Transcript: How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs – Jordan Peterson

And you might think, well, I don’t want to let go of the consequences because I want to control what’s going on. But what you miss then is adventure because if you don’t control what’s going on, you don’t know what the hell is going to happen.

And maybe that’s exciting, and actually there’s no doubt about it. And then you have the additional advantage if you’re attempting to say what you believe to be true and attempting to act in the manner that you think is most appropriate. That’s genuinely you, and you have the force of reality behind you. And obviously, that’s what you have if you’re trying to live in the truth as you have the force of reality behind you. That seems like a good deal.

Then you have the reality and the adventure. So why is that a moral obligation? Well, if you hide and you don’t let what’s inside of you out and you don’t bring into the world what you could bring and you become cynical and bitter, you will start doing very dark things. So you’ll not only not add to the world what you could add, but you’ll start being jealous of people who are competent and doing well and work to destroy them. So that’s the pathway to hell, really.

The Problem with Cynicism

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of the trends that I’ve been railing against most recently has been cynicism. There’s this pervasive belief that everything is terrible and it can’t get better.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And the people who believe that it can improve are dumb and delusional than the problem. And I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t like it.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: The beginning of wisdom, cynicism. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to combat, because people start out naive. And naive people are optimistic, but not really. They’re just naive. And naive people have no idea that there’s, say, malevolence in the world.

They have no idea that there’s malevolence in their own heart. They’re sheltered and dependent. And when that breaks, it often breaks into cynicism. And so cynicism is actually an improvement.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The veils have fallen from your eyes.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. Exactly. The problem with cynicism is that, especially if it’s allied with a kind of arrogance, is that you can end there. And that’s a big mistake. So then the question becomes what?

Once you’ve been bitten hard and you’re no longer naive, well, that is very hard on your optimism, let’s say. So then the question is how do you restore that without reverting to the naivety, which you can’t do anyways without blinding yourself once you’ve been bitten? And the answer to that is you substitute courage for naivety, and you regain your optimism as a moral imperative.

One of the things you might ask yourself is, well, if the future is likely to be catastrophic in a variety of different ways, which is definitely the case, both socially and personally, then what attitude should you bring to bear on that?

And the answer might be, well, if you were courageous and faithful, and I can explain what that means, then you would conduct yourself in a manner that met the future head on with the presumption that you can manage it. And this is the presumption we should bring to bear politically.

Now these people who are using fear to garner power point to the various apocalypses that might befall us. And it’s difficult to counter them because the future is always an apocalyptic horizon. Like everything can fall apart and has before and might well again and will in fact in your life as you age and die.

And so it’s very easy to conjure up an apocalypse. Then the question becomes not is that apocalypse potentially real because the answer to that is yes, but what attitude should you have towards that? Naive, that’s not good. Cynical, that’s better, but it’s still not good. It’s another form of hell and it also tends to make the potential apocalypses more likely.

Moving Beyond Cynicism to Wisdom

Well, so what do you have when you move beyond cynicism? What you have when you move beyond cynicism is wisdom. That’s not naive, it’s courageous. One of the things that religious people have done relatively badly, especially in recent years, is they failed to delineate the relationship between faith and courage. You know, people like Dawkins and the new atheists, they point to faith and they describe it as something like belief in foolish superstitions.

But that isn’t really what faith in the deepest sense means. It means that you are willing to act out the proposition that you can ride the wave no matter how big it becomes. And that we can all do that together, especially if we do that in goodwill. And I think that’s a much more appropriate way to confront the future, and it’s also the proper medication for cynicism.

Now the other thing about cynicism that’s interesting too is that cynics aren’t cynical enough about their own cynicism. Right? Because you can get doubtful enough to start doubting the validity of your own cynicism. It’s like, what makes you so smart? What makes you the judge of being? And the Columbine kids were like that.

You know, they decided that existence itself was unsustainable given its cruelty and that the proper response was to put up a giant middle finger to men and God. Right? Well, here’s the way of being cynical about cynicism. How does your cynicism let you off the hook? Right?

How does your cynicism justify your desire to avoid necessary responsibility and to pursue your own short-term hedonic gains? It’s like, why aren’t you cynical about your own doubt? And that’s another place where wisdom begins. Right?

Cynicism beats naivety, but it’s not the ultimate destination. And you should be cynical enough to question the moral validity of your own resentment and your own turning away from the world.

Delusion vs. Fantasy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The way that I see it, given that we don’t know the future, given that much of our motivations are invisible to us, we’re not a crystal pond that we can see into. You have to have some form of delusion about what’s going to happen in the future. You’re trying your best to see the way that it’s going to be, but given that the glass could be half empty or half full, why not have a delusion that’s going to be useful to you, one of hope, even in the face and the understanding that things might be difficult and that there’s going to be obstacles.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: You know, there was a line of social psychology that pursued that argument for quite a while that made the argument that people had to have positive illusions about the future and that that was the fundamental way that people staved off despair and bolstered their self-esteem. But I don’t think we need to separate out the distinction between fantasy and delusion.

You do have a fantasy about the future. You have to because like you said, it’s not structured. So you have to provisionally map the future. That’s what a plan is. Positive goal. Strategy is.

But that doesn’t make it a delusion. Like, it becomes a delusion when the map bears no relationship to the underlying territory. So if you have a strategy for the future, maybe let’s say that your strategy for the future, just for the sake of argument, is that you have 5,000,000 YouTube subscribers in three years. Well, you have no evidence of the strict sort that that’s how it’s going to be because anything could happen between now and three years from now, let’s say. But there’s no reason to call that a delusion.

It’s a hypothetically possible path of potential, and then you can make the sacrifices necessary to bring that about. So even though it’s a fantasy because it maps something that isn’t there, it’s not a delusion. It’s a delusion when you’re ignoring elements of your own experience that would inform your fantasy more effectively. You’re ignoring them so that you can live in a positive representation of the future without having to pay the appropriate price for it.

The Inner Citadel

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of my favorite ideas I learned over the last couple of years is the inner citadel from Isaiah Berlin. Do you know this?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So Isaiah Berlin says, “When the natural road towards human fulfillment is blocked, human beings retreat into themselves, become involved in themselves, and try to create inwardly that world which some evil fate has denied them externally. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.” This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in-depth into a kind of inner citadel in which you lock yourself up against all of the fearful ills of the world.

