Jordan B. Peterson on 12 Rules for Life

Tonight's talk is the most popular talk we've done in 15 years. Tonight is the third. So it's been a Jordan Peterson weekend, which has been a great pleasure for anyone who doesn't know him. And last night I think it was a baby in arms and tonight it's probably my mother. He is an associate professor at Harvard University and is now a professor of Clinical Psychology in Toronto. His first book was a great success, it revolutionized the psychology of religion and that of his last. The 12 Rules of Life book is set up to do exactly the same thing, um, just some housekeeping stuff at the end of the talk, we're going to have a question that I'm going to moderate, so prepare your questions, please ask them questions. and Also for those people on the live stream there will be Post-it notes and no questions can be given to the ushers and we will take those too so I'm looking forward to that and the end.

We're not going to do as many assignments, but here on the stage there's a dedication, everyone's book is there or, well, everyone's book is already signed, so if you want, if you don't want a dedication, leave it on the third page. find the firm so that last night there was a huge queue, as you can imagine, so that the queue went smoothly and I'm sorry to sound bossy, but he's not going to take selfies um um just because that means he has to get up all the time and it will slow down the flow, but he is very happy to be photographed and you can photobomb him if you want.

Also because all of us, especially me, are really interested in him solving the problems of Our Lives, please. resist doing that during the dedication because it will really slow everything down. I think the three things you can learn from tonight and the judges will be, firstly, be inspired by the talk, secondly, read the book and thirdly, marry a Canadian, I feel pretty lucky to have done the three. Also, if you want to tweet, it's the hashtag the 12

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, so without further ado, please welcome one of the world's great public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson, thank you.

It was nice, hahaha. Oh, so I thought I'd talk about my book tonight. I've given two talks now and I didn't actually talk directly about it, more like I talked about it, but I thought I don't like giving. Same talk twice, so I thought I'd go over it and summarize it a little bit, so I hadn't spent most of the day memorizing the rules, you know, you'd think if you worked on something for three years. or it's been five years, I guess you would have actually memorized it, but memory is a very strange thing and it's very particular and goal-oriented and I didn't really have the rules memorized and certainly not the numbers, so I hope I have them now. so I guess we'll find out, but I have a copy of the book here in case I forget, so I think we'll go through them one by one and see how that goes seven or seven. 'Watch, okay, well, the first rule, which is a kind of comical rule, is to stand up straight with your shoulders back and it's a meditation on, among other things, the habits of lobsters.

I read some articles about lobsters, it must be 10 years ago. I guess they absolutely blew me away and one of the things that I really loved about being a psychologist and there are many things, but I really loved the psychoanalytic theory and the great clinicians, the behaviorists too, I mean Freud Jung Adler Carl Rogers. Abraham Maslow, that behaviors like Skinner and cognitive behaviors, I mean, I've learned a lot from reading doctors, so if any of you are interested in Psychology, I would really recommend reading great doctors because you know they learn a lot. A lot about

life

is crazy to read, so it's been fun, but on the other end of the spectrum where I've learned the most about psychology is from the really low or what would you call them, the real science or about animal behaviors.

Who did they turn into neuroscientists? First they were animal behaviors and then they became neuroscientists. I have learned a lot from them. They are such clear thinkers. The best of the group. I think there are two of them. named Jeffrey Gray, who wrote a book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, which is just a deadly book, it's impossible to read, it takes like six months to read it because I think he read like 1800 articles to write it or something and he actually read them, That's the good thing and he understood them, which is really extraordinary. Then there's another guy called Jacques Panksep who wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience that describes his studies, for example, on rats.

He was the guy who learned that rats laugh if you tickle them. the end of a pencil eraser, but they laugh ultrasonically like bats, so you have to SL, you have to slow down the ultrasonic vocalization before you can hear them. Laugh and you'd think why on earth would you spend your time tickling rats with a pencil and making them laugh, but look, what it showed was that there was a place in mammals that there is a real psychobiological basis for the game Rough and Tumble, for example , it's a big deal, you know, discovering a whole new circuit in the brain that's like discovering a continent, it's Nobel Prize-winning stuff and Panccept's affective neuroscience.

I would highly recommend it, so there's another book that I also know of, which is 12 rules for life that you can also check out if you want anyway. I was reading these articles. in lobsters and I came across this finding that lobsters govern their postural bending with serotonin and I thought God, that's so interesting, that's so inflection, is this, it's standing up straight, hey, we thought, wow, that's so interesting because You know depressed people crouch down. I wonder if there's some link between those two things and then I went and read a bunch of articles about lobster and lobster neurochemistry.

The neurochemistry of lobsters is actually pretty well understood because they have a pretty simple nervous system, and if you want to understand a complex nervous system it's a good idea to understand a simple one first and then work it up and it turns out that serotonin governs the state, governs state, emotional regulation and posture in locusts just as it does in humans and that just blew me away and one of the things that chapter one deals with is the fact that if a locust is defeated in a dominance battle, you can essentially give him antidepressants and he will fight again.

Oh, that blew me away, you know, it's like that. It's so remarkable because one of the things it tells you is that if you imagine you could be Lobster's top dog or bottom dog, imagine there are 10 strata in the Lobster hierarchy, so you could be number one, top, up, lobster, number ten, down, Lobster if you are a lower lobster you have low levels of serotonin and high levels of octopamine which is the neurochemical that humans do not produce and if you are a higher lobster you have high levels of serotonin and low levels of topamine and you can move a lobster up its dominance hierarchy by moderating its serotonin levels and I thought that's very interesting because what it means is that the counter that keeps track of our state and we have a counter in the sense of our minds that keeps track of our state is a third of a billion years old. and what that also means is that the idea of ​​hierarchy, let's call it Harkey dominance because within lobsters it's like a hierarchy of physical prowess, something like that, the idea of ​​hierarchy is at least 350 million years old, so I read that . and I think well, both because of the idea that human hierarchies are a sociocultural construct, it's like no, that's wrong, it's not just a little bit wrong, it's incredibly wrong, it's incredibly wrong, it's okay and it's fine, and so on. , hierarchies have existed. for a third of a billion years and we have a neurochemical system that modulates our understanding of those hierarchies and then also this is what's interesting and this is why people's reputation is so important to them, there are many reasons, but this is one of them is that where this counter that you share with the lobsters rates you in terms of your hierarchical position determines the ratio of negative emotion to positive emotion that you feel and that is also an absolutely mind-blowing idea for two reasons, one is that it tells you: Why is it so hard for people to be put down?

Because not only does it bother them in the moment, but it changes the way their entire system responds to the world, so now they experience more positive emotions and less negative emotions, so that's really hard. and then there's a corollary to that too which is that there's a very close relationship between your belief system and your position in the dominance hierarchy. It's complicated, but it's worth looking at, let's say like this, so I have a certain status as a professor and and and and I have the let's call it uh, what would you say? I have been granted the right to a certain position in a social hierarchy.

Now the question is why do I have a valid claim to that position and the answer hypothetically is because I know enough for my claim to the position to be valid, so if you stand in the audience and challenge my beliefs and prove me wrong, you might say, "Well, I get angry because I'm wrong, but it's more accurate." The reason I get angry is because you are signaling to the crowd that my position in the hierarchy of authority is invalid and by doing so you are lowering me down the hierarchy and messing with the neurochemical systems that regulate my emotions, etc.

If you are interested, at least in part, in why people are so prone to defending themselves and their beliefs in service of their position, then that is why, and that is a great example of how these can be learned. Incredible things when stumbling upon a rather obscure process. biological fact is simply what would you say it's like a series of dominoes and that's also why biological facts are so useful it's like we don't have to argue about whether the social hierarchy says or not, I said, are hierarchies social constructions, A given hierarchy is influenced in its structure by sociocultural conditioning, say, but the fact that the hierarchy is so similar to the part of your brain that detects and regulates your response to hierarchies is older than the part of your brain that recognize trees as it's ancient, it's really fundamental and that's why almost all social animals organize themselves into social hierarchies because now the other thing in chapter one is kind of a meditation on what might constitute a hierarchy, one of my business colleagues, a former student of mine. from Harvard, a very, very smart guy, he has a graduate degree in engineering from MIT and a PhD in Psychology from Harvard, so there is one like him in the whole world and he is a very smart guy and he helped me design the authoring suite and has been working for about 20 years on that set of programs that help people write about their lives to straighten them out.

