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there isn t anything that can stand up against the truth.
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And I mean, I believe that, I think, to some degree, because it just seems self-evident.
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It s like, if the truth is deeply reflective of the structure of reality, the claim that the lie can dominate is the claim that the unreal can defeat the real.
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And that s, you are literally insane if you believe that.
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He s a clinical psychologist and a professor and a best-selling author, but
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I think the greatest thing about him is his commitment to unwavering truth.
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He just will not bullshit about things.
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He tells the truth and he digs in and he s willing to look for the truth.
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He doesn t believe he just has it.
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But he also studies, what I really wanted him to chat with us about today, is in the middle of all this chaos, seemingly chaos, there is a larger order.
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And the larger order can be found by studying the stories of humanity.
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You know, the hero s journey is one of those stories.
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And perhaps, you know, he studies all the great religious texts, but he s been doing a whole series some of you may have seen on the Bible, different portions of the Bible.
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Please help us welcome our friend, Amazing Soul, Dr. Jordan Peterson, everybody.
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Give it up for him.
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Jordan, thanks for joining us.
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Hey, it s good to see you.
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Good to see all of you there.
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Thank you for that introduction.
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Our pleasure.
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You have the floor, my dear friend.
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Well, I think we ll
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take off from that intro.
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The first thing I should let everybody know, this is a conclusion that people have come to across a variety of different disciplines.
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Literary criticism, computer intelligence, robotics, study of perception from the physiological perspective, a real coming together of observations across multiple disciplines.
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And so here s the fundamental realization.
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We have to see the world through a story.
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In fact, if you describe to someone the structure through which you see the world, what you re actually doing is telling them a story.
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Now here s a way to think about it.
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When you go see a movie,
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it grips you emotionally.
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And the reason that happens is because the filmmaker, the writers, provide you with some insight into the goals of the characters.
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And when you can adopt someone else s goals, you can align your emotions with their emotions.
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And that means that you can feel what they feel, and that means that you can understand them.
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And so
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If you adopt the story that someone else is telling, then you can literally mimic them.
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You can mimic their nervous system with yours.
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You have that feeling of being in sync with someone or in tune with someone, and you have that feeling because that s exactly what s happening.
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Not only do we have to see the world through a story, but the story that we see the world through determines how we respond to things emotionally.
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So this is a useful thing to know.
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If the world is unfolding for you in a manner that you don t find particularly acceptable, if you re anxious and upset and depressed and hurt and hopeless, one possibility is that you re not looking at the world through a particularly productive story.
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Now,
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Once you understand that you have to look at the world through a story or that it s inevitable that you will, another question immediately arises, which is, well, what story do you or should you see the world through?
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And that s the subject of great debate.
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In fact, the whole cultural war that we re in at the moment that s turning everything into a kind of chaos is actually a debate between the promoters of different stories.
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Now, the postmodern and neo-Marxist types
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They tend to insist either that all our stories are fragmented and subjective and hedonistic at their base.
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There s no such thing as an overarching uniting narrative.
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That was the claim of the French postmodernists.
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Or there s an alternative claim, which is that the only story that really unites people, the only story that really exists is one of power, and that you can see the whole world
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as a reflection of the competition between different stories of power.
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So when you hear the Marxist types, for example, make the claim that
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our culture is nothing but an oppressive patriarchy and that marriage is an oppressive institution and that all economic relationships are merely those of exploitation.
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You re hearing an insistence that the only story that people can live out is the story of domination and oppression and victimization and mutual exploitation.
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It s an unbelievably dismal view of humanity.
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It also justifies the use of power on behalf of the people who put forward the story because if there s no
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motivating ethos other than domination, then it s perfectly reasonable for you to use nothing but domination in your attempts to deal with other people.
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Now, that s a very pathological story.
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I would also say, by the way, it s a very counterproductive story.
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You might say that people who wield power can become remarkably successful.
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You could point to dictators, for example, like the man who runs North Korea and say, well, Dr. Peterson, you claim that
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power isn t a very productive story and that it doesn t work very well in the long run.
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But if you look at brutal societies like North Korea, you see that people who are perfectly willing to use power rise to the highest positions.
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How can you describe that as anything other than success?
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And I would say, just because you re the biggest devil in hell doesn t mean that you ve won the game.
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In fact, quite the contrary.
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And you can attain a position of dominance through force, but if you don t think you ll pay a price for that, you re a bloody fool.
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn did quite a nice job of
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investigating the psychological state of Joseph Stalin, for example.
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And Stalin was clearly the most powerful man in the world s most corrupt country, which made him the biggest devil in that particular form of hell.
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And you might say, well, what did he gain for his trouble?
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And I can tell you what he gained.
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It was that
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Every single person around him lied about absolutely everything all the time.
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He had no true friends.
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He just had sycophants who wanted to be near a bully.
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He distrusted everyone.
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He had contempt for everyone, of course, because he was so terrifying that people conducted themselves atrociously around him.
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He engaged in a variety of quasi-genocidal enterprises.
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He was a murderous thug.
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And he ended up likely murdered.
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And it isn t obvious to me at all that any of that constitutes success.