Mutual friend Rob Henderson explained it in a simpler way. If your leg is wounded, you can try to treat the leg. And if you can’t, then you cut the leg off and denounce that the desire for legs is misguided and must be subdued. And I think that we see this everywhere.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, okay. So imagine that you lay out a plan and it meets with an impediment and it knocks the slats out from underneath the plan. Now you retreat. Okay.

Now you have an option when you’re retreating, and one option is to construct a world in fantasy where you’re taking revenge on those who wronged you and getting what you want. That’s a pathway to madness. So often people who develop serious delusions do develop compensatory fantasies, and then they start to dwell in them and often for hundreds of hours. So the kids again who showed up to Columbine High School, they dwelt in a fantasy world for hundreds of hours before they undertook their dreadful actions.

But you can also flip back into yourself, let’s say, and this is like confession and atonement. It’s the proper way to think about it, is you can think about what it is that you did wrong or insufficiently that led to the collapse of your plan. Right? So that’s the first investigation.

I made some sacrifices. I attempted to bring about a particular form of the future. It didn’t happen. Okay. Why?

Well, the world is set against me and the cosmos is evil and there’s no God and I’m bitter and cynical. That’s one potential explanation. Right? Poor me. Right?

And I’m not trying to be flippant about this because sometimes people’s dreams are quite realistic and they still fail catastrophically. You know, it can be brutal. You know, maybe you did make a lot of good decisions and you suddenly got ill or someone in your family did and everything went to hell on you. It doesn’t have to be because you’ve done something cardinally foolish that you fail. No.

It’s built into the structure of the world. But it doesn’t matter. You can also retreat into yourself and you can say something like, alright. I need to retool my conception of strategy, but also potentially my conception of goal. You know, maybe I’m looking in the wrong place.

Maybe I have to look somewhere else. And you can open yourself up to a revelation. So there’s a gospel statement that’s very relevant to this. So Christ tells his followers that if they knock, the door will open. If they ask, they’ll receive.

And if they seek, they’ll find. And so it sounds like it sounds magical. It sounds like the sort of thing that the new atheists would have a field day with, but that isn’t a wise interpretation of that thing. The proper interpretation is something more like a recognition of the way thought works. So imagine your plans didn’t work out.

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

The Power of Self-Examination

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Can you sit down and say to yourself, “I’d like to know, even if the world was conspiring against me and my failure was 95% the fault of external occurrences and other people, what did I do that wasn’t as good as it could have been and where did I fail to look so that the probability of my failure was higher?” Now to ask that question, you have to want the answer. That’s what it means to knock or to ask or to seek. This is no joke. It’s like you have to want to know.

And it’s a very painful thing to do, especially if you had given it your all to the degree you were able and you have reason to be bitter. You’re going to be searching for the errors that you still made. Discovering your own errors is always extremely painful, especially if there are errors that you’re in love with. And so you have to be willing to strip yourself down. That’s what humility means fundamentally.

The advantage is this is why it’s so useful to listen to people. You might find out where you’re stupid, and then you could stop being stupid. One of the reasons you confess your sins, let’s say, is because you want to discover where you’re insufficient. Now it’s painful. It’s painful to encounter an impediment in the form of someone else’s opinion that might show you where you’re blind and ignorant or willfully blind even.

But the advantage to that is you can rectify the error and then as you move forward, you’re stronger. One of the things I taught my kids, and I hope at least somewhat successfully, was that you should always ask a stupid question. And that doesn’t mean the sort of question that someone who wasn’t paying attention would ask. If you’re listening to someone and you don’t understand what they’re saying and you reveal that, you’re revealing your ignorance. Maybe you’re in a room full of people and you think you’re the only person stupid enough to not get it, which is very rarely the case, by the way. The thing is though, if you reveal that ignorance to yourself and to the other person, they can rectify it.

And if you do that a thousand times, you’re not ignorant anymore. And this is a real pathway to success too. You see it. You do this because you ask real questions in your podcast, and Rogan does this. Rogan’s always trying to be a little smarter than he already is. And then that works. Iterated, if you ask a thousand dumb questions and you listen to the answer, then you know a thousand things, some of them deep that you didn’t know before.

So that’s the advantage to searching your soul, let’s say, for the unrequited sins and attempting to atone. That’s not a delusion. It’s an attempt to set yourself right. It’s the opposite of a delusion even though there can be a fantastical element to it.

Managing High Standards and Expectations

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The conversation around people who try their best, do as many things right as they could and yet still fall short because the world is random and unfortunate things happen. Happiness, as far as I can see it, sits in the gap between your expectations and reality. But the problem here is that people who have high standards often end up feeling a lack. Right?

How can people who strive like this avoid feeling despondent at falling short of their own high standards? I’ve heard you talk about the statue of David saying something like, “you are not all that you could be.” And as soon as you posit an ideal, you begin to compare yourself to that ideal.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a good question. I mean, the ultimate ideal is also the ultimate judge because the ultimate ideal is something against which you fall far short. And that might be so painful that you can barely stand it. But then what you do is you do two things, I suppose: you lower the ideal and you raise your estimation of your potential.

And what do I mean by lower the ideal? Well, if you’re comparing yourself to someone or even to a future self and the gap is so painful that it paralyzes you, then you’ve created a dragon that you don’t have the tools to master. And so what you have to do is you have to scale the dragon down to size. And you want to scale the dragon down to size until it’s a size that you are willing to move toward, however small that is.

Now, if you’re here and your ideal is here and that gap is unbearable, then you reduce the gap and you reduce the gap. And you’re going to have to do that anyways because you’re not going to move from where you are to perfect in one fell swoop. Right? There’s going to be incremental steps. So you have to fill in that hierarchy of progression with a high enough resolution representation so that you can start to move forward.

And then you should be buttressed. There’s another gospel comment that’s very interesting. It has to do with the Matthew principle. And the Matthew principle is, “to those who have everything, more will be given. And from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.” Now it’s brutal because it implies that reality works like this.

When you’re moving up, you go like this. Right? And that’s pretty nice. That’s a lot better than this. But when you’re going down, you go like that. Right? It’s like downhill, downhill, cliff. Okay. So you want to avoid the downhill path.

Well, if the uphill path is like this, which is like exponential, let’s say, or geometric, then what that means is that it doesn’t matter how big the first steps you take uphill are. Even if they’re trivial, even if they’re shameful in their size because you’re so useless, if you’re disciplined in that, you’ll speed up extraordinarily rapidly. And so that’s the good news, you might say, is that you can take very small steps, even ones that might be shameful in their size, and you have to admit that to yourself. But once you get the ball rolling, it doesn’t roll in a linear fashion. It rolls in a geometric fashion.