He told me to stop using the word dominance hierarchy and said the reason was because it was infested. with Marxist presuppositions and it really bothered me when he first said that, because I've been using the word dominance hierarchy for years, he said we had a discussion about that, he said, well, it's based on the idea that you move up the hierarchy. of human hierarchy as a consequence of the expression of power is as if that is wrong, moving up in valid hierarchies as a consequence of the expression of competence and that is actually technically correct. He was exactly the right person to tell me that because he had done his PhD on what predicts success in Western hierarchies and the answer is pretty clear.

General cognitive ability, some prefrontal ability as well, which is what he tested specifically, so intelligence, generally speaking, although a little more elaborate than intelligence, is pretty close and the trait of conscientiousness represents about 50 percent. percent of the variation. in long-term success and you think well, hey, how do you want your partnership to be structured? I think it's pretty cool that smart, hard-working people are the ones most likely to succeed. Not a bad empirical test of the validity of a structure. You know, especially given how much quirkiness there is in life, a lot of random things happen to people, but it's better to be born three standard deviations above the mean in intelligence in the West than to be born three standard deviations above the mean. in wealth relative to where you'll end up when you're 40.

So he said let's use the word hierarchy of competencies or we decided I think that's a lot better, so chapter one is a bit of a meditation on the nature of hierarchies and the biochemistry of hierarchy, but it's also a mandate about how to present yourself because you don't want to present yourself to the world in a way that doesn't dishonor you in some sense, which might be a good way to think about it and you don't want to dishonor yourself because the consequence of dishonor is emotional dysregulation. , more pain, less positive emotion, so the best way to introduce yourself is to honestly get up and stretch, you know, take up some space and do.

You feel a littlevulnerable doing that because you open the front of your body wide, but it's a sign of confidence and that way people are more likely to give you the opportunity. The benefit of the doubt and that's a good way to start regulating your mood, but not only does it directly regulate your mood to stand up because it is as closely associated as the posture reflex is associated with serotonin and emotional regulation, but also because if you straighten up and present yourself that way , then other people are more likely to take you seriously and that means they'll start treating you like you're lobster number one instead of lobster number 10 and that's another way you can at least give of yourself. the damn benefit of the doubt, right and and and and and and and face the world in a brave way and that's a very good way to figure out how to establish yourself in multiple hierarchies of competence because one of the general rules of The key to success is to face the things that you They scare with directness and bravery, and that's kind of the universal strategy for success, and that's what the verse chapter is about, so it's a lot of fun, my grad students.

I told them these lobster stories I have. my grad students when we used to vote for breakfast and they were a very competitive bunch, very rebellious and witty and they were always trying to one-up each other and making some witty criticism or something and it got to the There's a point in restaurants where they put their claws in the air and they click like that when they know they beat one of their colleagues, which was very peculiar and strange and very funny too, so that's rule number one, um, rule number two is uh, treat yourself like if you were someone you cared about and that's a deeper chapter.

I'd say chapter one is a bit comedic, but it also has a serious scientific ending, for example, and it's practical, like most rules, chapter two. a little meditation on why I read this I read this work of Jung a long time ago and it was a meditation on the command to treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated that way and what Jung pointed out that what I really liked was that that wasn't a command to be nice to other people, it was an invitation to reciprocity, it was something like this, it's like you should figure out how you would like to be treated, like you were caring. about yourself, not how you would like people to respond to you, it's more important than that, it's like imagining that you have a child that you really care about and someone tells you, well, people will treat this child exactly the way you want, but you have to calculate it. figure out what that is and then you'd have to sit for a month and think, well, how do you want your child to be treated?

You don't want everyone to be nice to him. You know you want to. people challenge them and you want people to discipline them and you want people to tell you when you're wrong it's like you don't just want everyone to be nice that's pathetic that's pathetic there's no challenge in that and very well you want to treat them other people how you would like to be treated well, then you have to figure out how you would like to be treated well and even though you would like people to cultivate you and just lay everything at your feet, it's like no, that's not a thing. you wish you had someone you were looking after and then there is an additional problem, which is often the case that people treat other people better than they treat themselves, which happens very often, so one of the things that I pointed out in the chapter The second was that if you have a dog and you take it to the vet and the vet gives you the prescribed medicine, you will go buy the medicine and you will give it to the dog and you will do it correctly, but if you go yourself to a doctor and you get a prescription, there's a 30 chance you won't even pick up the medication and if you do, there's a 50 chance you won't take it correctly, so I really thought about that when I first I found that statistic, it really was another one of those little facts.

I thought, what the hell is up with that? It's like you're doing it for your dog, so obviously you're doing it for something you care about and are conscientious enough. You actually will, so why wouldn't you do it for yourself? Your dog likes you. You know even your dog would prefer you did it, but you don't. Dont do it. And it's actually one of the reasons why modern medicine doesn't work as well as it could because people just don't take their medications and it's not just because they don't take care of themselves; There is some skepticism about doctors, but you could also be skeptical about the veterinarian.

It's a deep meditation, I would say, and what I've done with these rules are very simple rules and a little bit comical and ironic in some ways, but what I've tried to do is sort of separate them and show what's underneath them and go deeper into what's underneath them. as much as I can and in rule two it's kind of a meditation on why people don't like themselves very much and I think there are really two reasons and one is that We are fragile, damageable and imperfect in multiple Dimensions all the time and that It often gets worse.

Many things get worse as we age, for example, so it's not necessarily that easy for a self-aware being who is extraordinarily aware. of their own fragility and, but not only, fragility, um nonsense and mistakes, story like you know yourself better than anyone, they know you and they know you, you may have a certain dislike for someone you know because of something they did , but you know. everything you did, Jesus, that's a drag man, you know, you have to carry it behind you, it's like I really did it, you know, and then it's like you're weak, a little useless and prone to temptation, and that's it.

You know. all those things that you know shouldn't be that way and then you're also capable of committing pretty vicious acts of malevolence and you also know that about yourself and it's a real existential question for people, it's like why the hell should you? deal with something as sorry and miserable as you are and that's what the chapter is really about, it's because the answer in the chapter is yes, yes, yes, you know that you are first of all, yes, you are pretty useless and terrible, but also They are all. more and that is actually an existential problem, right, and what I mean by that is a problem that every human being has always had and will always have, so it's not just you, it's a universal problem and there is an answer to that and one of them is that is to say love the sinner but hate the sin is something like that is that even though you are not all that you could be the appropriate attitude to have towards yourself is the attitude that you would have towards someone who really cared and that it behooves you to act as if you really care about yourself, just as you would with someone, that you really care about someone else, so it's a reversal in a sense of the golden rule and it's a discussion about why what that is necessary and, more than that, it is a discussion about why you have a moral obligation to do that, it is not just that you should do it because it would be better for you, but that you actually have a moral obligation to do it, I think because you do it.

The world is a much better place, a much worse place if you don't take care of yourself, so you should take care of yourself, you know, because well, that's what the chapter is about, in part it's because you have something valuable to contribute. the world that is what happens with being an individual is what Western civilization has always recognized that as an individual you have a light that you have to bring to the world and that if you don't bring it to the world the world is a darker place and that is a bad thing because when the world is a dark place it can get very, very, very dark and it's not just to make you feel better, not just to make you number one.

Lobster, none of those things you need Take care of yourself because you are in the best position to do so and you need to take care of yourself even though we are mortal, vulnerable, self-aware and capable of not only doing terrible things, but also doing things terrible Do them regardless, you still have that responsibility, so I wanted you to know that you answered the question as strongly as you can to try to figure out well why people despise themselves and there are many reasons for that. sure but the reasons don't justify mistreating yourself it's as simple as that it's not a good strategy and the next rule is to make friends with people who want the best for you and that's a meditation on my own childhood and adolescence to a certain extent .