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And so that s the typical outcome of strategies that are based on power.
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It s not advisable.
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Now, you can think about this in your own life.
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Maybe you ve used instrumental and manipulative means to get to where you want to go, and maybe you think that s necessary.
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But I would say you don t want to have a marriage
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where the fundamental relationship is one of power, where one of you is a tyrant and the other is a slave, and maybe you alternate roles, but there s no reciprocity or mutuality there.
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There s no genuine love and regard.
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There s just force.
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And you certainly don t want friendships that are predicated on that presumption.
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You want to be around people who want to be around you, not people that you forced or otherwise enticed or manipulated into being around you.
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And then on the business front, many of you are very successful.
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And those of you who are properly successful know perfectly well that the way that you establish a business that has a good probability of surviving into the medium and long-term is to
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make contracts with the people that you work with that are to your mutual benefit, so your interests are aligned, so that you re thrilled to be working together, and then to offer your customers genuine
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service and value for the money.
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And none of that s about exploitation and none of that s about power.
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It s completely different ethos.
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And so,
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You might ask yourself, well, if you re going to characterize the ethos that isn t power, that unites people, that stabilizes them psychologically and provides for social unity, how would you characterize that?
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And Tony made some reference to this.
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And there are archetypal themes that echo throughout human history that detail out the fundamental story of life.
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And the most, one of the most fundamental of those, there s probably two, there s an adventure story and a romance story, but I ll start with the adventure story.
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And the adventure story is essentially the myth of the hero.
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And the myth of the hero, which is, by the way, is the story that our culture, Western culture, is predicated on, and I would say all functional stories, posits that human beings are not automatons or clockwork machines that are driven by deterministic functions, but creatures that constantly confront
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what you might describe as a transforming horizon of possibility.
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So imagine, you know, when you get up in the morning, what confronts you, your consciousness is not so much the furniture in your room and the things that you can see that are right in front of you, but the possibilities of the day.
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The possibilities of the day open up as that vast domain of potential occurrences that you can play some role in determining.
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You re going to be thinking about the problems that you have that need to be solved, and you re going to be thinking about the opportunities that beckon to you that you could, in principle, take advantage of and utilize, if you have any sense, to your medium and long-term advantage and simultaneously to the advantage of the other people around you.
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And so you re contending with a realm of possibility and you shape that with your vision.
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And the way that that s portrayed in mythologies of the hero is generally with some motif that s analogous to that of a dragon fight.
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And so you can think about St.
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George in that regard.
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And the ancient story is something like this.
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It s the story of the Hobbit, by the way, it s the story of the Lord of the Rings.
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It s the story of Harry Potter.
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It s the story of the movie Jaws.
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It s deeply embedded in the biblical corpus.
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It s Star Wars.
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It s everywhere, this story, is that there s a city and it s threatened by the emergence of ancient chaotic forces that were once under control.
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And a hero emerges who notes the
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the onset of this threat and who decides to step outside the bounds of the city and confront this creature, dragon, often.
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And a dragon, by the way, a dragon is a symbolic representation of a predator.
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You know, people say there s no such thing as a dragon, but it s imaginary creature.
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It s like, that s actually not true.
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What a dragon is, is an amalgam of the features of the
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creatures that have classically preyed upon human beings.
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So it s a predatory bird and a predatory cat and a predatory reptile and the destructive force of fire all combined.
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And so dragon and predator, dragon is the image of predator and the ancient human idea is that our consciousness, our heroic consciousness is that which moves out into the world to confront the eternal predator and to overcome it.
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Now, we obviously do that because we can protect ourselves and our children from predatory beasts.
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We can also protect ourselves from predatory people, and we can protect ourselves from the predator that lurks in our own heart.
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That s more of a spiritual twist on the classic St.
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George and the Dragon story, let s say, which is in variant forms the oldest story that we know.
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What s the idea?
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Well, the eternal dragon of chaos always threatens the habitable city.
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And people who are awake and alert and who are acting in accordance with the highest ethical principles become aware that such a threat exists and then decide to confront it voluntarily.
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And that s the image of the knight, let s say, Armored Knight, confronting the dragon in its lair.
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Now, interestingly enough, it s classically the case that predatory beasts, dragons, let s say, hoard treasure.
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They also hoard virgins, strangely enough.
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And the reason they hoard treasure is quite straightforward.
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It s because that which you most need to find is always lurking where you least want to look.
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That s a good leitmotif for life.
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So you could imagine that there are things in your life that you re avoiding, that you know you should do, that you don t want to confront, that frighten you, that activate your predator detection system, let s say.
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And if you can learn to organize yourself so that you have enough courage to take on that chaotic unknown, then you ll discover things about yourself and the world that you don t know.
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and master them.
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And the consequence of that will be that you ll be rewarded.
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And that s, of course, the the treasure that the dragon eternally guards.
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And the rule of thumb is fundamentally, well, the larger the dragon, the more likely you re going to get eaten.
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But by the same token, the larger the treasure, the virginal motif in that story is the motif of the virgin is that.
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Women are.
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What would you say?
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deeply inclined to be attracted to male figures who are capable of taking on chaos and prevailing.