Starting From The Bottom

This is a really good thing to know because it can take the sting out of the realization of your own stupidity. Everybody has their weak sides, let’s say, things they’re embarrassed about. When I first started going to the gym, I was about 23. And I think I weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and I was six foot one. Very, very thin. A toy, I had a twenty-seven inch waist, something like that. I smoked like mad, and I drank too much. I wasn’t in good shape.

The first attempts forward I took in the gym, I went to this swimsercise class. It was me and this really fat guy, young guy, probably not in any worse shape than me, and like, seven old women over 70. And they could outswim me. It was pretty damn humiliating.

And so I did a semester of that and got myself in somewhat better shape. And then I started to go to the gym to work out to lift weights. And that was also rough because I’d be underneath the bloody bench press trying to lift 75 pounds off the rest. And some muscle headed bastard would come over and tell me how to do it. And it’s like, “Yeah, thank you.”

But it’s embarrassing and lots of times people won’t do things like go to the gym because they’re so embarrassed about how they look or what sort of shape they’re in. It’s a pain to start at the bottom, but you start at the bottom where you’re weak. And if you want to rectify what’s weak, you have to accept the fact that you’re at the bottom and that the first steps are going to be painful.

It took me about three years, but I stopped smoking, and then I stopped drinking, and I gained 40 pounds of muscle in like, three and a half years, something like that. I basically had to stop doing that because I had to eat like, six times a day. It was crazy. But I got a lot more physically confident and a lot more coordinated because working out with dumbbells makes you coordinated. Right? Because it exercises all the small ligaments and the tendons. And so my lower body in particular got a lot more coordinated.

Then I could dance, so that was better when I was going out dancing because I did a lot of that in graduate school. But the point of all this is if you’re going to rectify your weaknesses, you have to admit your insufficiency to your own shame. Now if the gap between you and your ideal is so great that it paralyzes you, you shrink that.

Choosing The Right Comparison Group

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of the things I’ve been talking about in the live shows is your comparison group is incorrect. The fact that we have the opportunity to sit down and listen to anybody on the planet. Right? The best minds, the best athletes, the best thinkers, the most articulate that are alive right now, all listen to the people that have died that were around when video cameras existed, and you can compare yourself to that group. But that’s not your comparison group.

If you have the impetus to sit down and listen to me and you waffle on for three hours about these deep topics, these interesting ideas, you are so already selected out of the normal group. You’re already asking yourself questions that—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: The right question.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Nobody almost nobody else is. Right? But because your comparison group are people that are unbelievably high performing… I remember before I started my podcast, I’d listened to you or to Sam or to Joe, and I think, “God, their recall is amazing. It’s like they’ve just got this eidetic memory and everything that they’ve ever read is able to come to the surface and they’re able to say it in this way that’s completely seamless and all the rest of it.”

If you go, “Well, are you really a person that’s never recorded a podcast before going to compare yourself to Joe Rogan, a man that’s recorded a thousand and spent ten thousand hours on stage and done all of this UFC commentary and done all of this stuff in terms of TV?” Is that really who you’re going to compare yourself to? And it’s unfair. And the problem that I see is people who have big dreams for themselves and want to do great things, they like to set their sights high—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: There’s a pride in that too. Like “I can be. I want to be. Well or that’s who I should be comparing myself to.” Right?

That’s the pride. And the pride is something like, “I should be that” or even “I could be that.” It’s like, well, maybe you could, but you’re certainly not going to do it as you already pointed out without the apprenticeship. Right? So you could say that the despondency is actually in proportion to the false pride.

Now I wrote a chapter in, I think, my first book, which was “compare yourself to who you are today, not to who someone else is.” The proper comparison group for you is you yesterday because you can make—first of all, you’re the only control group that’s appropriate to you because you have a certain set of talents and possibilities and limitations and tragedies that are truly unique to you.

And so you might be comparing yourself to someone else on some dimension, but it’s not a reasonable comparison because you don’t know what talents they were blessed with and you also don’t know what opportunities they had that you didn’t, etcetera. It’s just not a reasonable comparison. It’s a lot better to think about who you were and then to think, “Well, could you be somewhat better in some dimension?” And the positive thing about that is the answer is almost always yes. Now you can orient that transformation towards some stellar target, and that’s the reasonable thing to do. But that doesn’t exactly mean that you should compare yourself to that target.

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

The Delusion of Comparison

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Aiming at something and comparing yourself to it are not exactly the same thing. Plus your bloody comparison is also a delusion. You know, that’s another thing that you have to understand is that you look at the person you’re jealous of. And really what you’re doing is you’re looking through a very narrow aperture at a very thin slice of their life. You’re looking at the thin slice of their life that’s turning out the best, but you’re also looking at a thin slice of their life that’s marketed to be the best.

Right? And you have no idea what the horror of that person’s life might be in its totality. And you have no idea if, like, if the deal was, say, you wanted to be Russell Brand. There’s a good example. You wanted to be Russell Brand.

You wanted to be as charismatic and as famous as he is. Well, your real wish is that you get to have everything Russell Brand has, but none of his problems. Well, come on. I mean, that’s just it’s no wonder that a vision like that would make you despondent because it’s naive, it’s resentful, it’s jealous, it’s bitter, and it’s unreasonable. You have to take the good with the bad. You have to take the bad with the good. And people rarely think about that when they’re thinking about, you know, the famous people they think they’d like to be.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There was a recent interview with Elon Musk where he said something. “My mind is a storm. I don’t think most people would want to be me.”

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They may think they would want to be me, but they don’t. They don’t know. They don’t understand.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you think of that? Elon’s someone that people probably look up to and admire and aspire to be.

The Price of Genius

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: One of the downsides to high level genius is you might describe it as hypomania. So here’s a simple test that people can do. This is a test of something called verbal fluency, and verbal fluency is associated with creativity. And so here’s a simple verbal fluency test. Write down as many four letter words as you can in three minutes that begin with T.

Okay, that’s pretty constrained. Four letters and T or write down as many words as you can in three minutes that begin with S. That’s less constrained. There’s quite a powerful correlation between the sheer number of words that you produce and your lifetime creative achievement. Right? Especially in the artistic and verbal domains. That’s different than vocabulary. Vocabulary is how many words you understand. Fluency is how many words you can produce in a given time.

