Okay, so what do you do about that? Well, one answer is no ideals. Well, that's not a good answer, because then you don't have anything to do, right? So, so ... And that deprives you of a main source of pleasure, which is observed, uh, generated as a consequence of observed movement towards a valued goal. So if you have a high goal, and you see any movement towards it, there's a potential, there's a really powerful potential kick there, so you don't wanna dispense with that. But then if you set up an ideal, it can judge you very harshly. So then you have to rearrange your reward philosophy, and instead of punishing yourself from as a consequence of perceived distance, you reward yourself for incremental movement forward. And that's not just theoretical. Look, I had was stopped by three guys on the street this week, three separate occasions, and they all told me the same thing. They, you know, they, they, they said that they had read or ... something I wrote or listened to something or watched something, and that it had been helpful. And whenever- ever anybody says that to me, I always ask them, "Okay, exactly what was helpful? And what changed?" Because I wanna know what's helping so that I can understand the target and hit it better. And so ... And generally, people are more- are pleased to tell me, um, although sometimes it takes them a while to formulate exactly the description. But they ... all three of them said, um, "I stopped comparing myself to other people. So I stopped comparing what I didn't have to what other people had. I left that off the table. And then I started to reward myself for improving over what I was yesterday." So they ... And that's profound change, because it means that you actually get your reward structure transformed, and that's a big deal, 'cause that's, that's your source of positive emotion and enthusiasm, encouragement, all of that. So now you can start to encourage yourself for, for genuine improvement. And it's also pragmatically extremely intelligent, because incremental improvement repeated is virtually unstoppable. And I, uh ... That's l- like the hallmark of behavioral therapy, that idea, because what a behavior therapist does is, you come and you say to me, "I'm not ... Things aren't the way I want them to be." And then I say, "Well, well, how would you like them to be? And how are they not that?" So we lay out the problem, the territory, and then the next thing we do is lay out a trajectory, w- which is, okay, well, here's something. You're lonesome. You, you don't have a partner. Okay, so what are the ... What are incremental movements can you make towards that goal that you would do that would be helpful? And so maybe you, you, you, you negotiate with the person, 'cause that's what you do if you're a reasonable therapist, and you say, "Well, look, why don't you," uh ... You decide as a consequence of the conversation, "Why don't you write out a description of yourself for a dating site? Don't post it or anything. Just write it out. And, and then let's see if you actually do that." And so then the person comes back next week, and they say, "I did that, and not only that, I posted it." And you say, "Great, what's the next step?" Or they say, "Geez, you know, I, I just kept avoiding that." And then you say, "Okay, well, we need to break that down. You avoided it. Well, could you write one sentence about who you are right now while you're sitting here?" And sometimes they can do that right away, or sometimes they can't, and then you, you make a micro-analysis of that. And what you do is you, you reduce the magnitude of the move forward until you hit the point where you actually will do it. And that's like the secret to good negotiation as well. If you're negotiating with your wife, maybe you want one of her behaviors to change, and then obviously she has to be on board with that, and hypothetically that's going to be reciprocal process, but what you wanna do is find a small improvement that is measurable, that's implementable, that will be implemented, that you can then reward. And, and that's, that's h- that's how you can have your ideal. You, you can have whatever ideal you want as long as you're willing to reduce your movement forward to achievable increments. But that's okay, because they compound. So ... And, and I really learned this as a therapist, and it was one of the things that was so fun about being a therapist is you can take someone through this process and start them on just the tiniest goal.... you know, and it's... just seems trivial. But they'll do it, and then they start moving fast af- faster and faster after that point, once, once the direction has been established. And people make incredible improvement over, you know, uh, not unreasonable spans of time. A few months, maybe a few years, but... which is not nothing, but it's not decades, you know. It's... I saw th- saw that time and time again. So aim high, but reward yourself for small incremental improvements, especially ones that repeat every day.

6. 30:49 – 37:38

   Avoiding Unhealthy Comparisons

   1. CWChris Williamson30:50

      I think that's one of the challenges we have in the modern era, because social media shows us the highlight reel of everybody else's life. But we get to watch our own failings from a front row seat, right? We watch ourselves-

   2. JPJordan Peterson31:02

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson31:02

      ... blunder through life. We realize just how far away from our potential we are. But nobody else actually knows that. No one else knows the podcast you could have recorded, the business that you could have built, the book that you could have written. In a very, very real sense, you are only ever competing against yourself. But because-

   4. JPJordan Peterson31:21

      Yes.

   5. CWChris Williamson31:22

      ... everything's a-

   6. JPJordan Peterson31:22

      Well, and that's especially... It's absolutely right. That's why the individual... Th- that's exactly why group categorization of people is so dreadfully wrong. It's like, you really are your only comparison group, especially as you get older, because your life is so idiosyncratic and peculiar that any compar- I mean, look, you have to care what other people think. It's stupid to think otherwise, bec- beca- because you have to be social and you have to be aware of what other people are doing and all of that. So it's... this is psychopathic individual, individuality, but it is genuinely true that no one has your set of opportunities and limitations. And so the, the, the comparison just isn't real. It can't be sufficiently multidimensional. You know, 'cause maybe you see someone who's ri-... I've dealt with... I've, I've met many people who are very, very rich. And you can look at their lives and they have these huge houses and material plenty, but j-... And they're shielded from many catastrophes that would hit someone without those resources harder. But their lives are still full of exactly the same troubles that characterize human life in general. And so you, you compare yourself on one dimension, you don't see, well, the person's worked 80 hours a week for 40 years and it's blown all his relationships out of the water.

   7. CWChris Williamson32:46

      Mm-hmm.

   8. JPJordan Peterson32:46

      It's like, yes, he's rich, but he's also old now, you know, he's 60. And one of the best predictors of wealth is age. You know, really? Do you wanna be young and poor or old and rich? It's like, I'd pick young and poor, 'cause you can't buy youth. And so... And, and that's something that's worth considering. But you don't know what burdens the people you're jealous of are carrying, so leave it be. It's not, it's not helpful to you to, to, to be envious.