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So if you re the sort of person who can confront the unknown in a visionary manner and you can shape it into the cosmos that s habitable and good, then that also makes you maximally attractive as a partner.
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And that, as I said, that s the oldest story we know.
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In fact, the oldest written story we know is a Mesopotamian story called the Enuma Elish, where the main hero, Marduk, is in fact a Saint George-like figure who confronts a dragon who threatens the entire world with destruction.
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And so, and that s, well, that s essentially the motif of most adventure stories.
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Sometimes the hero confronts a giant instead of a dragon, and the giant is usually a symbol of something like the corrupt state.
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So, you know, there s two variants of heroes, and one variant of hero confronts chaos as such, just disorder and uncertainty, and the other variant of hero confronts corrupt
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Gigantism, that s a good way of thinking about it.
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And that s another eternal enemy of human progress on the psychological and social front, right?
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The tendency of organizations to develop into tyrannical giants that have to be slain in order for proper order to be established.
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And so that story of
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confrontation with chaos is extraordinarily deeply rooted in Western culture.
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You see it expressed in its most fundamental form, arguably, in Christianity, because the crucifix itself is a symbol of something like chaos.
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So imagine, if you re thinking about this psychologically, one of the things you might ask yourself is why
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Have we collectively been gazing, for example, at this terrible figure of the crucifix for 2000 years?
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And to get a sense of how shocking that is, imagine that the object of worship was a man hanging with a broken neck from a noose.
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It s exactly the same kind of image.
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It s an image of state-sponsored torture, fundamentally.
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It s an image of
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What would you say?
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It s an image of the sum total of all vulnerable possibilities.
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And so in the Christian story, the eternal redeemer, who s in principle the model for behavior, is the person who voluntarily takes on the entire chaotic weight of existence.
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And so in Christ s passion, all the terrible things that can happen to any particular person
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are amalgamated together and form part of his catastrophic adventure.
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And so you could imagine in your own life, and this has already happened to many of you in many ways, well, what terrible things might happen to you?
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Well, you can be hurt physically badly.
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You can be tortured, let s say.
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You can be put to death.
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You could be tortured physically and be put to death young.
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That could happen as a consequence of being betrayed.
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It could happen as a consequence of being betrayed by someone extremely close to you, let s say your best friend or your marital partner.
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It could happen because the state turns against you.
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It could happen because the state turns against you even at the hands of your own people.
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And that could happen to you even if you were innocent.
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And so you can see that in some ways that s the sum total of all possible fears.
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And the crucifix is an image of the sum total of all possible fears.
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And the reason that it s a redemptive symbol, at least in part, is because, and this is why there s a Christian injunction, let s say, to pick up your cross and stumble uphill with it, let s say, to pick up your cross and bear it.
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The idea is that you re going to be best prepared
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to take on the true difficulties of your life by confronting the potential existence of all of those problems before they make themselves known.
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Because I could say, if you all wanted to be more resilient in your life, and that would mean less stress, that would mean less anxious, mean less subject to pain and depression and nihilistic thoughts, and more able to spring back
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when trouble visited you.
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One of the ways that you could make yourself more resilient would be to envision, for example, how you would react to, well, perhaps bad medical news on your behalf or on the behalf of someone you love, or betrayal by someone close to you, including yourself, or being potentially mobbed and alienated by your social group or your ethnic group or your political group.
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or being subject to the tyranny of the state, or your own weakness, to walk through that and to face that as a, what would you say, as a inevitable, likely reality, and to fortify your character in
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what would you say, in preparation for that eventuality?
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You could ask yourself as sensible people, well, how the hell could it possibly be any different?
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You know perfectly well that you re not going to be prepared to confront anything that you avoid.
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Obviously, how can you prepare yourself to confront something that you re going to avoid?
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And given that you know that your life is going to be rife with a set of
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irreducible difficulties, how could you possibly be any better prepared than to face that beforehand and to understand that that s part of your destiny?
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And then even more, to take that on as voluntarily as something that you re not only willing to do, but maybe capable of learning to do, well,
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with, I suppose, in a spirit of radical acceptance, and maybe even now and then something approximating joy.
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You know, it s a lot to ask for, right?
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That you have to maintain your moral compass and your hopeful optimism in the face of the worst that can happen to you.
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But what the hell s your alternative?
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You know, if, if the chickens do come home to roost and things start to go badly for you and you are terrified by that and embittered as a consequence, and then you turn away from what s positive at highest, all that s going to happen clearly is that your suffering is going to get a lot worse and that you re going to distribute that suffering to the people around you.
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So like, how in the world is that going to work?
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And so the radical types, especially the intellectuals, they insist that, well, we can orient ourselves quite well with a kind of subjective hedonism.
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That s the hedonism of the moment and of subjective self-promotion, let s say.
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And more Marxist types insist that we maneuver through the world merely as a consequence of our imposition of various schemes designed to accrue to us all the power.
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But there s no evidence that a hedonistic orientation towards life works, which is why most of us mature beyond
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the sting we re at when we re two years old.
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And there s no evidence at all that an orientation towards power and domination actually constitutes a good strategy psychologically or socially.