People vary to a degree that you can hardly imagine. Some people, if you get them to do the four letter test in three minutes, they’ll write down, like, 12 words, and some will write down 50. And the ones who are writing down 50, their minds are going at a hypomanic rate. They’re just thinking five times as fast as “Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Without any remission whatsoever. And, you know, when that gets completely out of control, you have someone who’s manic. And there’s nothing fun about manic. That’s where the word maniac comes from.

And someone who’s manic has a thousand different plans, each of which are one sentence long that they’re hyper enthusiastic about. They’ll spend every cent of their money pursuing them and things just go immediately to hell. And so that’s the outer limit of pathology on the creative front. And someone like Musk, who’s clearly a genius, that’s what he’s contending with in his internal landscape. Now I’m not saying that he’s manic because I see no signs of that, but someone that creative is on that edge.

Or you see someone like Ben Shapiro. I mean, it’s very interesting to talk to Ben because and Russell Brand is the same way. Shapiro speaks, I think, more rapidly than anyone I ever met. But if you’re with him, you see very clearly that he’s probably thinking five times that fast. And that’s a lot.

And when I was writing Maps of Meaning, which was my first book, I had a very difficult time shutting off my mind. I was obsessed with that book. And so I was writing about three hours a day. And then I was thinking about the material, like, for twelve hours. And the thoughts came way faster than thinking. They probably came about as fast as I can read. I can read about 1,200 words a minute if the material isn’t overwhelmingly dense. And so it was just nonstop thought for, like, sixteen hours a day. That’s part of the reason I started lifting weights. Because if I was lifting heavy weights—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 1,200 words a minute while I’ve got a hundred pounds on my back.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: It was enough to shut it down. Yeah. And it was also one of the reasons that I drank because that was another thing that would shut it off.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Well, I think the price that people pay to be the person that you admire is just such an interesting frame to look at someone like Elon Musk. “My mind is a storm. I don’t think most people would want to be me.” The prices that you would have to pay in order to be me is not one that you would—but you’re one of the richest men on the planet, and you get to, you know, dance on stage and release cars that are bulletproof and put rockets in space and stuff. Well, yeah. But what about all of the baggage? What’s the price?

Creativity and Conscientiousness

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: What’s the price? He also appears to me to be hyper conscientious, and I know people who’ve worked with him. Like, Musk isn’t just a creative genius. He’s also an extremely conscientious engineer, which—and really conscientious engineers, they have very interesting minds.

I like talking to engineers because my brother-in-law is a great engineer. And when he understands something, Jim, when he understands something, he understands how to build it out of atoms. Right? Like, he understands it at every single level. And Musk appears to me to be someone who’s this rare combination of hyper creative but also hyper conscientious. Works all the time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Does that sort of hypertrophied executive function help to wrangle some of the diffuse creative energy? Oh, we’re going to put it into this one thing at least for a while, and then we’ll move on to another thing.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes. Definitely. Definitely. Eric Weinstein’s a good example of someone. I hope Eric isn’t annoyed by this. But Eric is unbelievably creative, but he’s not particularly conscientious. And so his—and I think he found an occupation where that works extremely well because he worked with Peter Thiel for quite a long time as his idea man. Right? And Eric’s an extremely interesting person.

Musk is hyper creative and as far as I can tell, hyper conscientious. And the conscientiousness does focus. It—and lots of people who are creative aren’t conscientious. Well, it’s rare. There’s no correlation between creativity and conscientiousness. Okay? So if you’re one in a thousand, if you’re the most creative person in a thousand, and you’re the most conscientious person in a thousand, you’re one person in a million. And Musk is probably more like one person in a hundred million. Right? Something like that. Maybe more, maybe a billion.

The Impact of Fame

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. It’s interesting to consider the changes that happen to people as well as their platforms, as their scrutiny around them continues to increase. Obviously, this has been a journey for you over the last, you know, nearly approaching ten years now of—was it 2006? Was that still 2016? 2016. Yeah. Sorry. How have you found fame change you? What’s been impacted or changed due to the scrutiny and the surveillance and the adoration and the criticism?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the first thing that changed, I think, was that I saw misery on a scale that I hadn’t really seen it before. You know, I had worked as a clinician for a long time, and I worked with, say, 20 people a week. And I was always in the realm of difficult existential problems, wrestling with my client’s problems alongside of them, and I like that a lot. And then I had my research, and I had my family and various business interests. And so that misery in some ways was contained and boxed in, and I had a lot of structure around that to be able to function despite the fact that, you know, I was neck deep in 20 people’s serious problems, which I really liked, by the way.

When I started speaking on a larger scale and meeting more and more people, the scale of demoralization really hit me. I didn’t know how deep the demoralization in our culture had become. And I think that was especially obvious to me at that point among young men. Now it looks like, this is Jonathan Haidt’s research is indicating this, that possibly young women are even in worse shape. But for whatever reason, most of the people I was meeting at least to begin with were young men.

I think it was probably because most of them—far more people on YouTube are young men. And so it was shocking and brutal to see how much demoralization, how widely spread the demoralization in our culture was. Other than that—and that was a real shock, and it was very hard on me, I would say. Everything else about it has been, at minimum, ridiculously interesting. I have an unbelievable wealth of opportunity. I’d be a fool to be anything but abjectly grateful. I mean, the misery that I saw was a shock, and it hurt me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How did that impact you? Did it change the way that you see the world at all?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: It made me understand more deeply how important it was to offer people an encouraging word. I could see that so many people were dying psychologically or actually for lack of an encouraging word. And so it made being in the position to provide that much more necessary. I mean, part of the reason that Tammy and I tour constantly is because it seems to be good. It seems to be a good thing.

You know, we’ve even seen changes in the audience. So five years ago, six years ago, when we did our first tour, a lot of the people who came to the talks were in pretty rough shape. There were more men than there are now, like the proportion of men to women was higher. And the men were generally there alone, and they were a lot of them were looking pretty ragged around the edges. And now five years later, half the audience comes in suits, like, it’s as if they’re dressed for a wedding. Most of the guys are there with some woman. The audience members are doing much better, and the lecture events are extremely positive.