   9. CWChris Williamson33:18

      I often tell people that we don't know the price that you need to pay to be the people that you admire. So we look at Elon Musk or Conor McGregor or Kim Kardashian, and we want the success that they have within a very narrowly defined domain of competence. Tiger Woods, fantastic example, the greatest golfer ever, but his dad mistreated him so much as a kid that they had a safe word. They had a safe word like you do during rough sex, that Tiger could tell him if he'd had enough. And it was called the E word. It was enough. And Tiger never once said it. His dad would racially abuse him while he was on the golf course telling him that, "These White people are never going to let you on here." But then when we look at Tiger's golf game, only then can we even begin to see what kind of looks a bit like child abuse, but only when he's able to perform in that way. But the question is, would you pay that price to be Tiger Woods? Would you have so little self-belief outside of the golf game that you have the most public marriage failure that anyone's ever seen? He's on anti-psychotic drugs and being pulled over by police at the side of the road because he's fallen asleep at the wheel. He's ten... spent half a decade off the game because he's been injured because of how hard he's pushed himself. Do you really want that? Because that's the price you have to pay to be Tiger Woods. You can't just get the golf capacity without having everything that comes with it. This isn't pick and choose like clothes off a rail. This is a wholesale sale. You pick everything, warts and all. You need to pick their sleep patterns, their self body image, all of the genetics they've got, the way that their brain feels when they go to bed at night. A lot of people, I think if they were able to see the full package, they wouldn't pay that price.

   10. JPJordan Peterson35:05

       Yeah. And, and, and that could well be the right decision, you know? Who, who knows what price you pay for hyper specialization? You know, and I learned that looking at, you know, power mad C-suite types. Well, first of all, they're generally not power mad, because power is actually an unbelievably unstable way of establishing authority. Y- y- you get, you get slaughtered if you're not reciprocal in most reasonably functioning organizations. And if you're in an organization that only rewards the, um, exercise of power, the probability that that organization is going to fail in totality is extraordinarily high, because it's a tyrannical organization and it'll lose touch with its customers. So the C-suite types, um, they're, they're working nonstop. Corporate lawyers in New York, you know, they make $700 an hour, but they work all the time. All the time. And there are people who are suited f- for that. But it isn't obvious that that's for everyone or that it should be, or that it's even desirable. Now, it's a temperamental issue to a large degree. You know, many of those people are hyper conscientious.And so if they, they'll work whatev- wherever you put them, what they would do is work. That's who they are. And it's biological as well. It's, you know, it's not all biological, because traits are affected by learning and, and by environment in complex ways. But a huge chunk of it is that you're born like that. And that has advantages and disadvantages. So conscientiousness is a good example. Um, it, it's a good predictor of long-term life success. But people who are conscientious tend to te- tear themselves apart if they become unemployed, for example. You know, sometimes you get laid off. You worked hard, but you get laid off. Well, people who are conscientious will tear themselves into pieces with guilt in that situation, because they tend to attribute so much responsibility to themselves. And so there's a price to be paid for conscientiousness. It, it, it opens you up to a certain set of vulnerabilities. So, you know, and you might be somewhat unbearable to your family too, because all you ever do is work. You know, you think, well, you, you, you wanna be a good... You want your father, maybe your husband, perhaps your wife, to be a good provider. But you want them to do that at the expense of everything else? Generally, no.

7. 37:38 – 52:55

   Deep Self-Awareness

   1. JPJordan Peterson37:39

   2. CWChris Williamson37:39

      Talking about the price that we have to pay, do you think that having a deep consciousness and the ability to reflect on life is really something that we should be thankful for? Like, is it a blessing or a curse to feel everything so deeply?

   3. JPJordan Peterson37:55

      It's both, I think. It's a blessing and a curse. So I suppose it's, it's, it, it... The benefit it delivers is an expanded scope of experience. And it's possible as well that if it was done well, it would be better than anything. But if it isn't done well, it's very, very punishing. So I think you can make that case about self-consciousness in people. I mean, self-consciousness, as a trait, loads on neuroticism. So, you know, and when people say, "I became self-conscious," they usually mean they've become embarrassed or anxious, right? Be- and those things do overlap to a tremendous degree. So self-consciousness per se, as an experienced phenomenon, is associated with negative emotion. Well, but do you want to dispense with it? Well, uh, no, because it's really informative. But you don't want to experience it. So if you're made self-conscious by one of your inadequacies, you wanna remove the inadequacy, you don't wanna remove the self-consciousness. But it, I mean, it can get out of hand too, you know. People can be so self-conscious and so self-critical that they can't move forward. So it can definitely be... You can have too much of, you can have too much of that. That's for sure. And it's, it's... One of the things you do as a behavior therapist, again, a cognitive behavior therapist, is if you have someone who's particularly self-conscious, there'll be a litany in their head of all of their inadequacies. And so it's like they have an inner tormentor that just constantly natters at them about how useless and weak and, uh, um, uh, what, inadequate they are. And there's a lot of stock arguments that repeat. And one of the things you do with someone who is in that situation is you have them write down all their self-critical thoughts, and you do that dialectically. You know, you, you help them over many sessions make a complete account, and then you help them develop counterarguments. Not false counterarguments, but you go after. It's like, "Well, is that really true?" You know? "And here's the, here's the evidence that it's not." And so you can bolster people against the consequences of self-consciousness gone amok. And that's often quite effective.

   4. CWChris Williamson40:19

      Where does that voice-

   5. JPJordan Peterson40:19

      It's difficult, though.

   6. CWChris Williamson40:20

      Where does that voice tend to come from?