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So all that s complete bloody rubbish as far as I could tell.
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And I think there s endless evidence now gathered on all sorts of fronts to indicate that that s the case.
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And then you might say, well, as I mentioned before, what s the alternative?
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And the alternative is something like full frontal
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confrontation with the most dreadful elements of existence.
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So in the Christian story, I could take it one step further, because this is also very interesting to note.
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To imitate Christ in the Christian sense is to take on the full catastrophe of vulnerable existence, right?
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To face the reality of death, to face the reality of torture and betrayal at the hands of friends, enemies, and the state.
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To understand that that s part and parcel of destiny.
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But you know, it doesn t end there.
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And that s quite interesting too.
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I don t think that you ve lived
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a very deep life or a very long life, if you haven t come to understand at some point in your life that there are worse things than death and maybe worse things than pain, you can see this make itself manifest in people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder.
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People who have PTSD are generally not merely people who ve been hurt by life.
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They re people who ve been touched by malevolence.
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And it s one thing to suffer.
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But it s another thing to suffer pointlessly at the hands of people who are doing nothing but trying to produce suffering, and that s not a bad definition of evil.
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And so, anyone with any sense who has paid any attention at all, for example, to the history of the 20th century knows perfectly well that
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a sensible person clearly admits to the existence of evil.
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I mean, how else would you characterize what happened in Nazi Germany or in the Stalinist Soviet Union or in Maoist China or now in North Korea?
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I mean, if you don t think that s evil, then, well, then you don t attribute the same meaning to the word that I attributed to it, let s say.
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It s a stark reality.
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And so you might add that
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to one of the stark realities that you have to confront along with the contemplation of your own morality is that you have to contend with the existence of malevolence.
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And the way that s laid out in the Christian story, which is a variant of the hero myth, by the way, the deepest variant of it, arguably, that you have to confront malevolence itself as well as mortal vulnerability in order to maximize your resilience and
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weirdly enough to foster the deepest levels of hope.
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You see that in the Christian story with the insistence that when Christ was crucified, he not only died in some real sense and had to go through all of that, but also had to descend to the depths of hell itself and to encounter the deepest abyss of human malevolence.
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And I would say that s also morally incumbent on us.
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This is a terrible thing to tell people, right?
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Because it really means that
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in order to become everything you could be, you have to face the worst that there is to face.
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But then again, like I said, if you think about it that like a sensible person for 15 seconds, you understand very quickly that you re not going to develop your character by shrinking away from things.
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And you certainly aren t going to do that with your kids.
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You don t tell your kids, listen, son, Ben
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thing to do in life is to shrink away from everything that s difficult.
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Not if you re someone who actually loves your son and wants to encourage him.
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You say instead, look kiddo, there s something within you that can respond to any challenge no matter how deep.
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And that maybe you encourage him to take on the most abysmal challenges in the hopes that he could succeed and become who he could be.
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And that s the fundamental, that s the appropriate fundamental orienting story that
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all healthy people and all thriving states has to act out and interpret the world through.
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And that s very useful to know, right?
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Voluntary confrontation with chaos and malevolence.
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That s the pathway to, well, that s the pathway to the eternal resurrection.
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That s the fundamental hero story.
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And that s the ultimate treasure.
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That s another way of thinking about it, right?
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That s how you gain your life by losing it.
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And there s nothing in that, as far as I can tell, that isn t just true psychologically and psychophysiologically and scientifically and theologically.
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And so, well, that s probably a good place to end that.
3
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How spectacular, exactly what we were wanting, talking about why all this occurs.
3
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There s a greater and higher purpose for it all.
3
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So we have some questions for Jordan, who s got some questions out there, ladies and gentlemen.
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Yes.
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I have like 6,000 questions, but I ll go with one.
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And just on a macro level, I have three older children.
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They re 23, 21, 19.
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I have an unbelievably blessed relationship with them.
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My son is my best friend in the world.
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So he goes off to college.
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My daughters go off to college.
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They are having incredibly high degrees of success.
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I couldn t be more proud of them and happy with how they ve chosen their life path.
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But, Rand, there is just such an unbelievable dynamic through the social dilemma and through the professors that they experience on an everyday basis.
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So my question is, what do you do?
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What do you do?
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You know, like with this world, how would we protect our children, our loved ones at the heart?
3
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I think I think you ve already answered that question in your question.
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I mean, you said, first of all, that you have a very good relationship with your children.
3
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So congratulations on that.
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You said they re out there in the world, you know, making their way forward.
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On multiple fronts, simultaneously, they re doing everything they can to pursue the truth.
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That s what you do.
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And that doesn t mean that the victories that you attain are going to be obvious or easy.
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I do believe that there isn t anything that can stand up against the truth.
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And I, I mean, I believe that I think to some degree, because it just seems self-evident.
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It s like, if the truth is deeply reflective of the structure of reality, the claim that the lie can dominate is the claim that the unreal could defeat the real.
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And that s,
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You you are literally insane if you believe that.
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Yes.
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So.
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If your children are doing what they can to live by and speak the truth, they ll find their way.
