April 2017 Patreon Q & A (No1 in a monthly series) (gqVopVh8hWQ)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=gqVopVh8hWQ

I guess it starts right away. You can check here. Yep, it’s live. That’s that. Alright! Looks like we’re ready to go. So welcome everybody. Let’s see how the Q&A goes. I’ve got a number of questions that people have already submitted, so I’ll probably start with those. For those of you who are on the live chat, you can submit questions too. I’ll probably just move back and forth between the ones that are pre-submitted and the ones that you guys are asking. And yes, it will be uploaded later. I think YouTube does that automatically. Pretty good to see all of you. There are people from all over the world here. London and Vancouver and… Let’s see, where else are you guys from? Well, Toronto. That’s not quite as exciting since I live here. Quebec, Calgary, Edmonton, Vienna, Boston, Auckland, New Zealand, Montreal, Texas. There we go. Morocco, Netherlands. Yeah, it’s amazing that this can happen like that as far as I’m concerned. So it’s going to take me just a bit to get adapted to what I’m doing. Okay, first question. What is your advice for finding a sane, sound therapist? And do you think a fruitful psychotherapeutic relationship requires a therapist to have specific temperamental compatibility, or even literacy and interests that align with the patient? Well, I would say with regards to finding a sane and sound therapist, there’s some practical things you can do. I guess this is more relevant if you live in North America, and I’m not sure exactly what the training requirements are in other places in the world, but your best bet, I would say, is to find someone who’s appropriately trained, and I would regard someone who’s appropriately trained as a psychotherapist to be someone who’s… I think you’re safer if you go with someone who’s trained at one of the big research schools, and you have a therapist who’s well-versed in psychotherapeutic practice, but who’s also sufficiently educated scientifically to be able to understand the scientific literature. And you can be pretty certain of that if you find a therapist who’s got their PhD rather than a Psy.D. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with Psy.Ds. If they received their PhD from an American Psychological Association approved school of clinical psychology, and those schools operate under what’s called the Boulder Model, and the Boulder Model promotes… what’s it called? Science practitioner as the optimal ideal combination for a psychotherapist. So someone who’s trained psychotherapeutically, but also has research experience, and can understand the relevant scientific literature as it pertains to mental health. So that would be the first thing. The second thing I would say is, well, go to see a psychotherapist once, and maybe go to see a couple of them, and find someone that listens to you. Because the psychotherapist shouldn’t be someone who solves your problems for you, or even really offers you advice, although sometimes that can be helpful. Really what the psychotherapist should do is be someone who can help you understand what problem it is that you’re facing, so that that can be delineated properly, to help you articulate what it is that you want, so what your vision of mental health might be, and what you’d like to attain in psychotherapy, and then who helps you strategize towards that end. And so you want someone who will really listen to you, that you feel comfortable telling the truth to. Because that’s also incredibly important. You have to… You have to… if you can’t tell your psychotherapist the truth, then you’re not going to get anywhere in therapy, because you won’t be able to actually outline the nature of your fundamental problems. So that’s vital. And go see someone and see if you’re happy with the way that you’re interacting with them. That’s the most relevant issue. So that’s the first question. Now, the next one was, do I think a fruitful psychotherapeutic relationship requires a therapist to have specific temperamental compatibility, or even literacy and interests that align with the patient? I think that… I think it’s difficult to work with a therapist who is less intelligent than you are. That’s kind of a rough way of conceptualizing it, but a lot of what a therapist does is help you strategize, and the person has to be able to think analytically, and probably at least to some degree, with the same degree of complexity that you’re capable of. It’s not necessarily a good idea to be able to outthink your therapist. So… Dr. Peterson, I heard you recently say that if a woman doesn’t want a baby by age 30, that something is unhealthy. I take no offense to that assertion. Rather, I am taking it very seriously. I’m 34 years old in a long-term relationship, but don’t feel a desire to have children. I always thought that I would one day, but I’m getting older, and that day still hasn’t come. I’m terrified of realizing too late that I should have had a family, but I’m also terrified of having them and regretting it, because I never truly wanted to be a mother. I don’t think I have any ideology at play. I’m not a feminist or anything like that. When you say something might be wrong or unhealthy, where might I look? Any advice on how to make this choice? P.S. My boyfriend and I both had Oedipal mothers. Perhaps that is relevant. Well, it might be relevant, given that you saw fit to include it as a potential detail. One of the rules that I would operate by as a psychotherapist is that if a client is inclined to add a detail to the formulation of a problem, that the detail is likely to be relevant. But I can’t tell, right? Because of course I can’t use a rule of thumb. So you might object, well, I shouldn’t have used a rule of thumb to say something like, if a woman doesn’t want a baby by the age of 30, that something is unhealthy. Well, there are going to be exceptions to every general rule, but my attitude to this essentially is that we have all come from an unbroken string of 3.5 million years of successful mothers. And so the probability that that’s going to be part and parcel of a healthy woman’s desire, and not only a woman, obviously, men desire to have a family too, and often very intensely. It’s just that men have a much longer time span over which to consider such things. So perhaps the chips aren’t down so rapidly, and to the same degree for men. I wouldn’t be so bold as to say that there’s anything wrong with you, the questioner, specifically. Maybe you have the sort of temperament that isn’t particularly inclined towards maternal behaviour. That might be someone who’s low in agreeableness, and well, that would be the primary issue. And so I wouldn’t take my word for it that if you don’t want to have a child and you’re 30, that there is necessarily something specifically wrong with you. But I would say as a rule of thumb, it’s part of the normal panoply of human desires and values. And so if there’s violent objection to having a family, something like that, then generally that seems to me to be indicative of something that might be at least worth looking into. I’ll try a live one here. A live question. What do I think of Paul Joseph Watson’s position that populism is the new punk slash counterculture? That’s a good question. I actually happened to watch that video a couple of days ago. That’s a good question. I mean, you see that, you see I would say some indication of that on YouTube. Although it’s not easy to get an unbiased sample of what’s going on on YouTube. Because of course YouTube tends to present you with things that are akin to the things that you’re already watching. It does appear to me that the conservative commentators on YouTube are playing somewhat of the same role that the counterculture played, let’s call it more traditionally, even though that’s a funny thing to say about the counterculture. What I’m wondering more is whether or not, not so much whether it’s a counterculture, but if it’s something that’s more specifically associated with a place that men, young men are finding their new political voice online. Part of the reason that I’m wondering about that, although there are a number of female conservative commentators who’ve also become popular online, is because many of the commentators appear to be men and many of the people who are following them also appear to be men. And so, and it’s not obvious to me that men, it’s easy now for men, especially young men, to have a political voice on campus, for example, or perhaps even in public. And so maybe they’re turning to YouTube to find these viewpoints that aren’t being disseminated as widely in the popular media. Was there ever a time when you saw a therapist of some kind? Well, no, actually, I haven’t ever seen a therapist and that might seem strange, I suppose, given that I am a psychologist. I don’t really like talking about my problems with other people, as it turns out. I’d rather keep them to myself. But I would say, having said that, is that I’ve read an awful lot of the writings of the great clinical psychologists and I would say that I’ve used them as psychotherapeutic aids. And I think that that plays a very similar role, that can play a very similar role. Okay, we just had to update the link. Okay, so let’s try another question here from the prepared questions. So I tried to rank order these by the number of people that indicated an interest in them. So… You emphasize the spoken truth and negotiation as the alternative to war and cite Solzhenitsyn as a brilliant documenter of the potential or inevitable fallout of deceit. But in Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis of the factors leading to the Gulag Archipelago, he also included the failure of people to take a violent stand to disrupt tyranny. And here’s a quote. And how we burned in the camps later, thinking. What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, pailing with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and every step on the staircase. But I’d understood they had nothing left to lose and then boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand. The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport, and not withstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt. If, if… We didn’t love freedom enough. And even no more, we had no real awareness of the situation. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterwards. End of quote. There appears to be a point where the price of our sovereignty and liberty must be paid with blood, in addition to the vulnerability required by the spoken truth. Here are my questions. Do you agree that there is such a point? Or do the weapons and power we possess today make violence an inviolable course of action? Okay, well, I would say first of all, part of what Solzhenitsyn is talking about actually is the right to self-defense. And you have the right to self-defense. And you have the right to use whatever force is necessary and reasonable when you’re defending yourself. And, you know, under the American Constitution, for example, it’s predicated on the idea, at least in part, that you have not only the right, but perhaps the moral obligation to resist tyranny. And so, obviously… So that’s a difference, that’s very different from using violence for specifically political ends. It’s… Do you have the right to defend yourself against incursions into your own home or into your own family? And I think the answer to that is you do. Part of the reason that… It has manifested itself so that being dangerous is the appropriate response. Now, then you might say, well, how do you know how to calibrate your defensive response? And I would say, well, we have some legal guidelines for that. That would be the guidelines governing self-defense in general. I guess maybe it’s time for a more aggressive response when you’re prepared to pay the price for that more aggressive response. You have to think it through. But you certainly have the right to protect yourself and your family and your property from inappropriate incursion by other individuals or by the state. And without knowing the specifics of any given circumstance that might call for such a response, it’s difficult to be any more straightforward about that. But I don’t… I certainly wouldn’t regard myself precisely as a pacifist. I don’t… Because I believe that there are… It’s reasonable to meet… Well, how would I say? You have the right to self-defense. That’s as clearly as I can formulate it. Can I ask your thoughts on Brexit? That’s a question coming from the live chat. Yes, you can have my thoughts on Brexit. The other day I was doing a lecture on the stories in Genesis. And one of the stories that I analyzed briefly, and this will be posted very soon, is the story of the Tower of Babel. And I’ve been very curious about that story. It comes after Noah’s flood myth in Genesis. And it’s a very interesting story. What happens is that human beings get together and they decide to build a massive building. And the human beings that are building that building all speak in one voice. And they have this grand vision, which you might regard as a utopian vision, which is what I think it is, that they can build a building so high that within it everyone will speak the same language and it will reach all the way to heaven. And so you could see it in some sense as an attempt to usurp the transcendent. I kind of read it as an early precursor of the story that Milton told in Paradise Lost, where Satan, who’s God’s highest heavenly angel and perhaps, and who’s Lucifer, the brightest light in the psychic hierarchy, you might say, and the spirit of untrammeled rationality, decides that he can wage war in heaven and overcome God. Overcome the ultimate in the transcendent value. And I read that as a cautionary tale about the pride that goes along with intellectual presupposition and the same pride that produced the totalitarian states of the 20th century. What happens with the Tower of Babel is that human beings start to build this unitary, homogenous structure whose pinnacle will reach into God’s heavenly domain, and perhaps thereby taking the place of the transcendent, God gets wind of that and goes to earth and takes the people or transforms the people who are building the building and who, in principle, it would house into a polyglot of people speaking different languages and then scatters them all over the world. Well, what I think that means is that if you try to build a homogenous totalitarian structure that usurps the transcendent, it will begin to badly fragment from within. And I think it’s a warning against gigantism. And I think one of the things that’s happening in Europe is that we’re seeing the folly of the idea of too big to fail. What we’re seeing instead is the manifestation of so big, it will certainly fail. And I think the reason for that is that there has to be a certain degree of homogeneity within anything that can be categorized as an organization. If the degree of heterogeneity within the organization becomes too extreme and if the organization becomes too large, then it’s very difficult for people to feel any affinity with it. They’re going to fragment back into their subsidiary identity groups, and those might be national groups, for example, which seems to be what’s happening in Europe. And then the whole thing is going to fall apart. And I have some sympathy for that because I think that it’s necessary for human beings at an individual level to feel some sort of affinity for the power structures that they find themselves in. And maybe being one 300 millionth of an entity is to be too much of a non-entity to feel any real affinity for that structure. So that’s part of what I think is happening with regards to Brexit. So… Okay, so let’s see what happens here. Let’s take another live question here. Is remove the toxic people in your life wholly good advice? Well, no, I wouldn’t say it’s wholly good advice because no single piece of advice could be considered as wholly good, except perhaps for tell the truth. I think that one might be outside that rule of thumb. It depends very much on what you mean by toxic and also who’s doing the judgement with regards to toxicity. My sense is that you should surround yourself with people who genuinely want the best for you, or perhaps more specifically, genuinely want the best for the best part of you. And if the people around you are not supporting you in your endeavours, and they put you down and they punish you for your virtues or even punish you too intensely for your faults, and fail to reward you when you’re doing what you should be doing, and fail to engage in reciprocal interactions, that there comes a point where you would be better off finding someone who is actually on your side. And that can even be the case with family members, although of course that’s a very difficult decision to make. But sometimes people do have the misfortune of being tangled up with family members who are operating in a manner that’s so counterproductive to their health that it’s better for them, despite the pain, to cease communication with them. And sometimes, paradoxically enough, that can also facilitate communication because sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand before people are willing to undergo the serious self-consideration that would precede any real transformation. So, but I would say, even if you don’t like the idea of removing the toxic people in your life, you should certainly endeavour to surround yourself with the sorts of people that you would want to surround someone that you regarded as your friend or loved one. So you need to extend the same courtesy to yourself, especially to the part of yourself that’s driving upward, that you would to someone that you cared for. So… Okay. What do I think of the phrase, diversity is our strength? Well, I think it’s a slogan. And the word slogan is derived from the Welsh. Two words, sluag, S-L-U-A-G-H, and gherm, G-H-A-I-R-M. And sluag, gherm is the battle cry of the dead. So the problem with that sort of slogan is that it replaces independent thought. And it’s certainly possible that, quote, diversity is a strength, end quote. But the question is, what the hell do you mean by diversity? And if the idea is that diverse modes of approaching situations necessarily emerge because you’ve gathered people together who are different in their, whatever group identity marker happens to be the privileged one at the moment, to use the postmodernist language, there’s no indication whatsoever that that’s going to produce diversity of strategic plan, for example. So it’s an empty phrase. And it’s a dangerous phrase because diversity can be a weakness just as much as it can be a strength. So, you know, I think it’s a slogan and I don’t like slogans very much. Do you have any practical advice? It’s still on. It’s just the camera turned off for some reason. Do you have any practical advice? It’s still on audio? Yeah, well, I have all this new technology here, guys, and sorry about that. It’s still we’re still working out the bugs. I bought new cameras and new lighting and all of that. And it does strange things that we don’t understand yet. And so it looks like I’m back on. So do you have any practical advice on how I can improve my ability to concentrate and pay attention to the world around me? Well, I have some practical advice for that. The first piece of practical advice, often the devil’s in the details, you know, but often some practical advice is, well, regulate your regulate your habits. Try to get up at approximately the same time each morning. I would recommend that you get up approximately when other people get up. So that would be something in the neighborhood of seven thirty or eight in the morning or perhaps earlier, perhaps a little bit later. But you want to stabilize that because your your circadian rhythms operate more. What would you call it? Fluidly. And your mood is likely to be regulated better if there’s islands of stability in your daily routines. Human beings like daily routines, just like dogs like daily routines. And so regulate your sleep. I would say when you get up in the morning, eat breakfast. That’s a really important thing to do. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve treated in my clinical practice whose proclivity for emotional instability and depression, anxiety, general hopelessness, emotional pain and gloom and doom, as well as capacity to concentrate, were properly regulated or inhibited or reduced by merely ensuring that you’re in the right place. And ensuring that they ate a I would say a protein and fat rich breakfast relatively soon after they wake up. And that’s especially true if they’re stressed. And as it turns out, that if you stress yourself after a fast, which is, of course, what you’ve undertaken if you haven’t eaten since the night before, that your body produces enough insulin to deplete your your your to deplete the sugar in your blood. And then it’s very difficult for you to become regulated properly with regards to your metabolism metabolism until you sleep again. And so it can be regulating your sleep and your breakfast eating habits in particular can be in a very effective way of regulating your mood and increasing your capacity to concentrate. The other thing I would say is that spending some time scheduling your time is also extraordinarily useful. And so I can tell you a little bit about how to use schedules effectively. So the first thing I would do is or the first thing I would say is that you should you should you should develop a long term plan. You can use something like the future authoring program, which most of you are familiar with, because of course you would have got a key to it. Almost everyone as a consequence of being a patron is you have to you have to set up your vision like Geppetto when he’s looking at the star before Pinocchio’s transformation takes place. You have to set up your long term vision, have some vision of the good towards which you’re working and some vision, perhaps of the hell that you’re avoiding. And