I had friends who wanted the best for me and friends who didn't, and you know they were friends some of them pointed up and some of them pointed down and if you have a friend who points down and you do something that points then they're usually not very happy. With that, you know, they try to top your achievement with one of their own, hypothetical or real, or they put aside what you're doing or offer you a cigarette if you're trying to quit and can't. You've done it successfully or you've had a drink if you've been drinking too much and you're trying to stop being an alcoholic, you know?

Yes, they are cynical, bitter and dedicated to no good and sometimes family members too, and sometimes. It's even part of you, you know, but this chapter is a mandate for people. It's like you have an ethical responsibility to take care of yourself. You have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the courage, faith, and wisdom to desire you. well, when you have done something good and to stop when you are doing something destructive and if your friends are not like that then they are not your friends and maintaining your friendship with them may not even be in their interest and so It's a complicated argument to make because I'm not saying you know when someone is in trouble, you should know, push them into a ditch and then kick them a couple of times.

That's not the idea, the idea is that, but I had a couple of The rules that I didn't write about one was: be careful, uh, be careful who you share good news with and another was be careful who you share bad news with and everyone, Those rules resonate in people's minds pretty quickly. A friend is someone you can share with. good news, you know, you go to them and you say, hey, look, something good happened to me and they say, look, I'm so happy that happened to you, like it should be, and they don't think, damn, why did it? did.

That didn't happen to me and like you know you didn't deserve it, here are a bunch of reasons why you're stupid and why it doesn't work, it's like that's not useful and that's why I would say if people know what than the other What people do if they try to drag you down, let's say, is try to see if you can take it because they have the idea that maybe life is not worth living and that things are not good and then if they can be sullied, let's say they use an archaic term, something that is pristine and good, then they prove to themselves that there is no true ideal and there is no necessary reason to be responsible and strive to move forward, and then they use you, which is a test case, you know, I'll just shove you into the low lobster bin and see how you respond and if you stick with it, then yeah, my cynicism is completely justified and well, that's chapter three and it's a painful chapter because It also details the suicide of one of my friends that occurred over a very long period of time, not the actual suicide, but the whole prodroma that comes with it, and it's a controversial chapter four, compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who. someone else is today and the reason I wrote that was because I had this client 10.

I'm a clinical psychologist and I've spent 20 hours a week for 25 years listening to people, listening to people tell me about their lives, you know. , and those people ranged from people who were barely clinging to the bottom of the world to people who were so successful you can barely believe it, like the whole range of people and that's been absolutely fascinating, it's like being a clinical psychologist if Real Listening is like being immersed in a Dostoevsky novel all the time. You know this, because it's amazing what people will tell you if you listen to them. They are very interesting people if you really listen to them because they are so quirky.

Like penguins, rhinos and ostriches, they are unlikely creatures and anyway, in regards to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday and not just who someone else is today, this old client of mine was about 85 years old when he came to see me. and he was a financier and kind of a mathematical genius. He made these little pendants with a mathematical symbol for the most beautiful mathematical equation ever written. He made them out of gold and distributed them and had studied. psychology when I was young and he introduced me to this concept that I didn't know called the Pareto distribution, which you see, as a psychologist I had been taught that most human characteristics were normally correctly distributed, so most people were average and some extreme people that is a pre or normal distribution intelligence is like that and in height there are more people of average height than very tall or very short and weight is like that and many things are normally distributed and psychologists tend to assume that everything is, but It is not, creative products are distributed in a Pareto distribution and that is something completely different.

It's really important to know this, it's another fundamental fact whose knowledge can transform the way you conceptualize, say, the political landscape, so here's an example of thePareto distribution, you know there is a general rule that says that if you run a company that 20 of your employees do 80 percent of the work or 20 of your customers are responsible for 80 of your sales or 20 of them are responsible for 80 of customer service calls the same, but that's not exactly the rule, the rule is worse than the rule is that in a given domain the square root of the number of people operating in that domain do half the work productive then you think well, you have 10 employees, three of them do half the work, it's like, okay, what if you have 100 employees?

So 10 of them do half the work, what if you have a thousand employees? So there are 30 and if there are ten thousand employees then there are one hundred and this actually turns out to be a fairly strict rule that applies in many situations. for example, to the mass of stars and the size of cities so you can see how universal it is as a law, that is, those who have more get more and those who have less get less. That is Matthew's principle, correct for those who have everything. More will be given to those who have nothing, everything will be taken away from them and economists sometimes call it the Matthew principle and what that sets out is a world rife with inequality, so you know, you hear this idea that I think it's The 85 richest people in the world have more money than the poorest two billion, that is a Pareto distribution phenomenon and you could say "to hell with capitalism for producing that" it's like "I'm sorry I misdiagnosed you" It's a natural law, no matter what society you study you get a Pareto distribution of wealth, you get a prior distribution of the number of records recorded, you get a prior distribution of the number of songs written or goals scored, as if any creative product had that characteristic and it's partly because as you start to succeed, let's say people, we offer you more and more opportunities and as you start to fail people move away from you and you plummet and okay, that's hard, so what What it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality and I'm not saying that we shouldn't do anything about it, although I am saying that we don't know what to do about it, that's what you know because you can modify the Pareto distribution of wealth, let's say, but if we don't know how to do it do it without disrupting the system so completely that it collapses, which is what happened in the Soviet Union, for example, and in Maoist China they were trying, at least in principle, to adjust inequality, but the cure was much worse than the illness and the truth of the situation.

The thing is that we actually don't know technically how much inequality there has to be to generate wealth, we can guess and you could say that there should be less and you could say that there should be more, if you are on the left, say less and if so, if you're right when you would say well we'll just let inequality flourish but we know it's inevitable and we also know we don't know how to regulate it so there is inequality what that means is there will always be people around who are better at something than you. and that's a problem because you can feel jealous and bitter and resentful and, worse yet, you can feel hopeless.

I know this because you look like, look, I have this, this friend of mine told me something really funny, uh, he was calling out his lack of success in the world and he compared himself to his roommate and he said, you know his roommate, his university. His roommate was doing so much better than him and his fucking roommate was Elon Musk, it's like he was really like, oh you're not doing as well as Elon Musk, well it's not, I mean , you could see, he would take it personally because they were roommates. and everything, it wasn't like he was doing badly, like he wasn't doing very well, it's like I'm not as good as Elon Musk, it's like, well, you and seven billion other people, you know, but I thought it was instructive because well, because you have to be careful who you compare yourself to now, you can't just not compare yourself to others, to successful people, because then you have nothing to aim for and one of the things I learned from Jung it is this.

It was something great. I'm going to make a real lateral move here. Jung thought that the Book of Revelation was added to the Bible because of the Christ in the gospels. He was too merciful. He was too nice a guy. Now it is an ideal right. And Jung said. wait a second an ideal is always a judge that's what happens with an ideal because you are not as good as your ideal so your ideal as a judge Revelation has Christ returning as a judge and that was Jung's explanation at the level of the unconscious collective by stick that remarkably strange and terrible book so well at the back of the Bible anyway my point is that it is an ideal do you need an ideal because you have nothing to aspire to but an ideal is a judge and you always fall short of the ideal so How on earth can you have the benefits of having an ideal without receiving the crushing blow that comes with having a judge who always considers you insufficient?

So I was trying to figure that out in the chapter and this is something that I've had to work on a lot as a clinical psychologist, it's like well, let's say you need a goal, but we don't want your distance from the goal to crush you, so you have to set a goal. and then you have to make the target break it into parts so you can move towards it. You have a pretty high chance of making it, so it's a bit practical. I wouldn't say advice is because it's better than advice. Some practical knowledge on how to achieve a goal.

Set a high goal but differentiate it so you know what the next step is and then make the next step difficult enough that you have to push yourself beyond where you are, but also provide enough. with a reasonable chance of success, that's also what you do with kids right, you want to push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are, but you don't want to crush them with constant failures, so what you do is Aim high and make them the goal is roughly difficult but close, so anyway that's one way to look at it, but then the next thing is you know, hey, I've had clients, a lot of clients in their 30s that are trying this.