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And the beneficial consequences of that way finding may not be immediately obvious, but that s also partly why you need to have faith, because here s a good way of thinking about faith.
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Let s say you have faith in the truth.
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Well, but then, you know, well, if I tell the truth, I m going to get into trouble.
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And then you might say, well, then I better not say what I have to say, or I better lie in this situation because otherwise there s going to be trouble.
3
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Well, that just means that you have misplaced faith in your current interpretation of trouble because a deeper faith says, and this is very useful to know, if you re telling the truth, whatever happens is the best thing that could happen.
3
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Yeah.
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Right.
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That s the statement of faith.
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So in the opening sections of Genesis, it s the word of God that creates habitable order out of chaos.
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And that s analogous to this process I described before of confronting chaos and generating order in consequence.
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Now, every time God uses truthful speech to create a new element of the world, he notes and repeatedly that this is good.
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Well, that process is also something that people can replicate, made as we are in the image of God.
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That s the thesis of the text.
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So the hypothesis there is that, well, if you re telling the truth, the world is laying itself out as it should.
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Now, you might not be able to see that because you re getting in trouble, at least in the short term, for what you have to say.
3
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You know, there s lots of times in your life where you do something that feels good right now, and it isn t so good in a week.
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And there s plenty of times when the reverse is true.
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If you do something difficult now, it might get you in all sorts of trouble.
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And it turns out that in two years, that was the best decision you could have ever possibly made.
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Well, that s what the truth is like.
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It s like, it s not going to be easy.
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But it s going to be it s going to establish the cosmos in the proper order.
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That s a statement of faith.
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And it sounds like you ve already inculcated that in your kids.
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So I would say, you know, first, congratulations.
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And second, more power to them.
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And then.
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Sit back to some degree and let it play out.
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Encourage them to continue doing what they re doing and watch and don t assume that if things are going sideways from time to time that that means that, you know, the whole game is lost.
3
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I found, for example, this very peculiar thing to have learned is that the people who have most viciously attacked me have done me the greatest favor.
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Now that sometimes took two or three years to unfold and it was quite brutal in the like intermediary desert, let s say, but that s still how it inevitably worked out.
3
SPEAKER_00
Thank you.
3
SPEAKER_00
Who s the next question?
3
SPEAKER_00
Um, Dr. Peterson, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk to you, uh, in your book, the 12 rules for life.
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Um, this is kind of playing off of what Sean may have said, but rule number eight, you said tell the truth or at least don t tell,
3
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a lie.
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And so many times I find that, uh, or, and you said there, there really are no atheist, just people who don t understand the God they serve.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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And I, to myself, sometimes I find that a lot of people, um, one of Tony s coaches is talking to me once and he said, Michael, he goes, there s a difference between the truth
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and the whole truth.
3
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And that really dawned on me once and some people tell the truth.
3
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and exclude parts of things in life that shade the story.
3
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And I find that I do that with myself sometimes.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I was just curious if you could shade some light on that rule number eight, um, really impact questions in there.
3
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Sure.
3
SPEAKER_02
Sure.
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I ll take that apart.
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So, okay.
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So first of all, it s not a straightforward matter to tell the truth.
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Hardly because like, what the hell do you know?
3
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Like we re all steeped in ignorance, right?
3
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So none of us are,
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in the final analysis capable of telling the truth.
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We can get better at approximating the truth with time, but we don t have full access to all knowledge, and so everything we say is going to be partial.
3
SPEAKER_02
Now, having said that, it s still perfectly reasonable to distinguish between what s true and what isn t.
3
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How do you start doing that?
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Well, someone might say, I don t know.
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how to distinguish between what s true and what s not true in the final analysis.
3
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And I would say to them, yeah, but you know, you ll, you ll find times in your life where you re inclined to say something or do something to say something, you know, to be false or to do something, you know, to be wrong.
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Now there may be times when you re ambiguous and ambivalent and you don t know, but that s not what I m talking about.
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I m talking about those times when you actually know,
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You know, and you can tell because if you re going to say something that you know to be false, it fragments you internally and makes you weak.
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You feel what could be the ground under your feet shifting.
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You re lying and you re betraying yourself.
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say, and this was the purpose of that rule, was, well, stop doing that.
4
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First, stop doing that.
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Just stop saying all the things that you are saying that you know perfectly well to be false.
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And then at the same time, you can stop doing all the things you know that you shouldn t do.
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Well, what will happen as a consequence is that your speech will become more precise and your vision will become clearer.
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because you re not putting yourself up with obvious falsehoods.
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And then if you continue doing that, your capacity to distinguish between what s true and what s false gets more and more sophisticated.
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And if you do that long enough, you might actually get to the point where you could actually start to tell the truth instead of just not lying, at least some truths, at least some of the time, you know, and that s a pretty good start.
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And then that can expand out across time as you become expert at this.
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And then you might say, well, why bother doing that?
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And I can tell you why you should bother doing that.
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It s very straightforward.
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There will come a time in your life where you have to make a very fine decision.
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It might be one that your life depends on, or the life of someone you love, or a relationship depends on, or your business depends upon, and you ll be torn apart at the point where you have to make that decision.