You know, if you looked at my life from the outside, you’d think that I was in a constant storm of, you know, aggravated controversy, but all of that, virtually all of that is virtual. It’s just in the online world. Now it touches the actual world from time to time because I am being pursued by my regulatory college.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You can. Yeah. Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Which is, you know, mostly just an annoyance and a preposterous annoyance, a preposterous expensive, and time consuming annoyance. But apart from that, everything that’s happened around me has been positive. That’s a strange thing too. Positive at such an intensity that even that is daunting. You know, you’d think it’s hard to imagine that you could be in a situation where things are so positive that you can barely stand it, but I am in that situation, and it’s quite something to contend with. I was fortunate, I suppose, to some degree that it didn’t happen to me till I was old because I’ve never really got accustomed to it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve had a thought about this observing what’s happened to you and, you know, the Weinsteins are a good example of this too. We often hear the perils of getting fame too young. In the Macaulay Culkins of the world, the Britney Spears of the world, you know, individuals who don’t have any sense of identity being thrust into a nonrepresentative experience of the world, and they’re completely unmoored. But I think that there’s an equally interesting question to ask. And what happens if you think you know who you are? If you’ve spent decades, five decades, six decades of your life understanding your place, your status, the trajectory that you’re on, and then out of nowhere, you get ripped away from all of the areas of reference, all of the way markers that you thought you knew, and now you’re just floating in the air. I imagine that could be even more disquieting in some ways.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, when everything blew up around me to begin with, it was stressful, I would say, because my job was on the line, my university job, and I never thought that would happen. I mean, when I worked at Harvard and at the University of Toronto, that was all positive. Like, I really liked working with my graduate students. I had at least cordial relationships with my fellow faculty members at Harvard. They were more than cordial.

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs – Part 2

University Life and Professional Challenges

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: At the University of Toronto, most of the faculty members that I started to develop friendships with were also those who ended up moving away. They were often people who got offers from other places, and they would disappear. So a lot of the friends I developed at the University of Toronto went elsewhere. I didn’t get as tightly tied in with regards to friendship networks among my peers as I had at Harvard, for example. But I had great relationships with undergraduates and with my graduate students.

That was plenty. I loved working with my graduate students, so it wasn’t like I was pining and alone. Not at all. I had a good network of friends. And then that was threatened and really disappeared in February 2016, and my clinical practice was threatened.

That was unsettling. I think there were things that continued, though. Even when I was teaching as a university professor, the way I taught wasn’t typical. The things I taught weren’t typical. I thought for decades that eventually someone’s going to find out what I’m teaching and there’s going to be trouble.

I couldn’t believe I was allowed, encouraged to teach what I was teaching. But the universities, and this was particularly true of Harvard in the nineties, that’s how they were structured.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What was so rebellious about what you were teaching?

The Intersection of Psychology, Religion, and Neuroscience

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, there wasn’t really anybody who was concentrating on the nexus between, say, archetypal ideas, archetypal and religious ideas and neuroscience. So that wasn’t a thing. I mean, there were a few people, Jaak Panksepp was one of them. A lot of the researchers who were interested in the neuroscience of emotion became interested in deep narrative because they started to understand that our emotional life is the story. That’s a good way of thinking about it. And that we’re guided by our emotional instincts.

And what our emotional instincts do is put us into certain stories. That’s what it means to be in love, for example, is that you’re in a love story.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. It’s not a particular balance of oxytocin and endorphins that you are aware of. It’s not broken down to its constituent parts.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: No. Definitely not.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Part of a narrative that you tell yourself about what this means and how this feels.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. Well, it’s interesting that the instinct manifests itself as a story. And so I was very interested in narrative and story, and also, no psychologists study Carl Jung. Like, literally, virtually none.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Really?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. Definitely not. I mean, psychology really developed in some ways as the materialist antithesis to psychoanalysis. So Freud and Jung and even Adler to some degree, they were off limits for scientifically trained behavioral psychologists, and that’s what I was and am. I trained at McGill. There were no courses in psychoanalytic theory at McGill.

I read Freud and Jung completely on my own, flying in the face of the advice that I was getting even from my well-meaning graduate supervisor who was a great guy and who never got in my way in the least, quite the contrary. But I was warned, for example, when I went on the job market not to talk about the things that I was truly interested in. And I ignored that, by the way. And what that meant was some places that I went to apply for a job didn’t want me, but then Harvard did, so that worked out quite nicely.

And that’s one of the advantages of being true to your own vision is that you won’t get what you don’t want. See, I didn’t want to go work somewhere where they wouldn’t want me. I wanted to go work somewhere where they wanted me. So my strategy was, well, this is who I am.

And if you don’t want me, that’s a drag because I’m looking for a job. But by the same token, I’m not going to pretend to be someone other than who I am so I can work here. What a stupid way of starting your career.

The Importance of Truth in Life and Career

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, that goes back to the truth. Right? Telling the truth. What are you going to if you tell a sufficiently seductive lie, what is the best that you can hope for? The person that you are telling the lie to falls in love with a projection.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. Absolutely. Well, when I applied to graduate school, I wrote a crazy admissions letter, and I basically laid out who I was, flaws and all, and what I was interested in. And two people, three people bit.

And the one that I liked best, partly because he was at McGill and I wanted to be in Montreal, was my graduate supervisor, Robert Peel. And he knew what he was getting, and we had a great time. I still work with him. I had one of the best relationships with Bob that I’ve ever had with anyone in my life, and it’s lasted four decades. And it was because Bob’s a very honest person.

We were very different. He’s very practical. He’s a very good administrator, a managerial type, although he’s super smart. He had an exhaustive knowledge of the relevant research psychology literature. And I came in flying on a mat of psychoanalytic theory and philosophy and religious ideas, very, very different.

Although, we shared a real deep interest in the practicalities of research, and he taught me how to fall in love with the more scientific end of the research distribution. But the point I’m making is that he knew what he was getting right from the beginning, and so did I. And that worked like a charm. There was no reason for any sort of subterfuge. And it turned out that our talents dovetailed extremely well.

So we had a blast. I loved working with him—that’s why we’ve been working together for forty years. I traveled all over North America with Bob because we also started a business, and it was great. The thing is, if you tell people who you are and an opportunity opens up, it opens up for you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Not for this thing you’ve created, this lie.

Following Your Instincts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s this story that Douglas Murray told me about one of his first bosses at an early newspaper that he worked at. I can’t remember the gentleman’s name. This guy is a legend within the industry. He’s been working for a long time. He’s accumulated a number of haters and fans.

And toward the back end of his career, as Douglas is starting his, he decides that he wants to release a West End play about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets, adventurous as West End plays go. Obviously, there was all of this scrutiny because he was this very well-known individual within the publishing world. And opening night, by the halftime interval, there was no one left in the entire auditorium, including the cast. And this guy was devastated.

And he was mocked in the press and all the rest of it. Apparently, Douglas saw him shortly afterward and asked him kindly. He was like, “Look, what were you thinking? A West End play about the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets?”