then I would say once you set up that vision so that you know how to orient yourself, then you should start designing your days. And you can do that very effectively with a calendar like Google Calendar. And instead of many people say, well, I hate using a schedule and or I hate using a calendar. And what I would say about that is, is that if you hate using a schedule or a calendar, then you’re probably using it wrong. What you’re doing is using the calendar as an external tyrant that’s telling you what you should do if you were going to be a conventionally good person each day. So you load yourself up with with arbitrary will say arbitrary responsibilities. But that’s not really how you should use a schedule. What you should use a schedule to do is to design the day that you would most like to have. Obviously, that’s going to include accepting some responsibility and undertaking to make progress on those things that you have to make progress on to keep your life from collapsing into chaos. But it should also mean that you schedule in activities that make you actually want to have that day. And so if you’re using a schedule properly, that it can be your friend. And that can also be something that can increase your capacity to concentrate. And then I would say, well, if you’re if you’re very scattered, then you can start to train yourself. You might say, well, I need to learn to read without distraction. So maybe what you do, you say, OK, well, for the next week, I’m going to read 10 minutes a day and I’m going to try to limit the distractions. And if you’re successful at that, then you could try 12 minutes a day. And if you’re successful at that, you could try 15 minutes a day. And the trick is to set a goal for yourself that is slightly beyond your current level of performance, enough to be challenging, enough to be worthwhile if you accomplish, but not so difficult that you’re likely to fail. And then practice incrementally day by day, trying to inculcate the habits that you want to inculcate and assume that it’ll take you a number of months or even a number of years in order to become very fluent at the habit. The important thing is to start improving incrementally because incremental improvement pays off like compound interest. And so I would also say that the trajectory that you’re on is more important than your starting point. And that’s also an extraordinarily optimistic observation because it means that direction is more important than current position. And I mean, current position matters, obviously, but I don’t think it does matter as much as direction. So if you want to learn to concentrate more, define what constitutes concentration, break it into micro habits and then start practicing instantiation of those micro habits. So very good advice here, Robbie Kelly says, how do you eat an elephant? You bite off one chunk at a time. Well, that’s exactly right. And that’s also the hallmark of behavior therapy, the issue. So what a behavior therapist does, and I’m an admirer of behavior therapy, although there’s other psychotherapeutic approaches that I also appreciate to a great degree for more that are in some sense more conceptually sophisticated. But one of the things you do if you’re a behavior therapist is take the problem at hand and decompose it into its micro elements and then practice implementation of the micro elements. And that can be the inculcation of new habits as already mentioned, but that’s also a great way of learning to face the things that you’re avoiding, learning to confront the things you’re avoiding that frighten you or that stop you in your tracks. So, you know, if you if you’re scared of going to parties or maybe scared of going out in public, you can also always go to the nearest bar for 10 minutes and sit there and have a drink and then leave, you know, and then maybe expand that up to 12 minutes. And then maybe dare at one of the dare at one point when you go out to say hi to someone. But again, don’t ever underestimate the utility of incremental improvement. You can get a tremendous distance by by engaging in incremental improvement. So, okay, so let’s see here. Why did I not upload my talk at Western University? That will be being uploaded. There’s a couple of talks I did that just aren’t that the people that were preparing them just haven’t got back to me yet. I have a podcast that went quite nicely with a German interviewer that I’m going to upload this weekend. I thought it was I thought it was good. So, but the Western University talk will be uploaded. I also did a talk in Calgary recently, which I talked about something new. I talked about equity, which which I believe is an absolutely catastrophic goal. Let’s say that’s equality of outcome. I think the reason that it’s catastrophic is because you can’t have equality of outcome because you can fractionate the group differences between people in an infinite number of ways. So even if you did manage to produce equality of outcome by, you know, the two top contenders for for prime group identity right now, which are race and gender being pushed very hard by the left, which I would say is something that’s very racist and very sexist. You might be able to reach equality of outcome across race and gender, although you couldn’t practically speaking. But let’s say hypothetically you could. Well, then you’d have to start to fragment race. So what do you mean by race exactly? Are you going to stick with the three? We might describe them as canonical racial differences, necroid, Caucasoid and Asian. Or are you going to start to fragment Asians into their various subtypes? And exactly how are you going to do that? And are you going to do the same thing with black people? Or are you going to just assume that they’re all the same? And how do you know when someone’s black and not just dark brown, so to speak, or medium brown or light brown? And I’d also like to point out, just in case anyone hasn’t noticed that people aren’t black and white, they’re actually tan and brown. And so and I’m saying that because there aren’t clear distinctions between the racial divides. And so you have to fragment race and then obviously you have to fragment gender, at least according to the gender theorists. And then you have other problems of group identity. Do you ensure that people are equally represented across levels of attractiveness or height or extroversion or introversion or emotional stability or mental health or physical health or age? Or well, as you get the picture, I don’t have to continue to repeat myself. There is a there is there are as many. There are an infinite number of canonical group identities and there’s no way of making a an objective hierarchy out of them in terms of value. And so you can’t equate for equality of outcome across all potential category schemes. And so equality of outcome is a futile endeavor. All that it does is transfer the power that the free market should essentially the free market as an externalized computational machine should be calculating for us, even though it’s an imperfect calculation. All it does is transfer the power of that collective and impersonal decision making into the hands of a coterie of people who will abs even if the initial people who have that power don’t misuse it. The people who take their place will certainly misuse it. So anyways, at Calgary, I did a talk on equity and tried to outline some of these things, trying to understand exactly what is wrong with the idea of equality of outcome. I mean, the historical data obviously indicates that it’s a catastrophic doctrine. But I think there are technical, psychological, computational and complexity related reasons why the doctrine of equality of outcome is is is is it’s an impossible goal. It cannot be achieved even in principle. So all right. Let’s see. The thinking skeptic says, I love you, Dr. Peterson. Well, thank you very much. Thinking skeptic. It’s conceivable that I love you, too, but I don’t know because I don’t know you. But we’ll assume that we could start from that perspective anyways. Thoughts on the use of amphetamine to improve conscientiousness. The long term data on use of amphetamine as a treatment for attention deficit disorder suggests that there are no positive medium to long term benefits. So I would say that if you’re going to take a data driven approach to that issue, that you would draw the conclusion that it’s not a useful long term solution. I experienced tremendous abuse as a child, and it’s led to me being a doormat for abuse. I seek out people who reject me and reject people who seek me out. How do I break this cycle? Wow. Well, that’s a really, really hard question. And the reason that it’s hard, apart from the fact that your situation is very complex, is that the devil’s always in the details. What I would recommend, though, is that you should be able to do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. 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And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. And I would recommend that you do a lot of research on the subject. But that’s not really the issue. I think what you mean is, has psychology been so corrupted by, let’s say, political correctness? I think what you mean is, has psychology been so corrupted by, let’s say, political correctness? I think what you mean is, has psychology been so corrupted by, let’s say, political correctness? So that it’s no longer a reasonable pathway. So that it’s no longer a reasonable pathway. It’s no longer a reasonable discipline. And I would say, I don’t think it’s corrupted to that degree. And I would also say that one of the things you need to understand if you are going to university is that fundamentally, university is a place where you educate yourself. And I would also say that one of the things you need to understand if you are going to university is that fundamentally, university is a place where you educate yourself. Now you can seek out people who have knowledge and confer with them about your own education. Now you can seek out people who have knowledge and confer with them about your own education. But the primary responsibility has to fall to you. But the primary responsibility has to fall to you. The library is full of great books. And you can find out what the great books are in a relatively short order manner by even just looking online. And you can do a tremendous amount of reading and a tremendous amount of writing on your own. And you can do a tremendous amount of reading and a tremendous amount of writing on your own. And you can do a tremendous amount of reading and a tremendous amount of writing on your own. And you can do a tremendous amount of reading and a tremendous amount of writing on your own. And you can do a tremendous amount of reading and a tremendous amount of writing on your own. And you can do that very effectively if you also treat your university experience with the same degree of what would you call diligence that you might put towards a full-time job. And you can do that very effectively if you also treat