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And if you can t rely on yourself at that moment to make the right decision, you could lose everything.
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Now you might ask yourself, well, how do you ensure that you can rely on yourself in a situation like that?
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And I would say, well,
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If you spent 20 years practicing lying, you can be bloody well sure that when push comes to shove, you re going to make the wrong decision.
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You re going to want to be, when things get rough around you, you re going to want to be in a situation where your eye is clear and your tongue is sharp.
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And so if you ve practiced diligently, one might even say religiously, to abide by the truth, then when you re cornered and the chips are down and you have to go left or right, and one of them leads up and the other leads down, you re going to pick the right route.
4
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And if you know that, like if you meditate on that, if you understand that that s coming, that can scare you badly enough so that you ll
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Stop saying things you know to be false.
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You ll pay the price for that.
4
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Then you add another interesting twist to that.
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You know, you said that often people, these are more subtle liars, they ll sort of half tell the truth.
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They ll tell the truth in a way that enables them to manipulate towards an end.
4
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Yeah, well, that s, that s a particularly pathological form of lying.
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That s actually using the Lord s name in vain, by the way, you know, that famous commandment, you don t use the Lord s name in vain.
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That doesn t mean to not swear.
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It means do not pretend to be serving God when you re not.
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And that s that kind of lie that you described.
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Telling the truth is a very tricky issue because you have to be aiming up in all ways to ensure that
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What you re relating isn t manipulatively self-serving at some subtle level.
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And it takes a long time to orient yourself at enough levels simultaneously so that you re no longer playing those sorts of games.
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But you do that by practicing.
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You do that by practicing not lying.
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You try to make that a vow.
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And you can clear yourself up an awful lot.
4
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You know, a lot of what you do with people in psychotherapy, huge part of it is you help them disentangle themselves from the web of lies that they found themselves trapped within decades of lies sometimes, or, or, or multiple lifetimes, even because you see, you know, you do see families from time to time that are so wrapped up in lies that it goes back.
4
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you know, three or four generations, it s just lies nonstop at every possible level.
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And so all of that has to be sorted out.
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And you often are doing that working as a psychotherapist.
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You can do that with a sustained moral effort on your own behalf.
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I mean, part of what you re doing, if you re a religious practitioner and you go and confess, is that you re trying to remind yourself about what lies you re telling.
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SPEAKER_02
And you do that so that maybe you can stop doing it.
4
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And it s a practice, you know, and you can get good at what you practice.
4
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So really what the Dickens process is, if you think about it, that we all do, right?
4
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People finding what the lies are that are holding them back and changing them right then and there with enough emotion.
4
SPEAKER_00
Question, Mary.
4
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Thank you, Dr. Peterson.
4
SPEAKER_01
Thanks, Tony and Sage.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve heard you say, Dr. Peterson, and what I love about these stories of mythology and biblical stories is I ve heard you say it de-isolates us and it gives us something that s like, wow, I m not alone.
4
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A lot of people feel this way.
4
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, hearing you explain this and sitting through some of the speakers that we ve had earlier, I have the feeling that, wow, this world is continuing, like the chaos keeps coming.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it feels, I don t know,
4
SPEAKER_01
It s overwhelming when I really think about the big picture of it sometimes and the complexity of it all and the things like, I will never understand this, whether it s financials or AI or all that the world is moving into, the dynamics of countries.
4
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I m shaking just talking about it.
4
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My experience is almost like there s these islands of order.
4
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I find that in my family.
4
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I find that in a safe community, mom and dad, friends.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if that s a woman s perspective of like, wow, there s a lot going on out there and I m just trying to cling to my people and something that I understand.
4
SPEAKER_02
Is that a proper representation?
4
SPEAKER_02
No, I think you ve got it right.
4
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I mean, first of all, it s inevitably the case that, what would you say, you confront an infinite expanse of ignorance.
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In some fundamental way, things are always going to be ultimately beyond you.
4
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You see that in the biblical stories that insist, for example, that people can only see the back of God.
4
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And so it s an existential reality that there s going to be more coming at you than you can manage and master.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then, of course, the question is, how do you deal with that?
4
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And you deal with that like a sailor deals with the ocean in a boat.
4
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know, there s a lot of ocean, but you can stay afloat and you can navigate forward.
4
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And so then you might ask, well, how would you do that?
4
SPEAKER_02
Well, we talked about that a little bit today in terms of orienting stories.
4
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You know, you, you have to put forward some courage and some faith, and you have to confront the things that are obstacles in your path.
4
SPEAKER_02
And that attitude helps turn you into something that s united psychologically, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
That can strengthen you personally.
4
SPEAKER_02
But then there s the social element to that because
4
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If we share the same story that we should confront chaos and make order, and we do that together, then now we have social unity around us.
4
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And that means that we have the strength of numbers.
4
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Part of the reason that I ve been able to maneuver through the political turmoil that I ve been admired in is because
4
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I have great family.
4
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They re very supportive.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I have a lot of friends who were tough people and they were behind me and I have a broader social community and that fortifies me.
4
SPEAKER_02
And that s the kind of unity in numbers and in belief that does help you maintain your integrated spirit through the chaos of life.