He said, “Well, Douglas, I followed my instinct. An instinct that may sometimes lead you wrong, but they’re the only thing that ever led you right.”

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that stuck with me.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, there’s something very relevant there too on the instinctual front. So things will beckon to you and call to you, and you’ll have intuitions about which pathway to take. And you will, in all likelihood, follow those because what else do you have?

You have these orienting instincts. This is another reason why you don’t lie. Because if you lie and you practice lying, you pathologize your instincts, and then your intuitions lead you wrong. And so there’s a sin that’s laid out in the gospels. It’s the sin against the holy ghost, and it’s unforgivable.

And people have been debating for like two thousand years about what this particular sin is, but it’s something like the pathologization of the instincts that orient you. If you sacrifice your relationship to the truth, you warp your vision, and then you can’t see. And then one day, it’ll be dark, and there’ll be sharp things in the fog in front of you, and you’ll wander right into them because you’ve pathologized your own vision. You don’t want to lie because you program yourself falsely, and then you automatically see what isn’t there.

And then, of course, the world will slap you in the face continually, and you’ll think, “Oh my god. The world’s such a pathological place.” When the truth of the matter is that, no. You just keep running into things that you refuse to see. And then you think, “Well, the world’s made of nothing but obstacles.”

It’s like, well, you put the obstacles in your own path, and you did that by developing these complex self-serving delusions, a story that you tell other people about who you are that isn’t true. You’re trying to lay out a map that bears no relationship to reality, and you keep wondering why you wander off the path and into a pit. It’s like, well, how could it be otherwise?

People have commented to me many times about my bravery, and I don’t like that. It’s not right. I’m afraid of different things than the typical person. Maybe that’s a good way of thinking about it. I’m way more afraid of the consequences of saying something that’s false or wandering off the appropriate path than I am of whatever consequences might come for saying what I believe and doing what I believe to be the case. I’m way more afraid of that.

You know, I’ve been reading the gospel of Saint Matthew. I’m writing a book at the moment called “We Who Wrestle with God.” And one of the things Christ says to people continually is to not damage their vision, to not occlude your eye. You can see what’s in front of you if you’re willing to see it. And if you’re willing to see it, many of the terrible obstacles in life, you can just walk around.

But if you blind yourself purposely to follow your own narrow self-serving delusion, you’re going to run into terrible things and terrible people and the terrible part of your own soul all the time. That’s what you should be afraid of.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But the best thing that you can hope for, if you do do that, is to fluke success living somebody else’s life.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. Great. Wonderful. Yeah. Exactly. You get to be a successful fraud. I remember this documentary about Ron Jeremy. I think they called him the Hedgehog. He was this famous porn star.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve seen a music video with him in. Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. Not one of the world’s most attractive people physically. And he lived in this very interesting world. He lived in this world where he was stopped constantly on the street by people who thought Ron Jeremy was a hero.

Right. So he was in hell because the people who admired him were the people who admired… He was surrounded by the people who thought that he was an avatar of success. Right? And so he got what he wanted, I suppose. He had easy access to easy women.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, let me give you this. This is why I think the beginning of the incel movement and the black pill movement was born out of pickup artistry. The origin, if you trace it back using Internet history, of the incel black pill ideology was a subreddit or a website called PUA hate. Pick up artist hate.

And what it was was a group of men who had been through the pipeline of pick up artistry

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And come out the other side with a very jaded and even more jaded view of the world.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Even more jaded?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. And I’ll tell you why. So what happens if a guy learns old school mid-twenty-naught pickup artistry

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is you realize that there is a particular set of actions, a script that you can run which makes it more likely that a woman is going to go to bed with you.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. Right. Right.

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

The Gap Between Persona and Authentic Self

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But what you realize when you do that as you learn how to nag and do penal escalation and tell them that story about the midget fight outside or whatever your script is that you’re running, you then begin to see just how far away that person is from the person that you actually show up as. Right. Who you are and this extravagant persona that you need to convolute into existence in order to get this woman into bed makes you feel worse even.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Feel the gap between where you are and what you have to do in order to achieve the thing that you want. Now what you don’t realize is that there are a million other ways that you could become sufficiently charming to get this person to like you.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: This is just actually doing it,

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: for example. This is just one that happens to be robust and easy enough to write down in a book and easy enough for most guys

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: to write it down. A form of scripted psychopathy. So what a psychopath does is feign competence. Right? So most psychopaths are very emotionally stable.

And so one of the early stage markers for competence is self possession and calmness. And so if you’re not an anxious person, you’ve got an edge on that already, and most psychopaths are very high in emotional stability. And so they look confident because confident people tend not to be that nervous. Like, if you’re doing something you’re expert at, well, you’re not nervous because you know how to do it.

So the lack of nervousness is a hint to competence. Well, you can feign that. You can feign competence. You can feign confidence. That’s what the pickup artists teach.

Now, I would say there’s even some utility in what they do. Right? Because if you’re dependent and bitter and resentful and charmless and self destructive and nervous and socially unskilled, the probability that you’re going to be successful with women is very, very low. Okay. So you should be other than who you are.

Now if you start putting on this persona, then you could think about that as a new suit of clothes, and you could learn through that how to fill in the gaps.

Authenticity vs. Manipulation

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Fake it until you make it.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. But if you take on that without doing the effort necessary to integrate that in a genuine way, then all that’s happening is that you’re being rewarded for being fake. Right? And that’s part of the problem with that too is that you’re practicing learning how to manipulate people in a psychopathic way.

And if you practice that, of course, you’re going to become jaded. There’s nothing more jaded than a psychopath. I mean, that’s the ultimate extreme of jadedness. And if you practice manipulating, especially if the women happen to be reasonably good women, if you practice manipulating them and you’re successful, then you’re learning to be one horrible person. Now, you know, as you’re completely useless, unproductive and undesirable former self, you weren’t exactly stellar to begin with.

But substituting psychopathy for that was sort of like substituting cynicism for naivety. Now as a complex problem, I mean, part of the reason that people like Andrew Tate are so attractive to young guys is because they do put up that confident, that false confidence. It’s Tate’s a complicated guy because it’s not all false. You know? Real people are complicated the way that, like, villains in comic books aren’t.

Tate’s a fighter. It’s clearly the case that he’s got a certain degree of physical bravery. That’s real. Alright? There’s an element of what he says that’s very attractive to bedroom basement dwelling losers because he’s at least there out in the world, you know, taking the blows, and he’s got a fast car, and he’s flashy, and he’s attracted to women.