your university experience with the same degree of what would you call diligence that you might put towards a full-time job. And you can do that very effectively if you also treat your university experience with the same degree of what would you call diligence that you might put towards a full-time job. And you can do that very effectively if you also treat your university experience with the same degree of what would you call diligence that you might put towards a full-time job. And you can do that very effectively if you also treat your university experience with the same degree of what would you call diligence that you might put towards a full-time job. And you can do that very effectively if you also treat your university experience with the same degree of what would you call diligence that you might put towards a full-time job. And you can do that pretty much at any university, I would say. And you can do that pretty much at any university, I would say. And you can do that pretty much at any university, I would say. So, what music do I like? So, what music do I like? I like a lot of different music. I like a lot of different genres. I listen to rock. I’m a dinosaur, so I listen to classic rock. I’m a dinosaur, so I listen to classic rock. Often from the 70s. I was wired up and imprinted on that stuff. But I listen to rock music from the 50s through today. But I listen to rock music from the 50s through today. But I listen to rock music from the 50s through today. I really like the band Arcade Fire. For example, Beach House is a new band. I kind of like them. There’s a band called Devotchka that I think, I think they’re out of Seattle. I think they’re really good. I love Tom Waits. I like old country music, the western stuff from the 40s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. I listen to jazz. I like blues. I listen to classical music. So, I think I mentioned Tom Waits already, who I think is an absolute genius. So, I don’t remember who said it once, but someone said there was only two kinds of music, good music and bad music. And I really believe that’s true. And so I found what I regard as great music in all sorts of genres. I wouldn’t say I’m a hip hop aficionado, but there’s some of it that I’ve learned to like. I really like Eminem’s Rap God. I think that’s an absolutely remarkable song. He’s unbelievably skilled in his ability to enunciate. And I think there’s high quality music being produced across a wide range of genres. I don’t like pop, generally speaking. It all sounds like bad 1970s disco to me, and I didn’t like bad 1970s disco. So, so, that’s what I like for music. Let’s see, what else have we got here? What do I think of the comments that were all favorable to me on that recent Hamilton article, Hamilton is a city, the city where McMaster University is, being disappeared. I don’t know what to think of that. You know, my, my, my gut instinct, and I would use this as a good rule of thumb, is to assume ignorance, or error, or stupidity, before you assume malevolence. And so you have to go through those alternative explanations first. I mean, I don’t know why the comments were shut down. It would be easy to assume the worst, but there’s no reason to do that. You don’t want to jump to the assumption of the worst to begin with. So, I thought it was curious, and so I tweeted it. And I do think it’s curious. And I do think that the, the, the threat of invisible internet censorship is a real one, because we are conversing increasingly in this public, artificial intelligence, giant, invisible corporation mediated way, and we don’t know what the rules are, and we don’t know who can make them. And I, I think that that’s something we’re really going to have to watch out for. I think you can see that happening with Facebook and Twitter, and perhaps with YouTube, although I think YouTube’s still pretty clean. Although, you know, I’ve seen people complaining that they’re losing subscribers and that, and that their content is being restricted. You know, the thing is, the company’s going to make some mistakes. They’re, they’re trying to do multiple things at the same time. And so, like I said, I would assume error and ignorance, and then stupidity, and then malevolence in that order, and, you know, give, give people who are trying to mediate these new technologies a bit of a break, but that still, you should be awake, because there is always the potential for new and unforeseen threats to emerge to freedom of speech when it’s electronically mediated. So, How will rescuing my father from the belly of the whale help me with regards to leftist ideologies? Well, I hope it would help you with regards to ideologies in general. I mean, it’s a serious, that’s a very, very serious question. To believe that rescuing your father from the belly of the whale would inoculate you against ideology is to accept a particular interpretation of what that story means. Now, my interpretation of that story is that the whale, the whale dragon, is a symbol of the predatory unknown. So, it’s a symbol of the dangers that lurk in the unknown. And the idea that the father, the dying father, or the ghost-like father, or the deceased father, is lying somehow inert in that landscape, means that encountering chaos can help you understand more clearly what the value was in traditional order. But it’s not only traditional order that is the domain, say, of the resurrecting father. It’s partly, the father represents partly the spirit of the social order, and partly the implicit logos that’s characteristic of the individual that acts to create society across time. If you identify with tradition as the foundation of being, and you understand what identifying with the spirit that creates tradition means, then that gives you a means of orienting yourself that’s far preferable to any pure ideology, whether it’s hiding in the national structures that the right promotes, which tend towards rigidity and hyper order, or drowning in the chaos that the left produces in their attempts both to demolish order sort of on the negative end, and transmuted, say, on the positive end. It’s better to, I think it’s better to act your life out as an individual, to incorporate the traditions that your society has brought forward to you into your life, so to do what other people do, and to do it well. To grow up, to move out of your house, to adopt the responsibilities of a family, to learn how to be honest, to take on the heavy load of helping to reduce unnecessary suffering in the world, and to try to make something productive and useful of yourself. And that’s a lot more interesting and meaningful than trying to manifest yourself as the incarnation of a pathological ideology. … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … You’ve stopped recording too. … … … … … … So I’m, it looks like I’m back. There’s a lag on the Q&A so it’s somewhat difficult to D Sherman so. D Sherman. To what? To D Sherman. To D Sherman yeah. Hi. I’m… I think I can hear you. Okay. Somebody says that this is the fault of postmodernists. It probably is. It probably is. That would be my guess. They’re probably putting like some kind of electronic bug in my camera. I don’t know why it’s shutting off. I’ll sort that out later. So Julian we need you. I guess you heard that eh? Yeah yeah. Okay so… That’s where I agree. Don’t yell at Julian. I can’t have to yell at him. He’s my son. I can yell at him. He’s my technical support. Actually he’s really good at it then I hardly ever yell at him. It’s a rough life for me though. Okay let’s say here… Take another question from from… So oh someone says what’s up with the socks? Yeah well I have I guess I need to… I guess I need to indicate to the rest of you just exactly what that means. You see these are the socks that we’re talking about here. My wife bought me some fancy socks. My wife bought me some fancy socks for Christmas and so I guess she thought my style needed upgrading. I guess it was partly because I got completely re-war robed here. I guess that might be a word. In the last few months I lost… I’ve lost a tremendous amount of weight in the last year. About 40 pounds and you know some of that might be due to social justice warriors although it’s really not. It’s because I’ve transformed my diet. I seem to have a variety of dietary sensitivities that seem to be contributing to… I’ve had a history of depression and that looks like it might be associated with diet. My daughter who’s been very ill with a variety of health problems including extraordinarily serious arthritis. She lost her ankle and her hip to arthritis when she was 17. She’s figured out that a lot of her autoimmune problems were associated with severe dietary sensitivity and we share some symptom overlaps. I’ve had some autoimmune illness problems and so she went on a very restrictive diet which was basically only chicken and vegetables and it stopped the vast majority of her symptoms including extreme fatigue and depression and the arthritis itself. It had quite a marked impact on her to the point where she could stop taking antidepressants and so about a year and a half ago she convinced me to try the diet for a month and that meant well it meant eating nothing but meat and vegetables and that would beef chicken and vegetables. That’s it. No carbohydrates, no nuts, no nightshades, no beans, no dairy, no chocolate, no fruit, no sugar. It’s unbelievably restrictive. It’s been a real pain because it’s really compromised my social life because they’re like who’s going to invite you out because so many people are… so much of what people do socially it revolves around eating and if you’re really a royal pain in the neck when it comes to your dietary proclivities then people are just not going to be very happy about you. Anyways I tried the diet for a month and I lost about seven pounds and I quit snoring which had been plaguing me to some degree and so I thought that was pretty interesting and so I just stayed on it and I lost… I kept losing about that much weight per month so I went down from about 212 pounds to my current weight which is about 170 which is about where I was when I was in graduate school. And so anyways this is a long answer to this question. Because of that all my clothing became tent-like and I had to throw all of it away and so I got some new clothes in more recently and including some very colorful socks so I guess that’s my… what would you say? I don’t know what else to say about it that I have these colorful socks and they’re they’re kind of interesting and stylish and so that’s what’s with the socks so that’s complicated answer, eh? Can you please take some questions submitted via Patreon in advance? I did do that. I did take questions. I guess you might mean do I answer… will I answer some more of the questions? And yeah I can do that. I think what I would recommend everyone… I mean we’ll get better at this and I’m going to keep doing it. Where’d it go here? Many of the questions that were submitted on Patreon were very long and I don’t think that’s going to work because it