   7. JPJordan Peterson40:25

      Well, it's probably, um, at least in part, the inevitable consequence of being a creature who's continually being socially evaluated. So y- you have a voice inside that's something like the abstracted average of everyone's cr- criticism of everyone. And that's useful, because it reminds you not to do things that other people are going to object to. It, it also, assuming your culture is reasonably functional, it also reminds you not to do things that are going to be counterproductive. And so that's one source. It's like interiorized public opinion. And then other sources are, well, it's also the voice of your ideals. And that, so that, in that sense, you might consider it your conscience. And that can be, well, that's extraordinarily useful, because it points out your shortcomings. Now, one of the things... Uh, I've analyzed this, the movie Pinocchio, sort of ad nauseam, I would say. But, but it's been very useful to me. Um, one of the things so, that's so remarkable about that movie is that the voice of the conscience, which is portrayed by Jiminy Cricket, is symbolically associated with Jesus Christ in the movie. And, uh, but interestingly enough, there's a dialectical relationship between the s- the puppet, the wooden-headed puppet whose strings are being pulled by external forces and the conscience. So despite the voice of the conscience being symbolically associated with Christ, the conscience has something to learn during the journey as well. And so there's like a dialogue between the conscience and the developing individual. And the consequence of the dialogue is the conscience gets more effective as the person becomes more developed.And I think that's right, because imagine that you have the average ideal inside you, speaking to you, and you have the, the average social voice inside you, speaking to you. But it isn't really speaking to you. It isn't taking your particularities into account. And it isn't until you engage with your conscience that you can craft it into something that's actually speaking specifically to you, and then that's, that's much less burdensome and much more effective. And so, and I, I think that's reasonable, I, uh, 'cause I don't think the conscience starts out infallible.

   8. CWChris Williamson43:12

      I think we need to question our assumptions far more than we think we need to around that. There's so much of the source code of what we're built upon, the stories that we were told as children, the beliefs that we've had and built up around ourselves for a long time. Unless you actually take time away from the urgent, you never get onto the important tasks of thinking, "Okay-"

   9. JPJordan Peterson43:31

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CWChris Williamson43:31

       "... well, I've held this thing like a, like a bag, like a satchel that I've carried with me for decades."

   11. JPJordan Peterson43:39

       Mm-hmm.

   12. CWChris Williamson43:39

       "Do I actually... Is this serving me? Is there anything even in here? Does this bag need to be with me? Can I dispense with it?"

   13. JPJordan Peterson43:46

       Hm.

   14. CWChris Williamson43:46

       But if we're constantly... And this links back to the productivity conversation.

   15. JPJordan Peterson43:51

       Hm.

   16. CWChris Williamson43:51

       If we're constantly chasing the urgent, forward-focused, gaining and going and getting after it, we never actually have the opportunity to sit back and assess the foundations that everything's built upon. If you're a building maintainer, you wouldn't build the building and then never check on the foundations. I imagine they must have to do that fairly regularly because that's what-

   17. JPJordan Peterson44:13

       Mm-hmm.

   18. CWChris Williamson44:13

       ... the rest of the building is reliant on to continue standing upright.

   19. JPJordan Peterson44:18

       There's an MBA program at McGill that's targeted to, uh, practicing managers, not, not to MBA students per se. Um, and the, the man who runs it has asked his students what they found most useful about the program. And what they found most useful was the opportunity to get away from the day-to-day fires of their managerial roles and think about the long run, the medium to long run. Because what happens with most managers is they're so bitty- busy putting out day-to-day fires that they never notice in what direction the entire organization or the part they're head- they're heading should be... in what direction it should be going. And we... that's easy f- that's... it's easy for that to happen in our own lives. I mean, I think that's actually why, at least part of the reason why, it's a real loss that people no... so many people no longer attend church. Because, you know, when I was a kid, there was a lot of cynicism, and there still is about, you know, one-hour-a, a week Christians. They'd go to church and participate in this elevated ritual that was, at least in principle, oriented towards a higher mode of being and then promptly return to their, you know, sinful work-a-day selves the second they stepped out of church. And fair enough, but an hour a week is a lot more than zero. You know, and you could object, "Well, most people who were going to church weren't engaging in this foundational analysis." It's like, well, at least they were sort of doing it and replacing that with zero doesn't seem to be a very wise move. And so I guess that's... it's sort of the answer to your own question there, too, though, is, you know, you asked about the utility of self-consciousness. It's like, well, you can step back from your... the traps of your unthinking habits and contemplate the whole journey. You know, my colleagues and I developed this program online to help people do that, to write through their life. So it, it... the, the Past Authoring program helps people write an autobiography. Who the hell am I anyways? Y- y- and you think you know, but you don't 'cause you're complicated. And then the Present Authoring program helps you identify your faults and your virtues by your own definition. It's not imposed on you. It's, it's a guided process of exploration. And then the Future Authoring program helps you figure out, well, if you could have what you wanted, what... hypothetically, what would that actually be? And yes, it's very much worth a- asking yourself that question 'cause you're always searching for that anyways, uh, even negatively because your conscience will torment you for the things you're not doing. Okay, well, not doing in relationship to what? Well, in relationship to the implicit ideal of your conscience. Well, what is that? And the answer is, well, you don't know. And so if you're just allowing yourself to be tortured into submission, then you're at the mercy of some ideal that you don't know, you don't... and maybe you wouldn't want to pursue if you actually knew. You know, that's why Jung, Carl Jung said, "Everyone lives out a myth, but virtually no one knows which... what myth they're living," and maybe it's a tragedy.

   20. CWChris Williamson47:50

       (laughs)

   21. JPJordan Peterson47:52

       Maybe you don't want it to be a tragedy. And then the question, what do you want? That's a really deep question, you know? I mean, you... that's a serious question. What is it that you should value? And people say, "Well, being happy." They don't even mean that, by the way. If you decompose what people mean when they say they want to be happy, what it turns out they actually mean is they don't want to be miserable. They're way more concerned with avoiding suffering than they are with pursuing, you know, enthusiastic, positive emotion. So even the, the statement, "I want to be happy," is actually not an accurate reflection of what it is that you want.

   22. CWChris Williamson48:32

       Does that not show just how little of our motivations we get to see? We're so good at deception that we deceive ourselves before we deceive anybody else. We get to see this tiny, tiny little sliver of why we are here, why we do the things we do, why we think the things we think. Uh, I saw this quote today from Robert Wright that said, "Emotions are the executioner of our genes," or the executor of our genes. All that they're-

   23. JPJordan Peterson48:59

       Hm. Hm. Hm.

   24. CWChris Williamson48:59

       ... there is to just enact what our biological imperative wants. And then we get to glimpse them as they run past on the way to doing a thing, and we believe that we're somehow ... we're peering into the source code of our own mind. That's not the case.