It's more true with women. I would say that a lot of women who are high achievers and who set their career goals in their 30s and then want to differentiate their life, want to have a husband, want to have a family, are trying to figure out how to do that and one of the things that I've noticed is that around 30 you really have to stop comparing yourself in any way with other people and the reason for this is that the peculiarities of your life are so idiosyncratic that there is really no one so similar to you, you know this because the details of your life are important and maybe you compare yourself to some rock star or something and you know that the person is rich, famous, glamorous and all that, but you know that They are alcoholics and they do too much cocaine and they have been divorced three times and it's Like how the hell do you make sense of that?

He is someone you should judge harshly or not. The answer is you don't know because you don't know all the details of their lives and who you know who you can compare yourself to that was easy yesterday so here's a good goal it's kind of like aiming high and I really mean it's like and we'll talk That's a little too high, but use it to control yourself, so your goal is to make today a small increase better than yesterday and you can use it better, you can define yourself better, this doesn't have to be an imposition of external morality .

You know, you know where you are weak and insufficient, where you could improve, you think that's okay, that's how I was yesterday, if I did this little thing, things would get a little better and well, that's great because you get the incremental, moving improvement. it's unstoppable, you can actually implement it and it starts to generate consequences similar to the Pareto distribution, it starts to compound and I've seen that happen in people's lives over and over again, people write to me all the time and tell me says I'm doing that, but I've seen that happen in people's lives all the time, they make a goal a goal, that the goal should be, how could I conceive my life so that if I had that life, it would clearly be worth It's worth living, so wouldn't you do it?

You have to be bitter, resentful, deceitful, arrogant and vindictive, so it's as if the end result is certain, because that's what endless failure does to you, it's not good, and that's what failure does to you too. life without a purpose and a goal, because life is very hard. You think okay, well, I need to adopt a way of being that justifies my suffering and you can ask yourself that question: what would make this worth it? I quote Nietzsche. I think in that chapter he said that someone who has a why can endure almost any how. a lovely line, I mean, it's a lovely line and it's really worth thinking about, so think about it, how do I handle all this misery, suffering and futility?

It's like, well, I need to figure out what I would have to do to achieve that. clearly it's worth it and then you have your goal and then you think well, I need to move towards that gradually because I'm kind of useless and I can only do so much and maybe not even that, but all I have to do is be a little bit a little bit better than my miserable self from yesterday and that will propel you forward very quickly and you will be able to be successful at it, which is also really wonderful because why not set yourself up for success?

Because otherwise you'll fall like a lobster number 10 and You know that's just not good, you get all Pinchy when that happens and it's not a good thing, so that was chapter four, chapter five, geez, we're cruising here . Chapter five is the one where I thought I would get into the most trouble. to write, you know, I thought people would be all over me for this and so far they haven't, but they still might be and it's called Don't Let Your Kids Do Anything That Makes You Dislike You and I thought it would be controversial in the first place. place because people would think well, I never dislike my kids, it's like you're really, really, really going to tell me that, God, you know, and there's a more horrible element to that too because, as a clinical psychologist, I.

I've seen the whole Freudian nightmare, I can tell you, and you know, I've seen families where it's like that, it's like the family members are standing in a circle, I would say, and each one of them has their hands around each other's necks. on each other and they're squeezing hard enough to strangle the other person in 20 years and that's the family, it's like, I mean, you know if you haven't met a family like that or well, then you're not paying attention and there's something There's a reasonable chance that you're actually in a family like that, so the idea that parents can't dislike their kids is like God, how naive can you be, it's just that if you think that guy doesn't even know where are you.

You would start to straighten up. I would never dislike my children's, yes, well, those are the people who also produce the most monstrous children. I can tell you that it's so-so and then there's this idea that this young man had that I really love, which is the idea of ​​The Shadow, and you know, it's kind of pop psychology and it's trendy, kind of like among the guys in the new age too, but one thing I can tell you about Carl Jung is that no matter what anyone may say about him, he is not at all new AG if you read Carl Jung and understand him and are not terrified to the depths of your soul .

You haven't understood anything you've read and one of the things Jung said about the shadow, which is the dark side of humanity. The Dark Side of each individual was that their roots reached to hell and it meant something very specific, both metaphysical and practical, with that the metaphysical element was hell literally and metaphysically, but it also referred to the closest types of hell and So what he meant was that if you were able to understand your dark side then you would see in yourself a reflection of the behavior that was present in Auschwitz, for example, and that the reason why people don't take on the Dark Side of themselves seriously and even confront the fact that it exists is because no one wants to see that reflected within them and no wonder it is outside, no wonder you also believe that that confrontation with the shadow was an inevitable barrier to Enlightenment. that didn't exist, you know, Joseph Campbell, who is a popularizer of youth to a certain extent, has become known for saying follow your happiness and you know that Campbell learned practically everything he knew from Jung, but young man, that's not what that Jung said at all.

He said, pursue what is meaningful and you will find what you least want to find and that is good, that is the dragon right, that is the dragon that accumulates gold, for example, and the dragon is also something that lives inside you and is not something so you take the encounter lightly. There are very old stories about this Egyptian story about the god Horus, who was the Egyptian savior in some common sense and when he encountered evil, um, even though he was a God, he lost an eye in battle and that's the famous Egyptian eye, you know everyone still knows, that's the Eye of Horus that was plucked out by Seth, who is the precursor. to Satan and so and so, it's notkidding, no kidding, um, back to Kids.

Look, I knew this when I had my kids. She had already been through it to some extent and she understood what it meant to be bad. person a terrible person um and one of the things I knew was that this manifested itself in families all the time tyrannical father overprotective mother more rarely overprotective mother tyrannical father overprotective tyrannical mother generally it's the other way around um and the terrible pathological family drama that Freud told him It was very important at the beginning of the 20th century. I had seen that in many depressing, brutal, horrible situations and I have seen parents punish their children and you can also take a page from nature if you really want to punish your children or anyone else.

If you have someone you're interested in punishing, including yourself, you don't, you never punish someone you really want to punish for doing something bad because that's actually a little bit of a relief for them, you know that's the thing about it. dostoevsky crime and the punishment is that the murderer gets away with it, it's a relief for him when he gets caught, it's like no, if you really want to punish someone, wait until he does something good, then you punish him because that will teach him that like this you'll maximize damage that way. you decrease the likelihood of them doing something good again and I'll tell you, man, if you want to have a good relationship with someone, that's something you don't do, you open your damn eyes and if they do something you wish they would do it again , then tell them how much you appreciated the fact that that happened and you hope it repeats itself, you see, so if there's one thing you can learn from tonight's lecture it's that it's an extraordinarily useful thing to know. look and when people do something that they should do more of, they say look, I saw you did this specific thing, I saw that it took a little bit of effort, this is what it means, this is how I observed it, this is how it goes on like this and man, yeah do you love somebody. you do that to them, that's a boost, that's a great thing, so anyway, back to the kids, so I already knew it was a pretty decent Monster when I had kids and I thought, well, my kid, my little kids, You know, like a baby or two. -Years like he's a horrible monster and for there to be a problem of unequal power here I better not let that kid do anything that would really make me angry.

You know, now you hear from time to time about something horrible that happens when I was in Boston years ago and read about a woman who immersed her two-year-old daughter's arms in boiling water. You think well, how can that happen? It's like well, you know, she's probably hungover, she probably just lost her job, she's probably desperate in six different ways, she probably didn't have any decent discipline strategy for the kids, she probably didn't have anyone to help her, she was bitter and resentful and angry. , and the child misbehaved at exactly the wrong time and as if you were going to.