4
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That s not weakness.
4
SPEAKER_02
That s a necessary observation that part of your sanity depends on the proper harmony you establish with the social community.
4
SPEAKER_02
Now, the female part of that might be that the female locus of concentration is more local, right?
4
SPEAKER_02
And more familial.
4
SPEAKER_02
But that s not a bad thing.
4
SPEAKER_02
Someone has to bind the damn families together.
5
SPEAKER_00
To some degree, we re islands unto ourselves, but to some degree, we re all members of family first and then community second.
5
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And it s not inappropriate at all to make the family level of social integration a fundamental point of concern.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I do think that s the natural resting place of women, partly because they have to take care of infants and young children.
5
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And that s not a weakness.
5
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It s just a difference of approach.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s nothing to be ashamed of.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s a virtue.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, it does mean that we still have to face the complex problem of how you integrate the integrated family in the broader community.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I would say that s a more masculine problem.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, that doesn t mean men and women can t address the same damn problem, but all things being equal, there s still a different level of natural concern.
5
SPEAKER_00
None of that s reason to feel guilty.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, when I counsel women, for example, on their career development, say, well, look, once you have a child, your fundamental concern should be your child.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s true whether you re a father or a mother, but it s particularly true if you re a mother, especially if you have an infant.
5
SPEAKER_00
Then women will say, well, what do I do about my career?
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, I feel guilty because I m not pursuing my career or I feel guilty when I m pursuing my career that I m not attending to my child.
5
SPEAKER_00
Women can be screwed both ways in that matter.
5
SPEAKER_00
I would say, well, look, it s perfectly reasonable for you to model successful adaptations of the broader social community for your kids.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, you have to get your act together.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to get your family together.
5
SPEAKER_00
then you have to integrate you and your family in the broader community.
5
SPEAKER_00
You should be serving all of that simultaneously.
5
SPEAKER_00
All that s a virtue.
5
SPEAKER_00
And women might approach that family first, and broader social world second, and maybe men the other way around.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, it s a loose rule of thumb, but both of those approaches can work just fine, and they work great in tandem.
5
SPEAKER_00
Beautiful.
5
SPEAKER_01
One more.
5
SPEAKER_01
Dr. Peterson, thank you.
5
SPEAKER_01
The question I have for you is, there s a lot of chaos in the world, and I sometimes wonder what, or maybe have a hard time deciding what part of the chaos am I responsible for uniquely
5
SPEAKER_01
confronting.
5
SPEAKER_01
So Tony s very passionate about ending hunger, for example, with their billions of meals.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I have, I have kind of racked my brain over time and not found that same kind of passion for a particular, you know, cause like that.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I wonder how, how, what, how might a person, you know, make that choice?
5
SPEAKER_01
That s a great question.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ll tell you a little story first.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s worthwhile knowing.
5
SPEAKER_00
So,
5
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It s a story from Exodus.
5
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It s the story of the burning bush, which is kind of a mysterious story.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so here s how that story essentially goes.
5
SPEAKER_00
So Moses is trying to find his way, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
He s trying to identify his destiny and he s off wandering down a pathway, minding his own business one day and something attracts his attention.
5
SPEAKER_00
It sort of glitters and glimmers off to the side and
5
SPEAKER_00
And it pulls him towards it.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now he has to decide to step off the path and go investigate.
5
SPEAKER_00
The story makes that quite clear.
5
SPEAKER_00
And this is a burning bush, not a burning forest.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not so overwhelming that you can t avoid it.
5
SPEAKER_00
All right.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so Moses goes and decides he s going to go investigate this thing that captures his interest.
5
SPEAKER_00
And as he gets closer to it,
5
SPEAKER_00
He starts to hear a divine voice.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the first thing the voice tells him as he gets closer is that he s on sacred ground and that he should take off his shoes.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then he starts to interact with this strange phenomenon, this burning bush, and God himself reveals his name to Moses.
5
SPEAKER_00
So what does that mean?
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, here s one thing it means.
5
SPEAKER_00
Lots of things grip our interest.
5
SPEAKER_00
and not really of our own accord, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
You can t really pick what you re interested in.
5
SPEAKER_00
It picks you.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now you can pick whether or not you pursue it or not, and you can pick how diligently you pursue it.
5
SPEAKER_00
But the interest itself manifests itself in a kind of autonomous manner.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, you might ask yourself, well, what would happen if you really pursued what gripped your interest?
5
SPEAKER_00
And the answer is, well, you get deeper and deeper into it.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the deeper you get into something, the more you re beginning to tread on sacred ground, because there s no difference between sacred and deep.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s the same idea.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the idea in the burning bush story is that if you attend to what compels your interest with enough diligence, the nature of being itself will reveal itself to you.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s true.
5
SPEAKER_00
So you might say, well, how does that burning bush appear then in the confines of normal life?
5
SPEAKER_00
And I would say it appears in two ways.
5
SPEAKER_00
It appears in the guise of what interests you.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it appears in the guise of what sets itself before you as a problem.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I would say, as a starter, you could try this.
5
SPEAKER_00
Do this over a couple of days.