   25. JPJordan Peterson49:16

       Well, we're definitely not transparent to ourselves, by any stretch of the imagination. We wouldn't have to spend decades studying psychology if we were transparent. Like, we're, we're, we're, we're tremendously mysterious to, to ourselves. I'm less pessimistic about the executors of our genes, because, uh, I, I think that, uh, you know, that, that, that pessimistic biological determinism kind of ... The pessimism sort of s- stems from this assumption, adoption of the assumption that our genes were tooled by a blind watchmaker, and there's this deterministic, soulless process at the base of our biological being. And I don't buy that. I think it's a lot more complicated than that. So I think even if we are tools of our biology in some sense, the ends at which our biology are aiming are ethical in, in an unbelievably fundamental way. So ... And I think all the (laughs) biological, soph- sophisticated biological evidence points in that direction. I'll give you an example. So I was talking, as I said, to this scientist yesterday, Richard Tremblay, and he studies the development of aggression. And it turns out that you don't learn to be aggressive. That's there at the beginning. You learn how to control your aggression as you're socialized, or not, so ... But having said that, if you look at ... So the most aggressive people are two-year-olds. They're most likely to kick, hit, bite, and steal. And younger children would also be likely to do that, except they're not (laughs) sophisticated enough in their behavior to manage it. So it's not like six months old don't experience rage, but all they can do is kick and scream. So ... But by the time you're two, you can hit someone, and you do. But, but 30% of children virtually never engage in violent behavior, 50% engage in some, and about 17% do it habitually. But all of them do it less as they're socialized. There's a subsection that maintain it quite regularly, and they tend to become delinquents and criminals. So that's how it play ... Okay, but the reason that's so relevant is that, you know, there's this idea that's rampant in our culture that our hierarchical structures of authority are predicated on power. But if that was the case, the tendency to aggression would be universal among children, not only characterizing, you know, a s- a tiny minority. And it would increase with socialization, not decrease. And so just that evidence alone suggests that however we organize ourselves in society for success, it isn't a consequence of mutual exploitation, oppression, tyranny, and subjugation. Those are actually very ineffective strategies. They're only employed by people who don't have the sophistication to do things in a better way. And better would mean better for them as individuals, but also better for everyone. And so I firmly believe that you're oriented biologically towards a very pronounced and sophisticated ethic. And so it's not so gloomy, even if your emotions are the handmaidens of your genes, which they are. That, that's, that's true, but I don't think that there's cause for pessimism there. Um, we're, we're unbroken, we're noble creatures.

8. 52:55 – 1:02:17

   How To Add Urgency To Life

   1. CWChris Williamson52:56

      I like that. Talking about the beginning of life there and how we sort of come into this world, I wanna talk about the end. For better or worse, life is short. How can we add a sense of urgency to it?

   2. JPJordan Peterson53:15

      Well, I, I would say by reminding yourself that life is short. That's, that's ... That'll add a sense of urgency, by noticing. You know, I calculated, I don't know, my parents are ... When my parents were in their 70s, or 60s perhaps, I, I usually saw them about once every two years. We communicated a lot more than that, but we live a long ways apart. So I calculated, you know, well, my dad's probably gonna live till his mid-80s, or late, you know, somewhere in there. Um, and he's six- he's 70, let's say, I'm gonna see him 40 more times. It's like, okay, 40 more times. That's urgent, so you better get it right, 'cause you don't have it, you don't have that many opportunities. You know, it's the same when you're formulating relationships in your adolescence, late adolescence and early adulthood. Y- you don't have that many experiments to run, you know, and, and you get, you get old a lot faster than you think. So atten- attention, attention. Attention is an underrated, um, faculty. It's not the same as thinking. It's watching to see what's there in front of your eyes, and, and to guide yourself as a consequence of what you perceive.It's the, it's the faculty that transforms thought if you let it. So... And your conscience alerts you as well. Tick, tick, tick. You know, you're wasting time. And very few people are happy with that. S- some are burdened by it more than others, but virtually n- no one escapes that voice of conscience. I suppose to some degree that's, m- that's the willingness not to engage in self-deception. Chapter 3 in Beyond Order is about that. Eh, people don't really repress the things they don't wanna face, they just fail to unpack them. You know, like maybe you're on YouTube regularly and every time you shut the computer off, you feel somewhat disgusted. But you don't pay any attention to that for a while, for two years. But then you decide you're gonna pay attention, then you find out, well, the reason you're disgusted is because you're wasting your life and you know it. And that disgust is indicating that, but unless you attend to the disgust and un-packet, let it reveal itself as informative, you don't know what the message is. You just have a f- sense of disquiet. It's not easy to transform that sense of disquiet into an actionable plan, and often you have to talk to someone about it as well. You have to discover the... So it's not like you're repressing the emotion exactly, it's that you don't undergo the difficult process necessary to un-pack it. It's effortful.

   3. CWChris Williamson56:10

      It comes back to that assessing assumptions that we said before. If the goal of life is to live a life which in retrospect we are glad that we lived, it's important to give ourselves perspective, to develop that metacognizance, to step away from the urgent, to step away from the phenomenological day-to-day existence, because the present self is a petulant child. It's lazy and it wants the path of least resistance and that glass of wine and that new movie on Netflix and the couch looks really comfortable. Very rarely does it do-

   4. JPJordan Peterson56:44

      Yeah, but that's the danger with impulsive happiness, is that it does have that present-bound quality.

   5. CWChris Williamson56:51

      And in retrospect, that can lead to a life that's not well lived.

   6. JPJordan Peterson56:57

      Generally that... Yes, yes. Yes. Uh, life definitely places phil- philosophical demands on you, whether you want it to or not. And so, it is just useful to step back. And that's likely why the trait openness evolved. That's the creativity dimension. That's the dimension that, that allows people to engage in philosophical discourse and to think laterally, and it, it does allow you to step back and look at things on a broader scale, and to generate creative alternatives. The problem with examining your assumptions is it's very disquieting. You know, because you want things to act the way you predict and desire them to act, and you work within a set of axioms and you act them out in order to maintain that predictability, that desirable predictability. If you mess around, the more fundamental the axiom that you question, the more uncertainty you release. And some of that can be positive, but, uh, plenty of it can be anxiety-provoking. I mean, just imagine that you're in a relationship and, and, you know, it's, it's maybe a year into it and you haven't formalized and finalized it, but then one day you allow yourself to ask the question, "Is this the relationship I wanna be in?" Well, that's a fundamental question, but just imagine now you're destabilizing your entire future. You're destabilizing your present. You're destabilizing your past. Because while engaging in the relationship, you're acting out the assumption that it's the proper relationship. But now you question that, that means the story you told yourself about what was happening, well, it happened, even though it's already happened, was wrong and something else had happened, and then you have to think through what actually happened. So it's unbelievably demanding, and the more axiomatic the assumption, the more certainty is cast into, into troublesome chaos. Now, you could say, "Yeah," (laughs) "but the alternative is worse." And I believe that often that's true, but, but the thing about the alternative is that you can always forestall it, right?