takes a long time to read the long questions and that means I can’t answer very many of them. So one of the things I would say if you’re going to submit a question on Patreon, at least for the time being, you might want to make them not more than about maybe four or five lines long because I also have to scan through a lot of questions to find out which ones not only are worth answering because I think many of them are worth answering but which ones I’ve got an answer at hand for because I can’t sit here and think and produce dead air for long periods of time for this to work properly. So I will figure this out as we go along. So Dr. Peterson in your lectures you speak a lot about toughening people up as someone who went through college got a humanities degree bought completely into postmodern ideology and until hearing your lectures couldn’t pinpoint that feeling of aimlessness, hopelessness and the aversion to responsibility. Where do you recommend they start? I’ve particularly seen this inability to be tough, to negotiate and to bring out my inner tyrant who is really just afraid. Oh you said it does bring out your inner tyrant who is really just afraid. It’s not going to get what it wants. How do you begin to work with that? Well that’s a good question and the next question is how can men become more dangerous? Well I can answer both of those at the same time. I would say for people who are too agreeable the first thing that you need to know, the first thing you need to figure out is what is it that you want? And because if you don’t want anything and if you don’t know what you want and you don’t know what your strategy is, how are you ever going to be able to conjure up the courage to stand for what you believe in? You don’t believe in anything and you don’t have any arguments at hand. And I mean that’s part of the reason that we developed the Future Authoring Program was so that people could not only figure out what they wanted so to identify the goals in life which is identifying those goals as an integrating force but also to articulate the arguments that make them capable of defending yourself. You know like if I’m going to challenge you let’s say you come to me and you say I want to raise. Maybe it’s taking you a lot of courage to conjure to to to be able to step into the office of your boss and say well I want to raise. And he says well no we don’t have any extra money at the time and you say well okay and then you leave. Well that’s not a good negotiation. If you want something the first thing you have to do is set up options for yourself. So if you really want to negotiate for a raise let’s say because we’ll use this as an example. The first thing you have to do is decide whether or not you deserve to have a raise because you can’t just ask for one you have to make a case for it. And so how do you know if you’re in a position to ask for a raise? Well part of it is that you have options. So I would say put your CV or your resume in order and make it tight and then look around to see what other other employment options you have that you would in fact take and see what your market value is. And because you have to have options you have to be able to say no in a negotiation. And then decide what how much of a raise you want and why it would be in the person’s best interest to offer you the raise. Make a case for it. And one one of the reasons is look I’ve got this other job opportunity that I’m pursuing and I like working here but I’m gonna take this other opportunity because it pays me more. And you can’t just say that if it’s not the case if it’s not true because that’s an absolutely foolish negotiating strategy. You have to have options you have to negotiate from a position of strength. And so you have to know what you want and you have to have options and then you have to develop strategies for communicating what it is that you’re that you’re asking for. And you you have to be forthright about that. And but you have to think through the reasons because otherwise you won’t have enough courage to tolerate the conflict that it might entail to to withstand the negotiation. And I think if you’re an agreeable type one way of fortifying yourself is to understand how much misery and conflict you may be storing up for yourself in the future if you refuse or if you refuse to engage in reasonable negotiation on your own behalf in the present. It’s like so one of the ways I get myself to do to engage in conflict that I might not have wanted to engage in and despite what you might think because of what’s happened to me over the next six months I’m not a person who particularly enjoys conflict. I’m a person who knows that unless you engage in a certain amount of conflict to stand up for what you want that your life turns into hell and maybe the lives of people around you turns into hell too. And I’d rather have the damn conflict which I find quite stressful. I’d rather have the conflict than allow everything to degenerate around me. And so okay so and then you say you bring out your inner tyrant who is really just afraid it’s not going to get what it wants. Well you get what you negotiate for and if you put yourself in a position of power and you give yourself options then you will get what you most more frequently than not you’ll get what it is that you want. But but not because you want it but because you have a variety of options available to you that would enable you to move forward more effectively in life. So okay Let’s see. Note for Julian. Will this livestream be archived? Yes it will be archived. YouTube seems to do that automatically. So is this chat really just patrons? Yes it’s just patrons. I mean it’s reasonable for the people who are supporting the channel to have to to what? It’s reasonable for me to thank the people that are supporting the channel in a specific way. I know that you guys because I talked to a number of you are happy that your efforts are also contributing to the fact that very many people and it’s about eight million now by the way. Very many people are able to watch these lectures online and many people are translating them and doing all of that too. So the information that’s available in the lectures is spreading very rapidly and the support that you’ve provided me with has not only facilitated that and improved the quality of these offerings substantially but has also enabled me to start thinking about what I might do in the future that’s more extensive. And so one of the things I thought I would do is to thank the patreon people specifically for for devoting their resources to this project and I’m doing the Q&A’s. I’m going to do them once a month and yes it’s just patreon people who are going to be able to submit the Q the questions although everybody will be able to watch them on YouTube because why not? It’s no harm done there. It’s nothing but benefit as far as I can tell. So Benjamin Rood says Jordan why don’t you use a dedicated microphone and headphones? There is a painful reverb slash echo when you interview host people. Yes I think I’ve taken care of that. I’ve got a very good set of earbuds. I’ve got new lighting. I’ve got a though I have a very good microphone even though I wasn’t using it very well and so I think I probably got that solved and certainly the camera is much better than the one before. So let’s see what else have we got to say here? One of the things also that I might comment on that’s quite interesting is that I’ve read a lot of the YouTube comments that accompany my videos and you know I’m most of the time my experience is on YouTube that if you read the YouTube comments it gives you a seeking feeling about the potential future of humanity. You know people seem to use the opportunity provided by anonymity to be some strange frequently some strange combination of arrogant and obnoxious but you know on on balance and I would say it’s more than on balance it’s in the vast majority of cases the comments that have been appended to my YouTube videos apart from the odd troll and and the odd person making the sorts of comments that no one should make the quality of the comments has been very very high and so I’m very happy about that and maybe that’s an accurate reflection of the people that are are watching the information that is provided by the videos. It’s rather difficult information and I don’t think it’s particularly welcome to those that who only want to cause trouble. So okay Dr. Peterson I’m a psychology student. What do you think is the role of psychology in the selective reconstruction of ethics? Well I think that that’s part of the reason that I’m a great admirer of both Freud and Jung and Rogers to that degree to to some degree and why you don’t and not I shouldn’t only limit it to them because I’ve learned a lot from reading the great clinicians. The great clinicians are attuned to the great clinicians and the great clinicians are attempting to determine what the appropriate ethic is that promotes both healthy lives and healthy societies and they’ve made a fair bit of progress. You know and maybe this gives some credence to Sam Harris’s claim that you can derive an odd from an is. Certainly an is can inform an odd although it certainly it doesn’t there’s too many is’s to to to derive odds with invariants. I think that’s the fundamental problem but it’s certainly the case that one of the things the pieces of wisdom that you can see emerge across psychotherapists is that people are strengthened by voluntary exposure to the things that they’re avoiding and that’s a big deal because I think that that’s not much different than a practical application of the lessons that are embodied in or that are represented that are represented in image and drama in hero mythology because the hero is the person who goes forth to voluntarily confront the unknown and gains something as a consequence and benefits the community as a consequence as well and that is very little different than the idea of exposure therapy and psychotherapy and so that seems to me to be the base the core basis of a certain kind of ethic is that human development is facilitated by voluntary exploration confrontation and exploration of the unknown and that looks something like it’s I don’t know if you could precisely say that that’s an odd from an is but it’s certainly it’s certainly trending in that direction so psychologists can help us understand the nature of human beings and by understanding the nature of human beings we may be able to better understand how it is that human beings might optimally behave so and that may also not merely be a consequence of laying out the the vast array of empirical facts that’s associated with psychological investigation it might also be a consequence of the sorts of things that Piaget talked about which is the observation of how societies right from the small societies of childhood all the way up organize themselves into coherent and functional large-scale units so okay how do you walk the line between being too agreeable or too disagreeable within a relationship not making it not making