5
SPEAKER_00
Write down what bothers you.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, there s going to be things about life, about the current political situation, about the details of your personal life, your relationships with other people that bother you.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, a million things could bother you and some things do.
5
SPEAKER_00
Those are your problems and your destiny is in your problems.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then I would also say, well, watch yourself for a couple of weeks and see what you re doing when,
5
SPEAKER_00
what you re doing appears meaningful, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
When your interest is gripped and you re compelled, because when you re in the place where you are, when your interest is compelled, then you re gripped, you re where you should be.
5
SPEAKER_00
And one of the things you want to learn is how to be there more.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to kind of treat yourself like a stranger to figure that out because, well, as you said, you know, you, you haven t been able to find your path precisely.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, that means you don t know who the hell you are.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s what it means fundamentally.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, you may know some things about yourself, but you don t know yourself as deeply as you might.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to understand that there s a certain degree of arbitrary strangeness about you and about the things that will compel you and grip you.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you need to discover what those are.
5
SPEAKER_00
And paying attention can help.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s like, where am I when I think I m where I should be?
5
SPEAKER_00
And what am I doing?
5
SPEAKER_00
And you can ask yourself that over a two week period or a one month period, like you re asking someone you don t know.
5
SPEAKER_00
Then the other thing I would recommend more concretely is I have this program
5
SPEAKER_00
called Future Authoring on a website called selfauthoring.com.
5
SPEAKER_00
And what Future Authoring program helps you do is to develop a comprehensive vision.
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And it s a great thing, by the way, to have your employees do if you run a company.
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It ll make them much more productive and also more psychologically integrated.
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So the way that this program works is that it asks you, this is a good meditative exercise.
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I suppose it s a form of prayer.
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Imagine now you re imagine five years from now.
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And I literally mean, imagine this.
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Okay.
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Imagine five years.
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Now here s the deal.
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You can have what you want and you need, and you can be who you want to be, but you have to figure out what that is.
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That s the price you have to pay.
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So now you have to fantasize.
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It s like, okay, if I was who I would want to be, and if I had what I needed and I wanted, what would that look like?
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Write it down for 15 minutes.
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You re not going to get it right.
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Just sketch it out.
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And then you can do the opposite, which is, all right, now if I let my bad habits and inadequacies have an upper hand and auger me in, what sort of hell could I occupy in five years?
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That s useful to know, too, because that s a good way of specifying where you don t want to go.
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The first part of the exercise helps you specify where you do want to go.
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second how it helps you specify where you don t want to go.
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Then you have something to run away from and something to run toward.
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And that s good for maximizing motivation.
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And then the rest of the exercise helps people strategize.
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And so you might say, well, I don t exactly know who I want to be or where I want to be or what I want.
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And I would say, well, here s some hints.
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If your intimate relationship with what you wanted, what would it look like?
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If your friendships were constructed the way you wanted them to be, these are questions you have to ask yourself.
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What would that look like?
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If you were educated to the limits of your intelligence, what educational strategy would you have to pursue?
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What job or career would you want or need if you could have what you wanted or needed?
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How should you use your time outside of work?
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How would you take care of yourself mentally and physically?
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Um, what,
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services might you render to your family and your community if you could do it in the manner you wanted?
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That s seven different questions, you know, to sort of differentiate your life.
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Man, it s worth spending a few days figuring that out.
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We did that with university students before they went to university and it dropped their dropout rate 50%.
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90 minutes of writing dropped their dropout rate 50% and raised their grade point average 35%.
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So you need a vision, man, you need a vision.
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And you can develop a vision by pursuing what s interesting to you.
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You can develop a vision by taking the problems that beset you seriously.
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And you can develop a vision by working with yourself to develop a vision.
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You know, let s say you love someone, you know, maybe you have a friend, maybe it s your wife, maybe a child, and you really love this person.
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And you say to them,
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I really like to know what you want, you know, and knowing that maybe I could figure out how to help you.
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If you would let me know, you can ask yourself the same damn question.
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You know, imagine that you dared to assume that you were worth attending to and that it would be okay if things worked out optimally for you in the best possible way.
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Just imagine for a moment that that was okay.
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Well, then you could ask yourself, well, all right, what would that look like?
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That s an unbelievably useful exercise.
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That s a prayer, man.
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That s a prayer fundamentally.
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And a prayer, that s a prayer devoted towards the seeking of a revelation.
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Jordan, we re right on the time.
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I know you have tight time and we re down to the last minute of it.
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We just want to thank you for being a prayer answered for so many of us in the world by your example of love and of integrity and of joy.
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Please give it up for Jordan Lees, gentlemen.
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Jordan, it s Sage.
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We just wanted to say thank you.
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It s such an honor to have you here, and thank you for your sincerity.
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Thank you for your goodness.
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Thank you for your brilliant mind, your generous heart, and for shedding illumination on this beautiful path called human life.
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You re doing it so beautifully.
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Love to you and Tammy, and God bless.
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We love you.
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See you soon.
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Thank you.
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The Tony Robbins Podcast is inspired and directed by Tony Robbins and his teachings.
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It s produced by us, Team Tony.
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Copyright Robbins Research International.