   7. CWChris Williamson59:11

      Mañana, mañana.

   8. JPJordan Peterson59:12

      You can ask that question tomorrow. Mm-hmm. You bet. You bet. And, and it's a very powerful temptation, and no wonder. You know, do you wanna dig up the body now or do you wanna wait a month? It's like, well, it'll be more rotten in a month, but, but it's not a month. It's not now, right? It's not now. And so, I, I understand why people don't wanna delve into things, even if their emotions indicate that they should. I, I mean, I would see this all the time. I- if you're trying to settle an important issue with your partner, let's say, that can be a tremendously troublesome excavation process, and there's no shortage of pain. But if you sort it out, then maybe things can be better. Doesn't mean it's easy or, or, or, uh, or pleasant. Quite the contrary. It's like surgery and it's not... It's like surgery to remove something, you know, that shouldn't be there. It's necessary, but man, still surgery.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:00:17

      I think it's possible to develop a cathartic f- uh, emotion towards that. I think it's possible to down-regulate the level of discomfort that you feel when you do assess your assumptions. On this show, a lot of the time I try and present uncomfortable truths.

   10. JPJordan Peterson1:00:37

       Mm-hmm.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:00:38

       So insights that are accurate, but disquieting to learn.... and that, to me, gradually exposing people and myself to more and more of these, and learning that it's not an existential threat. It's not going to destroy my ego.

   12. JPJordan Peterson1:00:54

       Well, or learning, or learning that it is an existential threat, but that you can handle it.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:00:59

       Correct.

   14. JPJordan Peterson1:01:01

       Which is really what people learn in, in exposure therapy that's effective, is the thing they're afraid of is frightening, but they're tougher than they think. And so, and, and that's very useful to learn. It, and, and s- yes, I, I, I do believe... Well, uh, it's also the case that if you decide that you're going to delve into trouble as it arises, you're likely not to avoid the delving process more than necessary. So the thing won't grow into a monster that's quite so large, you know? And so once y- the relationship you have with your intimate partner is reasonably well constituted, and you decide that you're going to address problems as they arise, then it's less burdensome than the total reconfiguration that might be necessary before any of that has, has been, has been started. It's like men- it's a form of mental hygiene, I would say, in some sense. And so, and you do get better at that with practice. And, um, you, you, perhaps you also get less likely to jump to the worst possible negative conclusion, you know, so, so, and that's also useful. You don't catastrophize so, so much,

9. 1:02:17 – 1:11:00

   Jordan’s Extra Rules for Life

   1. JPJordan Peterson1:02:17

      so...

   2. CWChris Williamson1:02:19

      Is there a rule which you didn't write in the original list of 42 that you wish you'd put in there?

   3. JPJordan Peterson1:02:36

      Oh, set aside some time for play. That's probably, that's one. Um...

   4. CWChris Williamson1:02:44

      Can I make a suggestion from your work?

   5. JPJordan Peterson1:02:46

      Sure.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:02:47

      It's from a lecture that you gave, and it's written on my wall over there, and it's, "Don't practice what you do not want to become."

   7. JPJordan Peterson1:02:56

      Oh, yes, yes. S- that's, that's, that's, uh... Yeah, I have a corollary of that too that works in relationships: Do not punish what you want to have happen. So, so here's an example. Imagine that you, that, that you've married someone that you find attractive, and then imagine that other people find that person attractive as well, and that that's actually somewhat threatening to you, and then instead of dealing with the fact that you're threatened by the very thing that you were attracted to and that you're blessed to have, you start to punish th- the person that you're with when they manifest themselves as attractive. Well, you do that for 10 years, and the attractive person is no longer there, and then you're going to be angry at them even though it was completely your fault. You know, because if you punish someone for the manifestation of a desirable virtue, it really hurts them, and you, because people are... You know, it's so interesting to watch what happens when people stop me on the street, especially if they are shy and maybe somewhat damaged. They want to tell me about something good they've done. But they're very hesitant about it, because their experience has been that if they reveal something good they've done, they either get ignored or punished, and so they don't want to do it. They're afraid. But it, if they do it and then they get a reward, well, they're, uh, they're unbelievably happy about that. But that's a good example, because it's very common for people to experience punishment for their virtue, and, you know, you can do that with your kids too if you're jealous of them. I mean, maybe you have a kid who's really bright, who's brighter than you. It's like, are you so sure you're happy about that? And how do you know that you're not gonna punish that child because you're jealous, you know? And if you think you're not that sort of person, well, you should think again, because people are that sort of people, and perhaps you can train yourself not to do it, but envy is a pretty common human emotion, and the probability is that you're reasonably prone to it. But, so one of the things I learned, again, from animal behaviorists, Skinner in particular, when Skinner believed that... He's the psychologist who was most famous for learning, uh, experiments with rats. He believed that the best form of discipline, so if you wanted to train an animal to do something, was reward. You waited till the animal did something that approximated what you wanted, and you immediately rewarded it. So maybe he would train a, a rat to climb a ladder and then walk across the top of the ladder down another ladder and, well, he'd, he just watched the rat, and whenever the rat went near the ladder, he'd give it a food pellet. And soon it was near the ladder all the time, and then being near the ladder, you know, it would put a leg on, a front paw on one rung. Bang, food pellet. Well, soon the rat was going like this, and then the next thing you know, it was going like this, and he could... I mean, the, uh, good animal behaviorists can train an animal to do an amazing thing, any amaz- number of amazing things. In your intimate relationships, if you watch the people that are around you, and then you see them doing something that they should do more of, and I don't mean this in a manipulative sense, because hopefully, if you have any sense, you're rewarding them for something that would be really good for them, and you say, "Look, I saw you do this, and that's really good. Do more of that." It's like, man, you're just opening up the pathway for that person to deliver what you want. If you'll admit what you want, if you'll reward it when it happens, if you pay proper attention, if you think you deserve what you desire, if you think your ideals are worth pursuing, if you have any faith in yourself, I mean, all those things have to be explored and answered, but it's unbelievably powerful.... and that's all dependent on, well, moral orientation and the capacity to pay attention. Absence of cynicism. (laughs)