it boring or impossible to work with the other person well you you walk the line between being too agreeable or too disagreeable by self-reflection and by self-reflection listening and negotiation so the self-reflection is continual self-analysis about whether or not you the relationship is fulfilling those things that you need to be fulfilled in order to commit to it self-reflection is continual analysis of whether you’re acting in the other person’s best interest in a way that facilitates your own interest in a manner that makes the relationship likely to last and maybe to extend out beneficial consequences into the broader community and then list by listening you get a chance to see how the other person views the situation and by negotiating you enjoy you engage in joint problem solving and the person will tell you often if you’re being a pushover you know you never tell me what you want to do it and and then you get angry about it that that’s often an indication that you’re being a pushover or or maybe you don’t take enough during sex or maybe you give you you give too much or you don’t take enough during sex which is actually quite frustrating for the other person and so it’s self-reflection listening and negotiation that that’ll help so that that’s basically the a short and straightforward answer to that um um let’s see here somebody said that julian is cute well i’ll tell him that i’m sure he’ll be happy to hear that i think he’s cute too although he’s 25 year old man and he’s not necessarily all that thrilled when i refer to him as cute he’s actually quite tough and that i think is actually tough plus cute that’s a killer combination so albin autison says i love your serious tone when answering dumb questions well thank you very much i appreciate the positive feedback it’s how tall am i dr peterson it depends on whether i’m sitting down or standing up so at the moment i’m about three foot six but generally speaking if i’m standing up i’m about six foot one so you could ask me some more questions like that because it’s getting late at night and so those questions are really easy to um to answer someone says my father is dead who do i save from the whale well that’s easy you save your spiritual father from the whale sonder beyond her says my feet lost weight well possibly i haven’t weighed them independently of my body so but it is certainly possible um chinese culture man spleen says plus one for paleo you know i know a number of people who have benefited substantively from a paleo diet including a relative of mine who’s a great genius and who’s life who’s probably in better at shape better shape now that he’s 60 than he was when he was 45 he made very radical dietary transformations of approximately the same sort that i’ve made and like he’s in extremely good physical shape and doing very well mentally and so there is a lot more to the diet picture than we know and at least for some people heavy carbohydrate diet seems to be absolutely catastrophic and it’s something i wouldn’t have expected because i’m one of those people who regarded people who was who were hyper concerned with their diet as as as tending towards the unbearably neurotic and i’ve certainly learned my lesson about that i no doubt in any group of people who are hyper concerned about something there are people who are unnecessarily concerned but there’s definitely something going on with our diets especially in north america because everyone is overweight and far too many people are depressed and i do think that it has something to do i hesitate to say this but i do think that it has something to do with eating too much grain derived carbohydrate specifically perhaps wheat and and dairy there’s the situation may be more complicated than that and it’s not an area of specific expertise for me so i’m hesitant to state anything more about that so robbie kelly says snoring is from being overweight sleep paralysis stops muscles in the throat from keeping the fat away from crushing windpipe yeah well i thought that too when i stopped snoring but the thing is after i changed my diet to basically a paleo diet i stopped snoring within a week it happened long before i i lost enough weight to make that the canonical reason so um let’s see a commenter says paleo meat plus vegetables did great things for my depression weight and health in general yes well that that is that is uh that is something that’s characteristic of many people’s experience loser luther 55 says is snoring a bad thing well not if you enjoy it and not if your partner enjoys it but yes generally it’s a bad thing because it interferes with your sleep and anything that interferes with your sleep is generally a bad thing i get and it can devolve into sleep apnea where you spend substantial periods of time each night not breathing and that can cause very serious health problems so um so yes it can be generally snoring is a bad thing so what would you recommend to someone who wants to try to be productive in their free time but always gets sucked in by video games and other distractions well i would say define more carefully precisely what you mean by productive so get get a plan in order delineate the plan down to the level of a daily routine set up a daily routine using a calendar put in times that you’re going to get sucked in by video games and other distractions because obviously you enjoy that and then set yourself up so that it’s difficult to get access to those things so that’s the answer to that question more technical trouble here hey why in the world do you think it’s doing that so technological mysteries so um let’s see here congratulations on the socks the weight loss and better sleep stay healthy we need you well i’m doing my best i’ve had a lot of health problems over the last well i guess to some degree over the course of my entire life though i had a very terrible time in december but i think i’m doing okay and um i don’t think the health problems were a consequence of all the political controversy that i’ve been in i just think they happen to co-occur although one probably didn’t really help the other so all right hey julian julian someone thinks that you’re cute yeah someone thinks you’re cute hey you want to come and look at these people and they can judge for themselves yeah sure why not all right so this is julian he’s he’s my son he’s been helping me with all of the technical issues that that i’ve been um coming up against over the last few months and so he wouldn’t think i was cute if you knew me anyone you pretty much stop thinking they’re cute so anyways so all right so let’s see what else have we got here what type of therapy should i seek for my social anxiety with so many different options available um i would say the most straightforward form of therapy for something like social anxiety is behavioral therapy and the behavioral therapists are very practical and so if it’s relatively simple and practical it’s not a big deal but it’s a very practical option and so if you’re relatively straightforward social anxiety exposure therapy is very useful for that sort of thing and sometimes social skills training if you don’t feel that you have the like the skill and wherewithal to conduct yourself appropriately in the social environment and some people aren’t weren’t socialized very well and so they don’t have those skills or they didn’t practice they didn’t get the opportunity to practice i would say what’s probably more important is that you find a therapist that you’re comfortable with and who is pushing you and helping you and listening to you in the proper manner but behavior therapy is very very effective for relatively straightforward ill issues of anxiety and and skill deficit let’s say so okay what else have we got here do you think science is a different domain than spirituality or religion and therefore can’t answer questions in each other’s domain yeah i do i do essentially believe that i think that science is pretty good at laying out the the landscape of empirical facts and that the religious domain is the domain that attempts to answer the question how is it that we should act in the world and there’s overlap between the two they can’t be entirely separate domains but roughly the distinction and i think the reason is is that value free empirical facts cannot you cannot derive values from a set of value free empirical facts and empirical facts by their nature are value free partly because the value is eradicated from the empirical fact by the scientific method that’s actually what the scientific method does now it can’t do it completely because scientists tend to concentrate on facts that they assume are relevant to the solution of a given problem they don’t just randomly search for facts and that’s a good thing because there’s an infinite number of irrelevant facts so you can’t separate them completely i believe that the domains are separate but that the scientific domain is necessarily nested inside the metaphysically religious domain and i believe that that domain is isomorphic in some sense with the darwinian domain that’s the point i was trying to make in the discussions i had with sam harris i have a lecture about that the name of which i don’t precisely remember unfortunately at the moment but it’s a lecture on darwinian versus newtonian approaches to the truth i try to delineate my my thoughts about that more particularly in that video so how old was i when everything you understood started to come together um i think that really started happening to me it started probably happening to me when i was in my early 20s um i think the most important realization i had and i outlined this realization in my book in the preface of my book maps maps of meaning that i realized at about that age that almost everything i said was um a falsehood of one form or another it was either i was using language instrumentally in order to win arguments or to attain dominance or to indicate that i was intelligent or to to use it for victory for for for narrow local personal victory and i realized that when i was in my early 20s and i started to i because a voice in some sense a voice started inside my head which i now regard as something equivalent to the cricket in pinocchio and it basically continued continually informed me that the things i was saying weren’t in some fundamental sense weren’t true and it was very disquieting because the voice that was commenting on what i was saying was making comments of that sort i wouldn’t call them disparaging act voices a voice it was more just a a matter of fact commentary but it was saying it about about 95 percent of what i was saying and i thought well that’s a strange conundrum because now i don’t know if i’m the voice that’s criticizing what i’m saying or if i’m the thing that’s saying what’s being criticized how do you figure that out but i decided that i would take a chance and assume that the part that was suggesting that i wasn’t saying things truthfully was accurate and i started to practice only saying things that that voice wouldn’t object to and i think