Being around your kids a lot and you might want to be around them so they don't misbehave at exactly the wrong time because all hell can break loose if they can and I didn't want that to happen so I knew that. It was easy for people to hate their children even though they said out loud that they loved them all the time. I saw very little evidence of that many situations, so one of the things you know is that you have a natural affinity for children and maybe even more so. a more powerful natural affinity for your own children, so that's a good start, but you don't want to make them enemies against you, you don't want to allow them to engage in the kind of hierarchical defiance that makes you irritable and resentful, that's not a good idea and if the things they do make you dislike them, the probability that they make other people dislike them is extraordinarily high, so you can consult your own irritability and you can say look kid, I used to tell this to my kids. .

You know, when they were three or four, I was like, look, I'm not in a very good mood and I'm probably not being reasonable, so you might as well go to your room and play for a while. I like you, man, you're a great kid, but get out of here for a while, you know, and they were fine with that, we'd train them at that point so they could go play in the room alone. You know what's something a kid should be able to do anyway, but you need to know what kind of monster you are if you're going to be a good parent and if you're like, oh, I'm not a monster, it's like, oh, yeah. you're just an incredibly oblivious monster and that's actually the worst kind, so the other thing about that chapter is that there's an idea in it and it's an idea that I think is well supported by the relevant literature, which is that you The fundamental job as a parent, especially of a child from zero to four years old, is to make that child eminently socially desirable, so you are a successful parent if when your child is four years old, all kinds of children want to play with him or her. she.

That's really it, if you want an indicator of whether you've been successful or not, that's it. Some kids are a lot harder to get along with than others, and some kids have a harder time playing, so I'm not saying that. Every parent who has a child who is not popular at four years old is to blame for that. I'm not saying the opposite, I mean, you can be sure you've been successful if your kid isn't exactly popular. but desirable as a playmate and then you think well, what have you done for your child? Well, you've opened the whole world of children to them because they know how to play, which is a very deep knowledge and it begins to become. instilled probably in the chest and certainly in the course of rough and violent play around the age of two, it is a deep and embodied knowledge, they know how to play like a good, well-trained dog knows how to play, you know, you meet a new dog and you go like this and the dog does like this you think oh that dog I can go like this and he doesn't bite me well he knows how to play and a child who is awake and alert is like a well socialized puppy If you know anything about children, you can take a four year old child and Give him a little play gesture and he will immediately smile and start playing right now and that is what you want for your children and wherever they go. other children like them and will include them in their play.

Play is how children develop, so if other children include them in their play, then children develop and poor children who do not make friends at the age of four with the literature about this is very clear, if your child is an outcast at the age of four, the likelihood that anything can be done about it is slim to none, no matter what you do, and I hate to be so blunt about it, but I know the literature and that is what the literature suggests and so on, the other thing is that if you don't allow your children to engage in unpleasant behavior, adults will like them because adults actually like children.

You know, one of the things I loved about having little kids in Montreal. I lived in a poor area of ​​Montreal, there are a lot of tough guys around there and we used to take our daughter in the stroller. These tough guys, you know, God only knows what they were doing, they were tough looking guys, you know? We had walked our daughter past them and they liked to smile and they would crouch down and make faces and you know it was you. I tell you, one of the best things about having small children is that they bring out the best.

In other people you see a whole side of humanity, even among the darkest parts of humanity you see a whole side of them that you wouldn't normally see and it's lovely and the thing is if you're good to your child in the real way. you can help them maintain that tremendous attractiveness that they have as little children and respond appropriately to adults like a puppy that wags its tail instead of growling and you know, goes for your ankle and then everywhere they go the adults welcome them and They teach them things and pat them on the head and smile at them sincerely instead of saying, "My God, here comes that couple with that damn brat again, you know, what a horrible thing, what a horrible thing to do to a child, because then everywhere they go, all the good ones, all the good will is false, you know that there is nothing you can do to someone that is more terrible than putting them in a world where all the good will directed towards them is false, that It's a terrible thing, so anyway, that's what chapter five and chapter six are about.

It's about it being a difficult chapter, um, it's about I spend a lot of time reading about totalitarianism and about atrocities like some brutal ones, a lot of brutal things, brutal beyond the capacity of the imagination, even um, and I read a lot about individual criminals and serial killers and that kind of stuff. of people also trying to get to Baltimore. One book I would really recommend is a book by Carl Panzram, which is an autobiography. Panzram is the name of the book and he was a tough man, whatever his last words to his executioner. He said to his executioner, hurry up, who is your bastard?

He could kill 10 men in the time it takes you to hang me, those were his last words, you know, he said: I wish the human race had a neck to put my hands on. surround him and squeeze, that was Carl Panzram and not many people like to write biographies, but he did it and he told you why he was that way and why he thought that way in case you want to know which one I would recommend by the way. because it's very useful to know that stuff, but I have to remember why I told you that panzram story, oh yeah, chapter six is ​​about that, it's about panzram and it's about the Columbine kids, the kids who shot up the high school because I read. their dyers, you know, and I understood them too, which is even better than just reading them and you know you see these mass shootings all the time and everyone does the same thing, oh, how did that happen?

Why did that happen? How can it be like this? It's like well, why don't you read what they said about why they did it and just assume that's the reason and if you go, if you go, oh well, my kids call, oh yeah, I was like, oh, They must have been intimidated, oh? Yes, because you know that the natural response of anyone who is being bullied is to go armed to the teeth to plan the destruction of the entire city. I think it was Detroit that covered the entire avenue of the high school with bombs and then went to shoot him. classmates, that's what happens when you get bullied, it's like no, that's not what happens when you get bullied, it's a stupid explanation, it's shallow beyond belief and it really just comes up because people don't want to deal with the real problem and Well, the Columbine children were dealing with the real problem, you know, they basically said quite frankly that, in their own arrogant estimation, the being itself was corrupt and unnecessary and that it would be better if it were eradicated in the most brutal way possible, as quickly as possible and You get to places like that, if you focus on Revenge for three or four years in your mother's basement, you know that you can go to very dark places and that's what chapter six is ​​about , and you know Panzram, who was treated very brutally as a child and they call them buyers who, you know, had their ups and downs, but nothing compared to Carl Panzram, he said that they were judges of the being and they decided that it was defective and that it was them who would fix it, so it's a difficult chapter, um. but it's more than that, it's a meditation on resentment because resentment is a key human motivation and I would say it's a great teacher to listen to your resentment is one of the best things you can do, you have to admit it. first it exists and then you have to admit the fantasies it's generating and you have to admit what you would consider the way out, so all of that is very difficult because it means learning things about yourself that you probably don't want. learn, but resentment only means one of two things: it means shut up already, grow up, stop complaining and move on, that's one thing it means or someone is playing tyrant for you, it could even be you and you have something to say. and do what you need to say and do to stop it so maybe the resentment can show you the way to do it.

There's a meditation on resentment and one of the principles I drew from that is how to be resentful. A person wants other people to change and if you are resentful then your motivations are not trustworthy, in fact they are very very dark and that is why I went to the extreme with people like Panzram and the Columbine killers, resentful people who want change. The world can't be trusted, what should you do instead? How do you deal with your own resentment? I would say well, there's a great I read this great line in that T.S Eliot play called The Cocktail Party and in it this woman approaches a psychiatrist I think this is in this chapter and she says you know I'm going through a very difficult, I'm suffering a lot, my life is not going well and then she says, uh, I hope there's something wrong with me and the psychiatrist says what the hell do you mean by that and she says.

Well, that's how I see it: either there's something wrong with the world and I'm just in it and that's how it is and then what am I going to do about it because it's the whole world or maybe I could be lucky and there's something wrong. in me that is causing all this unnecessary suffering and if I could I could fix it. I could learn and I could fix it and very well. I've been thinking about that for a long time and I think if your life isn't going the way it is you know you can find someone else to blame, which isquite convenient for you and also relatively easy or you might think it's okay.

I don't like life. I don't like the way my life is developing. Maybe I don't like life in general because it is tragic and contaminated with evil. How can I know if my judgment is correct and the question is? Did I really do everything I could to straighten out my life? Because maybe I shouldn't. be judging it by its quality or the quality of life itself or by being in itself if I haven't done everything I can to straighten out my life, so there is a task, soldier knitson, I'm great. a big fan of social media and his book the gulag archipelago was one of the things that brought down the Soviet Union and he said that a man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny and you know, he said that with some authority I think it could be It's easy to argue that The Gulag Archipelago is the best book of the 20th century.