   8. CWChris Williamson1:07:00

      We have an equivalent with ourselves as well, right? The equivalent is that-

   9. JPJordan Peterson1:07:03

      Definitely.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:07:04

       ... we need to do what we want to become. We can afford to give ourselves those little rewards, and also to punish ourselves-

   11. JPJordan Peterson1:07:11

       Yes.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:07:11

       ... when we do the things we don't want. And you-

   13. JPJordan Peterson1:07:13

       Oh, well, you see people, people do this all the time. So may- maybe, uh, you decide that you wanna sit down and write. Uh, oh, hell, I don't know. Maybe you decide you want to clean your room and it's a hell of a mess. And you're working with a therapist and, you know, he says, "Look, just open one of the drawers and look at it 'cause you've been avoiding it for five years. Just, that's all you have to do this week. Open it and look at it." And, you know, on the one hand, that's so trivial and, and it's pathetic. But on the other hand, no, it's not. And so often the person will come back and say, "Well, that, I did it, but it was just stupid." It's like, "No, it wasn't. Your room isn't clean, but you opened the damn drawer, and now it's time to give yourself a pat on the back." Uh, but to do that, you have to admit, in some sense, you have to admit how pathetic you actually are. You know, you have to admit how pathetic you are (laughs) before you can reward yourself. And that's okay, because that, that patheticness, well, it's sort of built in to your, to the fact that you're vulnerable, you know? And you need a small step and you need a reward. That's okay. It's okay that that's the case. You know, when you see people, what they'll do is they'll say, "Well, that, you know, that's just a good indication of how useless I am, you know, that that's all I could do." So they punish themselves. Well, then you have an opportunity. You say to them, "Look, there's two things going on here. You can't clean up your room. That's a problem. But you also can't reward yourself properly. So we need to take that apart and fix that so that you can reward yourself properly." And that's also why, you know, when, when I suggested to people that they clean up their rooms, the reason I did that was because I actually knew how difficult that is. Because to, to get your room in order, you, there's no way you can get your surroundings in order without simultaneously getting yourself in order, at least to some degree. And it's exac- for exactly the reasons I just discussed. What you'll find is the reason the mess is there is because of psychological mess. You know, assuming it's not, you didn't just move or something. You know what I mean. There might be obvious situational contributors. But generally speaking is the mess, the external mess is absolutely isomorphic with the in- individual mess. And so it's really powerful to order and beautify something in your immediate environs. It's unbelievably powerful to do that. You learn a tremendous amount. You also may find, for example, maybe your family's dysfunctional. And part of the reason that your room is such a bloody mess is because if you ever took any steps to address it, they would punish you. Because as soon as you start to clean up your room, then you cast a dim light on their mess. And so they see you taking a step forward, they're gonna whack you, because now you're an ideal that's judging them. So y- you deal with someone who is in a dysfunctional family and you ask them to do something positive to move forward and then you watch the resistances that emerge, and you've got a picture of the pathology in the family. And that can help the person start to sort that through. Because maybe they can say it, and like you have to do a lot of negotiating and thinking before this is a possibility. But maybe you say, "Well, look, you have to have a talk with your mom. You have to say, 'Look, Mom, I'm doing something good here and your reaction is to punish me. What the hell is up with that?'" Now, that's a complicated conversation. And maybe you have to start with something even smaller than that. But you get the point. You know, these things aren't simple. They're not simple at all. And luckily, though, they're right in front of you. You can, in fact, do it, and you'll learn

10. 1:11:00 – 1:21:45

    Courage to Change

    1. JPJordan Peterson1:11:00

       a lot from doing it. So...

    2. CWChris Williamson1:11:03

       I asked your colleague, John Vervaeke, a similar question. I asked about if you feel like you're built for more, if you want to grow, if you want to improve, if you want to become a better human, but you don't have people around you that also want to. You're scared that you're going to lose friends. You're scared that you're going to be alone as you start to go out on a journey of self-improvement. How can people find the courage to do that?

    3. JPJordan Peterson1:11:32

       Well, one thing they can do is co- contemplate the consequences of not doing it. You lose friends. Well, you're gonna lose the friends who don't want the best for you. Those the friends you want in 10 years? I mean, you lose friends. Well, maybe you gain new friends, maybe you gain better friends, or maybe, miracle of miracles, your friends pick up their, their mess too and move forward. Maybe not, and I'm no, I'm not naively optimistic about such things. But you have to contemplate the price you pay for inaction. And this is something I did with my clients all the time. It's like, "Well, I don't wanna change jobs." Well, no wonder. It's like, you have to go, uh, put yourself out to be interviewed. You have to send out 500 resumes. You have to be rejected 499 times. You have to polish your interview skills. You have to update your CV, which means you have to take a real look at the inadequacies in your preparation. Um, and maybe you won't find a better job. It's like, no wonder you're afraid of that. Okay. You're in this job you hate and it's 10 years from now. How does that look? Think about that. You already know you're in a little hell. You know perfectly well it's gonna get worse. Which is more frightening?... action or inaction. Well, the thing about inaction is you're blind to it, hey? So you can hide from it. Well, that's chapter three again. Do not hide things in the fog. Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price. And so then you think, "I'm terrified of this, but I'm even more terrified of that." And that, you know, people have asked me, for example... (clears throat) I suppose, why I was willing or am willing to engage in the troublesome process of objecting when I think something isn't going well. Because I'm more afraid of the consequences of inappropriate silence. It's not that I'm brave. It's that I'm more terrified of the alternative. So, so I don't engage in the alternative and I, I don't know, maybe I've a knack for that to some degree. Maybe it's a consequence of clinical training, but, you know, I can walk into people's houses and look around and I think, "Okay, uh, there's something up here." And I, I mean, people have that ability. You know, I walked into a house once and, and the dishwasher was in the middle of the kitchen and, and it was undone, and had obviously been there for a couple of weeks, and the fridge had food in it that shouldn't... was no longer food. And the cupboards had unopened wedding gifts in them, like five years after the marriage. I thought, "There's a lot of things in this household that are being swept under the rug." And that was all laid out in, in the, in the practical environs. It's like they hadn't negotiated who was responsible for cleaning the fridge. They hadn't even been able to open their wedding gifts. It's like, something's rotten, deeply so. And so I, I could see where that was headed without a tremendous amount of effort on the part of the pe- and it didn't work. They were divorced, you know, a week... a couple of years after that in a very ugly manner, for very ugly reasons. Well, I knew where that was headed, you know, and under different circumstances, I would've said, "What the hell is that box doing there?" "Oh, you know, it's nothing." "Yeah. No. Wrong. It's not nothing. That's a little portal to hell." I can see it and so could you if you looked, but you won't. And I mean that literally, because people won't look. They'll walk into a room like that and they will not look at that thing. Absolutely. And that's because if they looked, they'd see, and they don't wanna see, and no wonder, but the consequence of blindness is worse. It's, it's worse. I mean, I have this, you know, my family is... would like some peace, uh, because I seem to be embroiled in one thing after another, and, you know, they have a point, but peace is very hard to obtain, and I can't be blind to what I see in the broader world around me. Not if I see it. If I see it, it's like, "There it is." And then I say something.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:16:24