that’s also equivalent to some degree to trying to say only those things that make you strong instead of weak or that make you that that do not fill you with a post-speech sense of shame and regret and i really think that was the beginning of of all of this about this it was at the same time though that i was starting to work out starting to work on the problem that i think has obsessed my my entire life which is what’s the pathway between nihilism and totalitarianism like is there is there a genuine pathway between those two pathological extremes so and i think those things wove together i had a serious problem to solve and i also tried to tried to begin to sort out my language and really to learn how to work as well so and that was in my early 20s i mean i had lots of things to straighten out in my life many many things and i still have many things to straighten out in my life but i think that’s it so okay okay but isn’t the future authoring program just praying ah well you know whenever you ask a question and the question is of the form is x equal to y the answer is always it depends on how you define x and it depends on how you define y and it’s not a cop-out i mean your question really means something like are there important similarities between what people conventionally describe as prayer and the meditative exercise that you might undertake while doing the future authoring and i would say yes there are important similarities i don’t think it’s reasonable to say that they’re the same because people wouldn’t automatically assume that they were the same they’re not obviously in the same category but i would say that completing the future authoring exercise is to a large degree putting into practice in a very pragmatic way the ethical guidelines that were outlined in the sermon on the mount because what the sermon on the mount basically says is something like aim at the highest good that you can conceive of and then concentrate on the day it’s something like that and and there’s also a tremendous call to truth in that sermon so yes sam dugan asks what is my favorite biblical story i don’t know if i have a favorite i mean some of them i’ve analyzed more than others i guess maybe that’s wrong maybe the story that that that that packs the most punch for a unit of of of of conceptual effort per unit of conceptual effort is the story of cain and abel that is really quite a story i mean it’s it’s very very short and it’s unbelievably punchy so so so far that’s the one that’s been most remarkably illuminating to me now that’s not it’s a tough question because i could say the same thing about the story of adam and eve i mean when i understood like i mean gaining some of the insights that i’ve had into these stories has really been a mind-altering experience so for example when i understood why it is in or at least i believe i understood why it is that in the story of adam and eve that human beings accrued the knowledge of good and evil that that they were transformed into moral agents when the scales fell from their eyes and they realized they were naked that was unbelievably powerful revelation for me and the revelation was for those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it that there’s no difference between recognizing that you’re naked and vulnerable and mortal and that you’re going to die so that you’re a vulnerable creature and and being able to take advantage of that vulnerability as it’s manifested in yourself and other people so you cannot be evil without knowledge of your own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others and you can be evil as soon as you know that because as soon as you understand that vulnerability you understand how to exploit it so animals for example predatory animals don’t exploit the vulnerability of their of their prey i mean they kill them and so in that sense i suppose it’s an exploitation but they don’t take conscious advantage of the prey knowing what would hurt them as individuals the most they can’t torture and they certainly can’t torture intensely and for long periods of times like human beings can that requires self-consciousness and so it’s the emergence of self-consciousness that gives people moral agency because they they develop the capacity for evil at that point and developing the capacity for evil they also develop the capacity for the opposite which at minimum is the the decision not to be as google would put it not to be any more evil than necessary let’s say so so dr peterson am i in the illuminati huh well if i was in the illuminati and i said no that would just be proof that i was in the illuminati so i don’t see any way i can answer that question without obviously offering proof that i am in the illuminati so i don’t think i’m in the illuminati how’s that that that might work out so so let’s see jordan dr peterson will you visit frederickton new brunswick i have visited frederickton i actually had quite a nice time there i i’m i’m going to try to limit my travel to about once every six weeks because i have a bunch of other obligations that i have to keep up with and so and at the moment frederickton isn’t on my travel schedule i am releasing a book in the early part of 2018 it’s called 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos and it’s 12 essays that i derived from a set of answers that i gave on the website quora to the question what are the most valuable things that everyone should know what are the most valuable things that everyone should know i think i wrote 42 little rules there and you can find them at jordanbpeterson.com some they’re accompanied by photographic images that one of my viewers has kindly donated to the project people have been doing all sorts of nice and creative things for me helping me facilitate what i’m doing on youtube and they did that the reason i mentioned that is because i presume that when that book is released that i’ll be going on a speaking tour and it’s possible that frederickton would be on that agenda but i don’t know because none of that has been formulated yet so the book i’m happy with the book i’ve been writing it for about three years and it’s been quite thoroughly edited and commented on by my editor penguin random house is publishing it in canada and that number of friends of mine who are good authors and sometimes excellent authors review it and so that should give me the opportunity to do some more traveling and to talk about the book so okay so let’s say dr peterson how did the postmodernist so successfully take over the education system man i i sure certainly knew wish i knew the answer to that dedicated effort over three decades would do it but i would also say you know if people are continually funded by the public purse for their political activity they can spend a tremendous amount of time concentrating on it and so and when you also add to that the fact that 80 percent of humanities papers garner zero citations which means essentially that no one reads them or if they do they don’t do anything with them then you don’t have to spend a lot of time concentrating on what you’re writing because it tends to be of very low quality at least judged by the standards of attracting readership and so i would say we’ve devoted a substantial proportion of the public funding of higher education to the production of precisely the kind of ideological ideologically minded activists who are aiming precisely at at at occupying positions of power everywhere they possibly can and transforming the social institutions into into puppets of their particular form of possession so okay IQ and wisdom what’s the relationship between IQ and wisdom i would say virtually no relationship whatsoever there’s no evidence of any relationship so for example i wisdom seems to be something more like the balance between a large set of of abilities and virtues and there is no evidence that i know of that that people with high IQs are are wiser than people without high IQs i don’t i don’t see any evidence for that so and i think it’s partly because you can be your your capacity to think can lead you into very bad places just as well in some sense as it can lead you into very good places so it’s a tool it’s a very very powerful tool and it’s a tool that can be wielded for better or for worse and even in relationship to your own well-being i’ve seen many people who whose intelligence and rationality has become nothing but the kind of critical force that completely undermines their capacity to live makes them nihilistic and bitter and resentful and and it’s a it’s a and proud as well because very intelligent people tend to be very proud of their intelligence which is also a mistake because they’re not the creators of that intelligence and have no reason to take personal credit for it so but wisdom whatever wisdom is doesn’t seem to be related in any straightforward manner to straight intelligence so someone says i made the mistake of using psychedelic and recreational drugs to access when i was young and i’m sorry i missed i i can’t see the question right now so i’m going to have to regenerate it from memory and the the consequence of that i believe is that my ability to think has become very cloudy and and uncertain and i don’t know what to do about that i would say that you should probably go talk to a psychologist or a psychiatrist because there there are maybe things that could be done to sharpen your thinking up again and maybe some of them perversely enough might be pharmacological perhaps you know what you’re describing could be a consequence of something like a depression or even post-traumatic stress disorder so because the evidence on the long-term use of of psychedelic drugs for example isn’t doesn’t indicate that in that overall they produce negative health consequences of the sort that you’re describing now you might have had adulterated drugs you might have been one of those people and there do seem to be people like that who are prone to negative consequences for using various recreational drugs but i would say if you really think that your cognitive ability has been impaired you should probably go talk to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and see if you can do something about that because sometimes for example antidepressants or drugs like wellbutrin which is also an antidepressant but a different kind can be very useful in restoring mental clarity it’s worth a shot you know you don’t want to go through life like that so okay do i believe in the power of lord keck what do you think of the rise of belief in mean magic well i don’t think it’s any different it’s the use of archetypal imagery and i don’t know if if i mean obviously archetypal imagery has tremendous power and so when when right now people are obsessed with archetypes of chaos and keck is a manifestation of an archetype of chaos and and transformation because the frog is a as a as a spirit of transformation i talked about that did an interview with a great russian orthodox carver named jonathan pagio who’s very knowledgeable about such things and we did a a