I mean, obviously there are other contenders, but he said that when he was in the gulag camps, you know, he mused about how the hell he got there and had a hard life, man. First of all, he was on the Russian front at the beginning of World War II and then he was thrown into the gulag camps and that was just the beginning of his adventures. He had a difficult life and he was in the fields, he was thinking. What the hell how did I get here? What's going on and he had Hitler and Stalin to blame, so if that's the case, if you need someone to blame, the man Hitler and Stellen, that's great, but he, that's not what he.

He said that he meditated for a while once he realized that he might have something to do in some strange way with the way things happened to him and he said that he went over his life with a comb of fine teeth in memory of him? Okay, where did I go wrong, but by my own judgment, when, when, when there was a path in front of me, when did I take the path that I knew I shouldn't take because you all know that well, you know that sometimes you don't. ? knowing if what you are doing is good or bad is just ignorance, you just don't know, but sometimes you know very well and you do what you know you shouldn't do anyway, that happens a lot and why do you do it? that peak is part of his stupidity, there are all kinds of reasons, but you certainly know you do it, so as Nixon thought, well, what if I took responsibility for where I am in this concentration camp and then went over my entire life and will you try it? finding out all the things I did that were wrong by my own estimation, that increased the likelihood of me getting here and then what if I tried to fix them all now in the present and that's why he wrote The Gulag Archipelago and One of the Consequences of that, as I said, was that it accelerated the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, so, hey, that's not bad, huh, like if you make a real confession, you really repent, do your penance which is writing this book and completely change the geopolitical panorama. of the world is and it's worth thinking about that because it wasn't just soldier nitzen who made Nelson Mandela do something quite similar, it's not that impossible and that's why the idea of ​​what you should do if you feel resentful about the nature of being or suffering too much for your own life, let's say, is fixing the damn thing, like trying really hard for a year, even trying for a week, trying not to do the things you know you shouldn't do, trying not to say the things you know you shouldn't do. they are false. and just see what happens, you might as well give it a good try because you're like, well, I'm in for a year, you know I'm going to do things right and then I'm going to sit back and watch how things play out. and maybe I'll reconsider at the end of that year it's like trying trying trying I mean I'd say I've gotten thousands of letters now from people saying hey I tried it you know and hey you know it worked you know I stop lying and drop everything, have you ever seen that episode of The Simpsons where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on the rake over and over again, it's like his whole yard is full of rakes and all he does is walk and step, then curse , step on a rake and hit?

He in the face and curses and then steps on another rake and hits it, you know what I mean, stop doing that, you know exactly, yeah, I don't know if we'll abide by the 12 rules. I guess you'll have to read the damn book anyway rule seven rule seven almost killed me. I've been in a lot of bad health over the last year and having to rewrite rule seven coincided with one of those periods that lasted about a month and was It was the hardest chapter by far and it hit the deepest by far and it was very difficult to get right. .

It's called doing what's meaningful, not what's convenient, and I'll just tell you a little bit about the chapter because I thought of something. in him that and then I explained something that took me decades to discover, so there is this idea, it is a very deep Christian idea that the Messiah is the person who takes upon himself the sins of the world, right, that is a characteristic of Christ , right, it's kind of the idea is kind of like Christ died for your sins, it's like what the hell does that mean exactly, you know and part of what it means, and I would say that a slightly corrupt form of Christianity is that you just have to to believe that that happened in him and you're redeemed, it's like, well, we'll leave that aside for a second, but there's an idea, a psychological idea, and you know that because the idea doesn't go away, it's lasted for thousands of years, it's like that. , so the idea. it means something, it has a psychological reality independent of its metaphysical reality, whatever that is, so I thought about that for a long time, it's like what the hell does that mean and then it hit me and Jung knew this.

Carl Jung knew this. he was associated with this idea of ​​the Shadow. I had this client once who, oh her parents, were pieces of work, her parents taught her. I swear this is the truth. Her parents taught her that adults were literally angels and when I saw. She was around 30 years old and she had a lot of strange symptoms, symptoms of some kind. She had never seen psychosomatic symptoms. She had almost epileptic seizures at night and not, but she remained conscious during them, it was very difficult to understand. and I won't explain it, but her parents told her that adults were angels and she was like 28 years old, she had a college degree and I said, well, did she ever wonder about that?

I told him: didn't you read any history? She said yeah, I read something about the terrible things that people did to each other and I just compartmentalized it and that was actually the key that I used to unlock what was happening to her, which eventually got fixed and I won't go into that. that but but I said I gave him this book I gave him two books I gave him a book called uh the terror that comes in the night which is a book about um about sleep paralysis and nightmares because I thought that's what might have been bothering him or It turned out which wasn't like that, so I gave him this other book called Ordinary Men and it's a great book, it's a terrible book.

A terrible, dark book about this police battalion that was transferred to Poland during World War II after the Nazis had left. and it was all made up of middle-aged guys who weren't victims of Nazi totalitarian propaganda when they were kids, they were just, you know, middle-class bourgeois guys like all of us, let's say, and they went to police in Poland and um. Basically, they were going to have to do some terrible things, but their commander told them quite frankly that if participating in wartime policing was too difficult for them, if they felt it violated ethics and psychology, they could go back to work. as a police officer Germany and very few of them did it partly because they didn't want to abandon their comrades, let's say they didn't want them to have to do the dirty work, you know, and they ended up being normal cops, they ended up being that kind of people.

Who could take naked pregnant women out into the middle of the field and shoot them in the back of the head? That's how the book that is the culmination of their training is very interesting to read about their training because they were absolutely disgusted by what they learned to like being physically sick and vomiting, shaking, traumatized, but they didn't stop and, if you want to know why, so you can read the book and I said, look, read this book, but don't share it enough for you to read it. Like you're one of those damn cops, that's how you should read history, right, you read about Nazi Germany and you're like, well, I'm Oscar Schindler, I'd save the Jews, it's like no, you wouldn't, you wouldn't. because people didn't do it and the probability of you not doing it is very high and all you have to do is think about it, you know what Anne Frank is like, you're really going to put your family at risk to hide a group from another family. in your attic for several years while there are Nazis parading down the street and where if you get exposed everyone dies, that's what you're going to do, it's very unlikely and it's no surprise that it's unlikely, but it's not It's like that.

You wanted to hype yourself up with fictional heroism without really knowing the facts on the ground, so I told her to read it and understand that the police were her and that's what you have to get right, the idea of ​​the savior. It's the person who takes upon themselves the sins of the world. It's exactly that. It's exactly the same idea. It's like the way they stop being Nazis is so that you know that you were the Nazis and so that you decide not to do that again, but you have to. knowing that you see this is what people won't do, you have to understand that not only can you do what the Nazi guards did at Auschwitz, but you can also enjoy it and then you have to decide that you're not doing it.

I'm going to do that more and that's not an easy thing to understand right and that's what that chapter is about, so that's a rough chapter Matt, that's a rough chapter and that's just a little bit of what it's about, you know, there's a lot, there is a lot. there and anyway that's what it's about um chapter 10 chapter nine let's see better I'm a little tired here oh yeah chapter nine is supposed that the person you're listening to might know something that you don't know this is a chapter about conversation and about the different forms that conversation takes, it's a chapter on humility and it's a chapter on listening and the element of humility.

It took me a long time to understand why there are religious mandates that support humility, to even understand what the word really means in that kind of technical sense. and it means something like this, it means that what you don't know is more important than what you know and that is a wonderful thing, then what you don't know can start to be your friend. You see people are very defensive about what you know and for the reasons we've already discussed but the thing is you don't know enough and then you can say you don't know enough because your life is not what it could be. and neither is the life of the people around you. you just don't know enough and what that means is that every time you find some evidence that you're ignorant, someone points it out to you, you should be happy about that because you think, oh, you just told me I'm wrong.