       That's it. You talk about heroes and how they're, they're called to do the duty that only they can because they can, not because they're willing. The person that needs to go and slay the dragon is the person who can, not the person-

    5. JPJordan Peterson1:16:41

       Well, there's something to that.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:16:41

       ... who wants to.

    7. JPJordan Peterson1:16:41

       But look... Well, look, uh, look, here... think about it this way, like some things bug you, and other things don't. I mean, there's lots of things that could bother you that don't, 'cause you're obviously not bothered by everything that you could be bothered by, right?

    8. CWChris Williamson1:16:58

       That's a great point.

    9. JPJordan Peterson1:16:58

       There's lots of things in the world that aren't set right. But some of them really bug you. Maybe they make you cynical and bitter, you know. "Oh, God, look at how the world is constituted. It's so awful that I can't sustain my faith in the sight of that." It's like, "Well, you've got something to do there, guy. That's your problem." Why? Who knows? I would say the reason is that it's your destiny calling to you in the form of guilt over unfulfilled obligations. You have an instinct for growth. That's not a mystical statement. It, it's part of being human. W- we, we don't reach the limits of our potential. We're, we're neotenic in some sense. We're continual children, biologically speaking, uh, and so we're always transforming and changing in some direction. What direction? Well, your conscience tells you, at least, in part, "This bugs you." Well, it's your problem. Now, you may have to investigate that and straighten it out because even your formulation of what bugs you is likely to be, w- ill-constituted. But, eh, still, that's... that's something calling to you. And you av- you avoid it at your peril, and everyone else's peril too. And it is... See, that's the way that your biology manifests itself in such a sophisticated manner. It's beyond you. It's like your better self is attempting to manifest itself by torturing you with a set of problems that you need to address. And then you can refuse that but, but then all the meaning goes out of your life if you do that. That, that's not good. We're developing something now to help people turn problems into goals.I have a problem. Well, sure you do. R- okay, what's your problem? Okay. Well, th- how do you turn that into a goal? So, that's so interesting if you think about it that way, is that that's your goals, your p- problems. What should I do with my life? Well, what problems do you have? Well, there you go. Solve those. I'm not being flip about this. It's, it's, that's where, that's where the answer is to be found. That's not happiness. And happiness has those problems you already described, you know. It's, it's got this n- now-focused impulsivity. And, and, (smacks lips) you know, I- I've been hard on happiness as a pursuit, and perhaps too much so, because I haven't had very much happiness, because I've been so ill for the last while. And, you know, I- I ... It's possible that I've undervalued it. Perhaps not, but it's possible. In any case, if it comes along, you're a fool if you don't welcome it. But, but it's still not the proper pursuit. I suppose, to some degree, it's not deep enough, you know?

    10. CWChris Williamson1:20:01

        Well, if the thing, if the thing that's pulled you through over the last 18 months to two years has been meaning, and purpose, and something less ephemeral and less fleeting and gr- grander and more written into the source code of your being than happiness, then I think it's, uh, as life buoys-

    11. JPJordan Peterson1:20:20

        No, it's been love, too.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:20:21

        Yeah-

    13. JPJordan Peterson1:20:21

        It's been love, too. You know, it's been responsibility, for sure. But it's definitely been love. P- a lot of people have taken, taken care of me. And I also wanted to be around them. I wanted to be around, because I loved them. So ... And I think that's why the second book has a more communitarian element to ... Because so many people have been so helpful, and also because I've seen even more clearly how much of what's sustaining is derived from love. Love and duty, that's pretty good. I mean, duty, in some sense, is the cold equivalent of love. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's love shorn of its warmth. I- it's what you should do, and it's necessary, and, and there is tremendous meaning to be found in that. But, but love has this maternal, ah, comfort and warmth-

    14. CWChris Williamson1:21:21

        It f-

    15. JPJordan Peterson1:21:22

        ... that duty lacks.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:21:23

        It feels like duty is pushed from the back, whereas love is pulled from the front. Love pulls you forward, whereas duty can kind of push you.

    17. JPJordan Peterson1:21:33

        Sure. I mean, you ... It's not unreasonable to say that love entices. I don't think duty entices. Uh, duty might torment, and love entices, so

11. 1:21:45 – 1:23:43

    What’s Next for Jordan?

    1. JPJordan Peterson1:21:47

       ...

    2. CWChris Williamson1:21:47

       What's next? I know that it's not another book that's got rules in. I know that you've said that 24 out of 42 and Beyond Order: Twelve More Rules for Life is going to be the final rules book. Are you thinking about writing something else, or is it ... Are you focused on the podcast?