youtube video on the metaphysics of peppy and so if you’re interested in that you might want to take a look at that is there a universal female story opposite to the hero myth yeah i think there is i think it’s beauty and the beast although i think that the taming of the partner the taming of the wild partner as an as a as a myth is applicable to men and women there’s an element of taming that goes on in a relationship regardless of the sex of the people who are involved in the relationship so men tame women and women tame men i think the idea of taming and civilizing men is more directly a part of the fundamental archetype of the feminine and i think that for a variety of reasons but i think beauty and the and the beast might be the canonical female hero story so i would like to elaborate on that but it would i’m starting to get tired and i don’t have the mental energy to do that i may do a video on beauty and the beast though i’d like i would like to do that so um what do i think is the archetypal significance of the popularity of the anti-hero in american television oh well that’s that’s easy i mean the the anti-hero nicha nicha made the proposition that he said that morality is cowardice now that’s not exactly what he said what he or what he said in a more elaborated form is that very frequently people are afraid to do things and they’re often things that other people regard as bad and because they don’t want to admit to themselves that the reason they won’t do those things that are regarded as bad is because they’re cowardly they pretended that it’s because they’re moral and so often conventional morality is a consequence of conventional cowardice and the problem with conventional cowardice is that it’s not sufficient to solve serious problems and so for example it’s necessary for a man and perhaps for a woman as well to become a bit of a monster or even a lot of a monster in order to move through life successfully and that doesn’t mean precisely that you have to act out being a monster but it means that you need to be able to be a monster when the circumstances demand it and so the reason that anti-heroes like walter white for example are so popular in american culture is because the criminal walter white was by no obvious was in no obvious way less moral than the conventional and cowardly walter white now you might say he went from one extreme to another which he did but it’s also the case that in order to expand past the domains of conventional morality slash cowardice from the nician perspective it’s necessary to incorporate elements of the shadow and that’s in some sense what nicha meant when he said that we need to go beyond good and evil and it’s certainly what young meant when he said that it’s necessary for someone who wants to burst forth from the potentially pathological confined confines of their conventional persona into the the journey towards individuation and and the development of the self was that the shadow had to be incorporated and that means often in part the capacity for aggression the capacity for sexual expression the capacity to divide defy convention the capacity to take your own road that’s all predicated on the development of an inner relationship with the monster and it’s the same idea that’s expressed in harry potter harry potter is actually able to combat voldemort who’s essentially satan for all intents and purposes because he has a piece of evil lodged firmly within him and it’s also what makes him a redeeming rule breaker right so so the anti-hero is the shadow roughly speaking and the shadow is the thing that the persona needs to incorporate to become the hero so south fresno says i preached a sermon and used some of your cain and abel stuff well that’s good i wouldn’t say that it’s my cain and abel stuff though much as i’d like to take credit for it but i’m happy to hear that and i hope it worked well and and that there were people at your sermon because otherwise that would be a problem so jordan what’s your favorite meme made of you well i don’t know i don’t know if i’ve developed a favorite let me think about that for a minute i find the fact that they’re being made of great amusement i think it’s absurd it’s absolutely absurd and ridiculous and i can’t believe that it’s happening so i know that that’s not much of an answer to your question but i find the whole category i don’t know what to say about it it’s surreal it’s a surreal phenomena and the association that has emerged between me and and kermit the frog and and peppy i also find that that’s that’s that was actually the most marked form of synchronicity that i i’ve ever seen manifest itself so that was really something quite remarkable and amazing and i talk about that also with jonathan and pageo on them in the metaphysics of peppy so so turned off again yeah i turned it back on it seems to turn off on a relatively regular basis so there must be something there must be some setting that we just don’t understand if any of you have a canon camera and you use it for video broadcasting and it shuts off now and then and you know why you could put that in the comments section i’m sure we’ll figure it out but it does seem to be a regular occurrence so all right so i’m going to sign out here pretty quick because i’m starting to wear out and i don’t want to say anything pathologically idiotic for public consumption and that could happen and that would be a bad thing so okay so let’s see i’ll ask answer one more question the canon cameras in the t range go to sleep the canon cameras in the t range go to sleep okay thank you very much hey that’s from louis guermo martinez pinzon and if i remember correctly please correct me if i’m wrong i believe that that is the delightful gentleman from mexico who’s produced the uh excellent graphic intro that i use on my videos and he’s produced another one for me which i’m going to be using on my my youtube interviews so thank you very much louise and and i will louis and i will check that out that’s that’s a good that’s a good hint thank you very much what are my personal spiritual practices and rituals um the simpsons yeah i’m absolutely addicted to the simpsons i think i’ve watched every single episode of the simpsons at least five times generally what i do is i start with episode one and i go through all of them and that takes about a year or maybe a year and a half and then i start at the beginning and again and i go through them again and i also watch the trailer park boys i’m very embarrassed to state to say that but i i’ve also quite addicted to the trailer park boys and that’s outside i don’t know what to say about that but um i i think that bubbles is one of the most remarkable comedic characters that canadian comics have ever developed and i think the same thing about ricky i really think the show is a profane and and distasteful work of genius and it’s a guilty pleasure so i guess those are my spiritual practices watching the simpsons and the trailer park boys i should also tell you because this is a funny story and because my son happens to be sitting here with me and he can tell you that this is the truth when my kids were little we didn’t have a television and the only television show i ever let them watch was the simpsons yes exactly and so when they were really little i used to cover up their eyes when itchy and scratchy came on because i thought that was a bit too much but i thought that the simpsons was a very honest satirical show and that it was teaching them the proper the proper rules of life and they didn’t seem to turn out too badly and they have really good senses of humor so um so it seems to have worked on all simpson diet that’s that’s the ritual i recommend for children i didn’t take them to church but i i had them watch the simpsons on regular basis and probably i should be hauled off in front of the child you know child welfare people for that and admitting it and that’s why i need to stop because i’ll tell you other things that i’ve done and i’ll get myself in trouble so all right so oh and louis guérmaux martinez benzo says also when no one presses any buttons i see okay i see so it is set to automatically shut off because it assumes that no one is doing anything do you know louis what i can do to stop it from shutting off because i don’t want to get up in the middle of a broadcast and like push a button so so but much much appreciated so okay i think i’m going to stop guys i appreciate that i appreciate the support very much and i’m doing my best to put it to the best of all possible uses one thing i could tell you is that you know that i’m doing this series on the bible you may know that or may not it’s going to start i believe may 16th but possibly may 23rd and i’m going to go through the bible from beginning to end describing the psychological significance of the stories but another thing that i’ve got involved in recently and this is in its in its early stages of development but i met a group of of moderate muslim intellectuals in toronto a couple of times now and they’re planning a reformist movement a reformist islam movement that will be grounded in canada and i hope to be involved in that in some integral manner partly as a consequence of doing youtube videos and podcast interviews on the topic of islam and on how it how it’s more extremist elements might be properly mod moderate moderated and so you know that’s a big deal and who knows if that’ll go anywhere but that’s definitely something that i want to devote my attention towards because it seems like an extraordinarily important topic and so with any luck i’ll be able to concentrate my attention on elucidating the psychological significance of the biblical stories from beginning to end and also engage in a dialogue with intelligent and careful and thoughtful moderate muslims about how we might bridge the gap between our two civilizations in a manner that would be productive and so that’s part of what i’m that’s what i’m aiming at utilizing the resources that you people are partly providing me with in as well as continuing to develop the youtube channel and and the the biblical lectures will be taped by the same people who’ve been doing my lectures and so um that’s part of that’s part of the upcoming plan over the next couple of years i would say and that might be enough if i could do those two things extraordinarily well or even well hopefully i could do them extraordinarily well but if i could devote my efforts to doing that credibly that would be that would be really worth that would be something really worth doing so thank you all and thank you for putting up with the technical glitches and all of that and i’ll get better at this as i go you know how it is when you first do something it’s okay if you’re a fool as long as you’re not any more of a fool than you have to be and you get better at things by doing them somewhat badly to begin with so anyways thanks very much i’ll see some of you again in a month and over and out and thanks to julian very much for helping me sort this out and set it up good night beat other one