Great, maybe I had to sift through a lot of nonsense to understand the real message you're telling me, but if you could somehow tell me where I'm wrong and then maybe give me a hint on how not to do it. make mistakes like that, then I wouldn't have to make mistakes like that anymore, that would be a good thing and you can, you can, you can embark on that adventure by listening to people and if you listen to people, they will tell you that I will tell you incredible things if you listen to them and many of those Things are little tools that you can put in your toolbox like Batman and then you can go out into the world and use those tools and you don't have to fall in blind. into a well quite often, so the element of humility is good: do you want to be right or do you want to learn?

And then it's deeper than that: do you want to be the tyrannical King who already has everything figured out? you want to be the hero or the fool in continuous transformation who improves all the time and that is actually a choice, you know it is a profound choice and it is better to be the fool who transforms himself and who is humble enough to make himself friend of what he or she she doesn't know and listening when people talk and listening is a transformative exercise, like if you listen to the people in your life, for example, if you really listen to them, they will tell you what's wrong with them and how to fix it.

Fix it and what they want they can't even help themselves if you start listening because people are so surprised if you actually listen to them that they tell you all those kinds of things that they might not have even intended to do. I don't even know and then you can you can work with that and so on and the other thing that's so interesting you know every once in a while you have a meaningful conversation right you don't have a good conversation with someone you walk with you think, geez, you know? what we really connected and I know more that when I came out of that conversation and during the conversation you are really absorbed in it and that feeling of being absorbed is a feeling of meaning and the feeling of meaning is engendered because you are having a transformative conversation and your The brain produces that feeling of meaning because it says oh yes, this is exactly where you should be here and now, it is the right place and the right time for you and that is a great place to occupy, etc.

A good conversation in which people listen has exactly that nature and the reason why it has thatnature is because it's actually transformative, it's one of the truisms of clinical psychology, like if you're a clinical psychologist, a big part of what you do is just listen to people, it's like you know they're coming, they're not happy and they'd rather not be something like that. You say well, why do you think you might be unhappy and they don't know that they have some ideas and they might have some ideas? ramble for a year before they figure out why they're unhappy, they get rid of a bunch of reasons why they thought they were unhappy that aren't true and then you kind of get to the heart of the problem, then you could ask them Well, if you could have what you want for your life to be good, what would that be like?

So they have to ramble on about it a lot because they don't really know it, but listening will straighten them out because people think by talking and To think you have to have someone to listen because it is very difficult to think, almost no one can think and even the people who can think they can only think about a limited number of things, but almost everyone can talk and you can hear yourself talk and If someone listens to you then well, then you also have a contrast for your thoughts because you can watch the person when you talk and see if you're bored or if you're having fun or if you're absorbing everyone. those things and listening, that's a very good thing.

I describe a victim of Carl Rogers, he was a famous clinical psychologist. This is another great little tip Rogers said. Here's a trick to know if you're listening, so let's say someone gives you their perspective. and then what you do is you say look this is what I think you said I think you said this and this and this and this and then this is that right, I got what you're saying right and maybe the person says God, you haven't. been listening and you know that then they have to clarify for you or maybe they say yes, yes, you understood and then the good thing about that is that you summarize their argument for them, which can be very useful and for you, but also not You can't convert to the person in a straw man, so if you are arguing with your wife, let's say, or your husband at the big party is going to want to win, that's stupid because if you win, you will be the best Lobster, but they can be the passive Lobster and if you want to live with the passive Lobster then you would like to have more power, but I wouldn't recommend it because you don't want, you want, you want to defeat your wife in an argument, well, great, like she's going to disappear tomorrow no problem, but you'd like to live with her defeated and miserable for the next week, that's not good, so you listen and think, well, this is what I think you said and maybe even make it a little stronger and more elaborate than the case with the original expression so that you understand the damn argument well because you don't want to win, you want to solve the problem, that's what winning means, so the summary with listening is very useful for that because the person can say well, yes, that's what I meant, so well, then you have to fight without and Roger said well, people usually don't because you know if you live with someone and they tell you the truth about the situation, it usually means that. there's something really stupid that you're doing well, so are they, but there's something stupid that you're doing that you know you're doing, that you actually have to stop and you know it's difficult and improbable, but hey, if you don't stop, then you can have the same damn problem every day or week for the rest of your life, so it's probably better to suffer the misery of stopping it than the misery of continuing it, but that's the mandate of listening to rule 11 is don't bother the kids . when they skateboard and that's a meditation on the difference between weakness and goodness, you see one of the things that have happened in our society and especially with respect to our attitude towards men, but also our attitude towards masculinity in women, so it is just as toxic. for women is that we seem to have come to the conclusion that strong men are dangerous and that's partly because we think that Western culture is a tyrannical patriarchy and the only reason you get to the top is because you do misuse of power and therefore all the men who are at the top Those at the heart are all abusing their power and all are tyrannical and all the guys who have the GOAL and the ambition to achieve that are simply tyrants in the training and that is the basic attitude we have towards our own culture and towards young men.

Now, and that's it, all of that is pathological, unforgivable and shameful. I mean, first of all, the claim that Western culture, the idea that Western culture is primarily a patriarchal tyranny, is like, well, first of all, it's historically ignorant beyond belief, because with what does it compare? How exactly how many civilized countries are there in the world? You know, three dozen, the rest of them are run by brutal thugs, right? Corruption runs throughout the country so we're not like that and I mean Western culture is fundamentally honest and I can give you an example of that because people don't like that idea. eBay proved it because here here Did it?

It was a very interesting thing because when eBay first came out, as the cynic would say, eBay isn't going to work because I don't know you, you live on the other side of the country and you're going to send me crap. and I'm going to send you a check that bounces and that will be the end of eBay, right, that's what a cynic would say and then what happened was the brokers came along and said, well, look, we'll guarantee the rights to The Exchange. for a 10 fee it will make sure you don't send junk and we will make sure your check doesn't bounce and what happened was that the brokers couldn't find enough deals and the reason was that all the transactions were honest. of them, you know it's like 19, if you were on eBay and you had a reputation of less than 99, there's actually something wrong with you, you know, okay, 98, but it's really just that it's that tight, so the default position was that you are offering this.

We'll buy it, we'll trade fairly and what happened was a lot of capital was frozen, technically speaking, it freed up junk that people had that other people might need and eBay freed up a huge amount of money for people and It was Everything is a consequence of default honesty. We also know that one of the best predictors of success in the Western world is conscientiousness and conscientious people are honest, they have integrity, they are obedient and they do what they say they will do, and that is a very good long-term predictor. -Long-term success in life, especially as a manager and administrator or something, so also chapter 11 is a discussion of the assault on the positive masculine and I read it partly as a continuation of what Nietzsche announced at the end of the 19th century like death. of God because in Western culture God was a masculine figure and the idea that the Divine masculine had been decimated, which was basically Nietzsche's pronouncement, has seeped into masculinity itself and I think it's an absolutely atrocious result, it's something which can only be desired by someone who is a true enemy of humanity, so in part chapter 11 is a call for encouragement, it's like you want and I've been saying that to young men in particular, but also to young women, although they don't seem to be.

They also need the message to take responsibility for your life, tell the truth, and understand that your lack of full participation in the self leaves a hole that is precisely the size of your soul in the cultural landscape. No joke, we need all the light we can possibly bring to the situation and well, I firmly believe that and I think for all kinds of reasons and I think there are very deep reasons, um and it's partly why I would say that the rules of Life also has a funny way. book because it has a very religious core but it's also very grounded in evolutionary biology, so that's what chapter 11 is about and it's about people who are enemies of the human Spirit, people who restrict children's play, for example, which it's particularly a pathological thing to do now there's a movement to not let kids have best friends it's like really what the hell is that so yeah there are so many things wrong with that idea it would take another whole lecture just to scratch the surface but mostly it's just I wouldn't even start with that final rule: it's called petting a cat when you meet one on the street and it's the most personal chapter in the book.