    3. JPJordan Peterson1:22:02

       I'm writing, I'm writing ... No, I'm writing, um, I'm, my ... I have about three or four functional hours in a day now. For the rest of the day, it's pretty much preparation so that those hours can be functional. But that's expanding, and as it's expanding, I'm starting to fill the, the spaces that are opening with writing. And I'm going to write. It looks like I'm going to write a series of essays on topics that are of crucial importance to me, at least. And, um, and I've started doing that. So tentatively, it's something like twenty-four topics worth considering. I don't know if I- (laughs) I seem to be attracted to, you know, increments of a dozen, but ... Um, well, twelve is a magic number, 'cause it's divisible by one, two, three, four, and six, you know? So there's something about it that's kind of magical. But ... And I don't know if, if it's twenty-four essays, they'll be shorter, and I'd, I'd kind of like to experiment with that, you know? Something that would be more like a ten or fifteen minute read that would be really concise, uh ... I don't know if I can do that. That's the goal at the moment, is to write another book that's twenty-four. I'm gonna focus on twenty-four questions or issues that I think are ... They're compelling to me, and, and they're sort of, they're at the forefront of my thinking, so ...

    4. CWChris Williamson1:23:20

       It might be fun and nice for you as well to have something that's a tiny little bit more, uh, there's boundaries between the topics, that you're able to go very hard and deep, but within a, a constraint. And then we can do it again, and we can look at this. I think with Beyond Order, there, there is-

    5. JPJordan Peterson1:23:36

       Well, that's the advantage of trying to make it short.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:23:38

       Yeah. And there's a unifying theme, right? Everything in here had to be about order. Everything in the first book had to be about

12. 1:23:43 – 1:30:03

    Jordan’s Influence on Chris

    1. CWChris Williamson1:23:43

       chaos.

    2. JPJordan Peterson1:23:43

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:23:43

       I think that'll be, that'll be a good use of your time. And given the fact that you are strapped for time, I'm very appreciative that you've joined me today. I'm a massive, massive fan.

    4. JPJordan Peterson1:23:52

       Well-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:23:52

       You have been a huge, huge influence on where I've got to now, and I think it wouldn't be too extreme to say that you don't understand the magnitude of the impact that you've had on people, because you can't see how the impact you've had on people has had their impact on others. You are degrees of separation removed from an undeniably better world, as far as I can see it.

    6. JPJordan Peterson1:24:20

       Yes, and so is everyone else. Yeah. I mean, you can be woken up to that, and then I can tell you something about that. Because I do understand it to some degree, I think, because people constantly approach me, and I see, because I watch. But I can tell you as well that there is nothing that's, that's ... It's so gratifying, that it's almost too much. You know, and it's a funny thing, because you could say, "Well, what if you could have everything you wanted?" Then the next question is, do you really think you could stand that? And so, you know, I'm in this unbelievably fortunate circumstance where-People tell me about the steps they've taken to make their lives better in wonderment, and they allow me to see that. And it's, it's very intimate, you know? And it's- it's stu- it's stunning. I'm- I'm walking with a friend of mine quite regularly, and he's a tough guy, man. He- he's worked with delinquents his whole life, so he's- he's like, a social worker superhero. Uh, very physically tough person and a very masculine male, but a social worker and very caring. And he's been very helpful to me. And he's been walking with me every day, and people are stopping me. And, you know, (laughs) the other day, this guy walked by us on the street and he was pretty run down. He's probably in his mid-40s and he's kind of s- street person looking, you know? And he stopped and he looked at me and he came over and he said, "I love you." And I walked away and my friend said, "You sure have a lot of men coming up to you and saying that they love you."

    7. CWChris Williamson1:26:09

       (laughs)

    8. JPJordan Peterson1:26:09

       And I said, "Well, yeah." I mean, I don't know, I just don't know what to make of it. It's so... The behavior is so completely unusual. And, you know, my wife too, she's said she's seen a whole different side of men, especially since we started touring, because of this happening. Because generally when people approach me, and they're not invariably men, but they probably are 70% of the time, they're very polite and- and very careful. And she said that's showed her a whole side of men that she didn't even know existed. And so, it's- it's- it's something. But I do believe that people... You know, it's... I do believe that my experience has been that there isn't anything that... I- I guess two things. There isn't anything that's more rewarding than trying to do things right. All other forms of reward pale by comparison. They're not even in the same conceptual universe. And there's nothing that's more adventurous than telling the truth. You have no idea what will happen to you if you tell the truth. And so, if you're looking for an adventure, then boy, that's an adventure.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:27:39

       You've said that sometimes you feel ashamed because you don't feel worthy of being some sort of sage at the head of a movement of people that are sorting their lives out. But, in the nicest way possible, you don't get to choose if people follow you. We chose you. Like, as the prototypical 27-year-old directionless guy that stumbled onto your work, something in you spoke to something in me. You taught me the value of telling the truth and of being responsible and of doing what is right, not what is easy. And it was like, um... It was like a pebble at the top of an intellectual awakening avalanche. It was like a, like a gateway drug to integrity.

    10. JPJordan Peterson1:28:18

        (laughs)

    11. CWChris Williamson1:28:18

        And it's not just me that's got better. The world is undeniably a better place because of the sort of person that I've become. I'm a better friend, I'm a better son, I'm a better boss, I'm a better partner. I've had the fortune of reaching tens of millions of people on this podcast, and I've given TEDx talks, and I've improved the texture of my own daily existence because of the process that your work triggered. You do not know the depth of impact that your work has had. And if the option had been there, I, and probably a lot of other people, would have happily taken on our share of your suffering over the last year if it would have somehow helped, as a thank you for how you've helped us. So, thank you.

    12. JPJordan Peterson1:29:02

        It looks to me like you are doing that from everything you just said. So, you know, hooray. Great. That- that's exactly how to do it. And- and it's a privilege to be, uh, involved in, in this. And you know, who... God only knows what the consequences will be. So, you know, we'll aim high and work hard and speak carefully and be appreciative and all of that, and then we'll see what happens. Jointly.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:29:35

        Jordan Peterson, ladies and gentlemen. Beyond Order will be linked in the show notes below, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the next few months holds. To reiterate what I said at the start, I'm very, very glad that you're back. (instrumental music plays) Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few months. And don't forget to subscribe. It makes me very happy indeed. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:30:09