But a lot of what he’s done, especially with women, doesn’t just border into the psychopathic. It crosses the line. And that’s not a good model. It’s not an optimal model for people who are trying to progress. But it’s a strange thing because just as cynicism is an improvement over naivety, right, the capacity to be dark is an improvement over the lack of ability to be dark at all.

And so Tate is attractive in the way that the shadow beckons to people who are undeveloped. Right? Because it does. It’s like you’re neurotic and you’re dependent and you’re repressed because you’re immature and harmless. Well, one way out of that is to stop being harmless.

And one of the things you can say about Tate is that he’s not harmless. Right. Well, that’s a virtue. Now it’s a virtue that has to be bracketed. It’s like cynicism is a virtue compared to naivety, but it’s not virtuous in and of itself.

It’s a step on the way. And so maybe you can learn how to feign confidence and you can learn how that works and maybe that’s an improvement. I had a guy in my clinical practice who got involved with the pickup artist community and he told me taught me a lot about it. And one of the exercises that their initiates had to do was to go out and ask 50 women for their phone number in one day. And that’s a great exercise, you know, and I’m not

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Exposure therapy, approach anxiety. Absolutely.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely. Getting over your fear of rejection. Right? And 50 times will do that because you’re going to get rejected the vast majority

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: of times.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: But well, likely 50 times. Although, generally, that wasn’t people’s experience, you know. If they were even vaguely skilled, they’d at least get a false phone number out of the deal. But then they could learn that the rejection wasn’t as catastrophic as they thought. But importantly, they learned that they could continue moving forward in the face of rejection.

Intellectual Humility and Growth

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The thing that it makes me think about there is intellectual humility and how tightly people hold on to their beliefs that if you believe that you are always going to be right, that there is nothing to learn outside of you, and that any kind of admission that you might be wrong is tantamount to destruction. It does exactly the same thing. You need to and it goes back to, asking stupid questions. Being prepared to ask the stupid questions and look not like the most informed person in the room, but also importantly, nowhere near the most stupid person in the room. Because you’re the one that’s asking the question.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: The stupidest person in the room is the person who doesn’t know and won’t ask, or even worse, who doesn’t know and won’t ask and acts like they know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s not good at all.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. There’s a from your See,

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s part of this idea that you should love your enemy. So you might say, well, why should you do that? Well, your enemy is going to be your harshest critic. Now it’s possible that if you have a very good enemy that he will show you flaws in your character that you didn’t know were there. And so that’s a very strange way of looking at the world to think that you should welcome an attack.

You should it and this is but this is right. I’m saying that with all due caution, let’s say. The most the more vicious the attack, the more of your potential hidden flaws might be revealed.

Learning from Critics and Enemies

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you found that to be true?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, definitely. But I’ve also found that the attacks force you to contend with it, to see if it’s there, right, to test it. I suppose the attacks that have come after me that have been most successful, they’re almost always journalists, and they’re usually British female journalists, but not always.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We produce a nation of hard hitting journalists.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, and faith in journalists is the lowest in The UK and anywhere in the Western world, and I can see why. You know? But there’s some advantage. There’s some real advantage to facing someone.

It’s a Pharisee problem. In the gospels, Christ was always contending with these Pharisees. And what the Pharisees were always trying to do was to lay a verbal trap for them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So is a Pharisee a person?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Pharisee was a Jewish sect. And the Pharisees were very legalistic in their interpretation of Mosaic law. And so they were sort of they were hypocritical the way they’re portrayed in the Gospels. And it was they’re hypocritical by the book moralists. And part of what and most of their morality was for show.

They liked to pray in public. They liked to be seen being holy. At least that’s the criticisms that are levied against them. And what they’re always trying to do in the gospel accounts is to lay a verbal trap for Christ so that they can expose him as a heretic and kill him. Right?

So every single thing they say is a snare of some sort. And there’s lots of journalists like that. Nellie Bowles, who wrote an article about me for the New York Times, which was a very devastating article in many ways and very serpentine and subtle. She three years later, she wrote another article about what it was like to work for the New York Times when she was working there and the tricks that the journalists played, including her. And she said that the game was to devastate someone else’s reputation in the attempt to boost yours.

Right? So you could think about it as a game of comparative moral standing. So the journalist’s trick is to trick you into saying something that will end your career essentially.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Their social status stands on the shoulders of yours.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so now the advantage to being in a situation like that is that you have to step if you step extremely carefully and you’re fortunate, then you evade the traps, and then the interview tilts hard in your favor. Yeah. And so the most the interviews that have done me the most good in the long run were the two interviews that were most hostile.

One by Channel 4’s Cathy Newman. And Cathy, at least, had a sense of humor. Another one by Helen Lewis, who had no sense of humor at all and doesn’t seem to have learned anything at all in the interim. But I think that I think that one has 80,000,000 views now, twice as many as the Cathy Newman interview. Like, it just keeps racking up views, and it was because Helen Lewis, she has, like, 50 tricks or a hundred tricks. Cathy had, like, four, You know, and they were pretty blunt. And she had a sense of humor about them.

But Helen Lewis, she was just all tricks and lots of them and smart. You know? And it’s quite something to talk to someone who’s quite smart and quite educated, but all tricks. And so but how does

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: it feel looking back on those two? They were very formative time. It was kind of the inflection point one of the inflection points, I suppose, for yourself as well. Yeah. How does it feel looking back on that?

I remember you said at the time it took you many days to recover from that kind of cantankerous sort of adversarial interview. Is that does that seem like a different lifetime, or is that still very much sort of with you?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, I’m a lot healthier than I was then. So those sorts of things wouldn’t have the same effect on me now as they did then. Because I was ill, it took me a long time to recover from, you know, a serious bout. I mean, the first time I talked to Sam Harris, not that Sam played tricks like I like Sam, and we’ve had very productive conversations. I was so ill when the first time I talked to Sam that I could barely sit in my chair.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Talking Sam Harris makes you ill. That’s the

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: No. No. Not not at all. No. No.

Sam and I have had very productive conversations. That was another good example, I suppose, of the utility of an adversarial conversation.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. You know

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Sam comes to a conversation like that pretty well armed, but it’s very helpful because it forces you to look in nooks and crannies that you might not have looked in and to be crystal clear to the degree that that’s possible about what you’re actually saying.