It's a lot about my daughter and my daughter was very sick when she was. Well, when she was a child, but especially when she was a teenager, she had a very hard time. She had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and when she was between 14 and 16 years old, it first destroyed her hip, which she then had to be replaced. It destroyed the ankle on her other leg which had to be replaced and she walked for two years with broken legs and she was taking massive doses of opiates and she could barely stay awake and she had this advanced autoimmune disease that made her all kinds of sick. other symptoms that were just as bad as joint degeneration, but they're harder to describe, so it's just brutal, you know?

And as a test of your faith, there is almost nothing more direct than a serious illness inflicted on an innocent child, right? the meditation chapters on that and also what to do in a situation like that because everyone is going to have a situation like that in some sense you know because you are faced with illnesses in the people you love and in crisis. and so it's just a practical guide to dealing with those kinds of things and one of the things you do when you're overwhelmed by a crisis is you shorten your time frame, you know it's like you can't think about the next month maybe. you can't even think about next week or maybe not even tomorrow, you know, because right now it's so overwhelming that that's all there is and that's what you do, reduce your time frame until you can cope and if you can't It's the next week that you see how to pass, then it's the next day and if it's not the next day, then it's the next hour and if it's not the next hour, then it's the next minute and you know people are very, very , very very. very very hard and it turns out that if you face things it turns out that if you face things you can endure much more than you think you can endure and you can do it without becoming corrupted and she did recover quite a bit. completely and largely as a consequence of our own machinations because she discovered what was wrong with her and then took steps to fix it, which is nothing short of a damn miracle as far as I'm concerned and, anyway, part of the The cat part is I actually start off by talking about our dog who actually died about a year ago, but is still alive in the book.

You know, I let people know because dog lovers love dogs and if you love cats then they think they don't like dogs and then they know they don't like you so I also pointed out at the beginning from the chapter you know that if you want to pet a dog on the street, that's okay too, so you don't have to do it. We're up in arms about it, but the idea is that you know you have to be alert when you're suffering, you have to be alert to the beauty of life, the unexpected beauty of life, and that's what I was trying to convey. .

The idea of ​​the cat is this cat that lives in front of us called Ginger and Ginger is a Siamese cat and cats are not really domesticated, technically speaking they are still wild animals, but they like people only God knows why, but they know , then Ginger comes over and our dog looks at her, but they're friends and she rolls over on her back and Seco used to sniff her a little bit and then he cuts you off and leaves you. You caress her if she felt like it that day and you know you have to look for that little piece of that shiny piece of glass in the dark when things go wrong you have to look and see where things are still beautiful and where there is still something that holds and you know you reduce your time frame and you would be grateful for what you have and that can help you get through very dark times and maybe even successfully if you are lucky, but even if you are not successful then maybe it is just tragic and not absolute hell and you can do it, you know that in the worst situation you can make it only tragic and not hell and there is a big gap between tragedy and hell.

I know there's nothing worse on a deathbed than seeing people there fighting against death, it's bad enough, but you can take that as terrible as it is and make it absolutely unbearable and maybe I think, and this is something just as I close the The idea of ​​this book is that if we didn't try to make terrible things even worse than they are, then maybe we could tolerate the terrible things we have to endure to exist and maybe we could turn the world into a better place, you know, and it's what we should do and what we could do because we have nothing better to do and that's what the book is about and that's the end of 12 rules for life, thank you, well, we've invaded with joy and normally I would have cut the chat or done something so we could have questions, but I really didn't think it was appropriate.

Tonight's talk was absolutely brilliant and inspiring, but I'm going toask a question. Just one question and, um, I'm going to let Jordan decide what question he's going to ask, so I'm going to take three from the audience, I'm going to read out loud, three of them come from the live stream. One of the live streams is how you challenge today's identity politics. The second is more personal: where do you fall short in these 12 rules? Is it a constant adjustment? Now let me answer three questions from the audience. and I'll let Jordan decide what the last question he wants to ask is, so firsthand, first of all, it's an honor to be with your lecturer and the question is that he wanted to ask, for example, some people like, for example.

Stefan Molyneux, who interviewed you, I think puts a tremendous amount of attention on admitting parents' thoughts and admitting the damage that was done by improving and overcoming adverse childhood experiences and I wanted to ask you about that and what you think about it and then Yes. You take the young lady here, we need to, I'm sorry, my question is about chapter nine about being humble and listening to what your enemies say and criticizing yourself. I'm a talk, express my thoughts type of person, so I talk. I showed it to my friends and I saw how it bounced off of them, so I realized that there is always a group of my friends that always criticize what I say and don't even try to understand who I am, where I come from and, um, I I've always wondered how to deal with that, I mean, I want to hear what they say, but they don't understand what I am, they're not trying to listen to what I say, so what?

What would you do in that situation? Can you answer that very briefly? Okay, there's a line in the New Testament that's relevant to not casting Pearls before pigs and what that means is if people don't listen to you, stop talking to them and that's really that's the best advice I can give you and What happens is that if you stop talking to people who don't listen to you and start looking at them, they will tell you what they are doing, but if you have things to say, you say them, but you find people who listen to you, talk to them, those who They don't listen to you, they back away because you are devaluing what you have to say by offering it to an audience that does nothing but reject it. and that's a good guide for life in general, so back up, yeah, and our last question is, gentlemen, with the blue, thank you Dr.

Peterson. He got small in my face when he mentioned John Taylor Gatto's work and I just wanted to. to find out what you think the relationship is between the classical Trivium and the Holy Trinity and whether that has changed over time and then okay, okay and then you'll get back on stage uh dedicating yeah, yeah, I think I'm gonna answer where you fall fit , you know, like I wrote these rules, why did I write these rules? Well, you know, and especially when I said, well, you should try to improve yourself instead of trying to right the world or instead of worrying. about what other people are doing wrong, you can say, well, that's a big deal for someone who just wrote a book called 12 Rules for Life, it's like you know that, but the thing is, he wasn't just writing, but I was writing that for myself as much as for anyone else and I mean, I really mean that, honestly, you know I had the opportunity to spend about five years meditating on how you should behave in order for your life to be what it could be and like me.

I'm in the group of people that I'm counseling and you know what I mean, it's like all of these things are so hard to stick with it to remember that and treat yourself like you're someone worthwhile and make friends. with the people. who are good for you and and to tell the truth or at least not lie, I mean, all of these are ideals, it is true that, especially together, they constitute a kind of Ideal and you never, never, never reach the ideal and no. it just goes back as you get closer properly because you straighten up, you think well, I've got it and you're thinking, oh wait a minute, there's more to go, there's still more to go and then you get that much further down the line, you think , oh yeah, I thought this was the end of the road, it's like no, there are a lot of imperfections left to work out, so it's a constant adjustment, but there's something about that that's also positive because you could say it's not that much.

That there is no good person is that our idea of ​​what constitutes good is not correct because a good person is someone who is trying to improve and no matter how good you are, there are better things you can achieve, but true goodness is in the attempt, right, it's in the, it's in the process of using a kind of cliché, you know, there's this and I'll close with this and it's a good wait, wait, close, you know, and this is a psychological observation, the center. The figure of Western culture is Christ and we can see this psychologically because Christ is the dying and resurrected hero and what does that mean psychologically?

Well, it means that you learn things painfully and when you learn something painfully a part of you has to die, that's the pain, you know when a dream shatters, for example, a big part of you that made up that dream, maybe even the biological substrate of that gene has to be stripped and burned, so life is a constant process of death and rebirth and participation. in that fully is allowing yourself to be redeemed by it and then the good thing is that process of death and rebirth undertaken voluntarily it's like you're not as good as you could be so you let that part of you die and if someone comes and says: you know what?

There's some dead wood in here, man, gotta burn it, you think well, those things are still a little alive when they burn, they're going to hurt, it's like, well, no joke, but maybe what emerges instead be something better. and I think this is the secret of human beings, this is how we are, you know, unlike any other creature, we can let our old self die and let our new self be born and that's what we should do and, So where can I do it? We fall short of these 12 rules, infinitely because, well, here's a way to think about it until the entire world is redeemed, we all fall short and that's probably a good place to stop.