Criticism as a Gift

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The idea of loving your enemy is something I’ve been playing with a little bit recently. There’s been I guess, my platform is getting to the level now where, there’s a reason for someone to have a bull’s eye pointed at least remotely in my direction.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Because there’s no point

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: in trying to take somebody down that’s got nothing that’s got no status. Why would you why would you invest the time?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Your the step that you’re going to get in terms of your status standing on their shoulders is so small that no one

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: knows this. It’s a backhanded compliment.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In the end, in some ways. Yeah. But you’re right, man. Some of the some of the criticisms that I’ve got and I was reminded by a friend recently about this, have been some of the best inflection points, very uncomfortable. And to see it as a gift, to think about that thing as a gift, it’s like, I know that you weren’t doing this to make me better.

I know that you weren’t doing this to try and, to try and benefit me and yet, in reflection it’s like alchemy. It’s like how Rory Sutherland calls it alchemy, taking something that was bad.

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

Finding Opportunity in Public Attacks

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, we’ve learned—my family has learned—that when a public attack occurs, there’s a massive opportunity nested in it. If you can reorient, it’s like, “Okay. This is bad. This is vicious. This does not look good, and maybe it could take me out, take us out.”

Is there a way we can play with this that will not only neutralize it, but twist it in the other direction? I think the thing we did that was most effective on that side of things was when I was written into Captain America as—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I spoke to you that day. Red Skull. I spoke to you that day that it happened.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Yeah. The magical super Nazi.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Floating Nazi or whatever. Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it was shocking. Right? It was very shocking. And then Olivia Wilde… that was shocking too.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s a litany of—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes. Yes. And it became increasingly preposterous, and the Olivia Wilde episode was one that was so preposterous that it was almost immediately possible.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think mercifully that film was so badly made, and I’m pretty sure that she cast her boyfriend as one of the—got rid of someone that was super competent and put somebody in that was pretty incompetent. And I think that caused it to flub.

But, man, the enemy thing—I’ve ended up becoming really good friends with one of my harshest critics. It’s so strange, and yet makes complete sense afterward.

Making Friends with Critics

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So I got criticized by a pair of podcasters who have a very critical eye of much of the podcasting world. They did an episode about an episode that I’d done, and they have a right of reply thing. Sam’s been on to do it. Thompson and Kisten’s been on to do it. And I went on and there was a bit of—I listened to their show. I think it’s a very illuminating way to see how people that have a different perspective about what’s going on in your world see it.

And I got the opportunity to go on and have a conversation, and I did. And I found them to both be way more charming than I thought that they were going to be.

And I’ve ended up—both Chris and Matt, although Matt less so. But with Chris, we must speak once a month every couple of weeks. One of us will just ring, and we’ll catch up about what’s been going on in the world. And he has a very different sort of worldview to me. He lives in a different area of the world. He’s a psychologist studying religion, I think, and sacred rituals and stuff like that, rituals rather than religion.

And now he points out blind spots that I don’t see. That one particular instance was really uncomfortable because this was still—this was three years ago or something now maybe, and I’m still super uncomfortable about it. And, oh my god, these people are going to take me down, and they’re both academics, and they’re really, really well educated, and they’re going to be smart, and they’re going to say things that make me look silly.

And yet, in reflection, it’s been that one instance and the subsequent rumination about it was one of the biggest inflection points for me going from having blind spots that I hadn’t seen to that. And I almost think that the degree of discomfort that I went through was mandatory because had I have not felt so much fear and anxiety and embarrassment about the fact that it’s going to be out there and there’s going to be all this focus and attention in not a nice way and there’ll be tweets and all the rest of the stuff, that was sufficiently uncomfortable to force me to actually genuinely look at the things that I was doing that I was getting wrong. And I’m sure that there’s a million things I’m still getting wrong. But, yeah, it was as much a gift as it could be.

Finding Value in Past Struggles

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Here’s another thing. I spoke to David Goggins about this last year, about how I was bullied as a kid, and I was quite unpopular in school. And I was an only child, so I didn’t really have many people to back me up in the school yard or whatever. And I, for a long time, had a chip on my shoulder about the kids that mistreated me in school as you might expect.

And then I got toward, you know, maybe a few years ago, and I really, really started to reflect on it and realized that so many of the things that I valued in myself were the light side of something dark that had been created during that time in school.

So, my complete preparedness to just spend time on my own means that I don’t mind about moving out to a country where I don’t know anybody and trying to make this podcast thing work, or spending hours and hours working or researching or recording podcasts or doing intros or whatever it is. Not having a super tight social network as a kid meant that I wasn’t beholden to anybody when I grew up, that I didn’t feel the need to have as much support as I go along to do stuff.

Now other sides of it haven’t been so great because I still seek validation. I still seek a lot of validation because that was something that I was missing as a kid. But, yeah, realizing not only you probably wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the things that you went through. Okay. That’s step one. And then step two is, and I’m quite grateful for what I’ve done. And then step three would be something like, wow. I’m proud of myself for having turned something that was negative into something that’s positive.

But then another level above that would be, wow. So maybe I should be thankful.

The Practice of Gratitude

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, we were talking earlier in the podcast about what is the appropriate attitude towards the future. And I would say, well, we could put past, present, and future in the same bin. Say, well, one of the things that you want to do is practice gratitude.

That’s one of the primary religious rituals, you might say, is the practice of gratitude. And you might say, well, my life is so horrible. What do I have to be grateful for? And I would say that’s—for better or worse, that’s still a form of blindness.

I mean, people can have very, very difficult situations, can be in very, very difficult situations. And it’s in those difficult situations where the search for gratitude becomes something that is by necessity deeper and more difficult, but that doesn’t mean it’s not appropriate. And there is a very tight association between loving your enemy and being grateful in spite of the terrible things that occur in your life.

I’ve been writing about the book of Job, and Job is a story of unjust suffering, fundamentally. God deems Job a good man. So we have it on God’s word that Job is actually a good man, and then all hell breaks loose partly because God makes a bet with Satan, which is, you know, a hell of a thing to do, and says, do your worst. He’s not going to turn on me no matter what you do.

And so Job, despite his torment, he becomes very ill. He loses everything he has. He becomes ill in a way that’s disfiguring. His friends come around and laugh at him and tell him that he’s a bad man, and that’s why all these terrible things have been happening to him. And it’s brutal. And Job refuses to lose faith in himself. He says, “Look. I’m not perfect. But as far as men go, I’ve done what I should do, and I’m not being punished in some manner that’s obviously related to my sin. It’s more like the random play of tragic forces in the world.”

I’m not going to lose faith in myself no matter what, and I’m also not going to—his wife says, “shake your fist at God, curse him, and die.” Because things have gone so badly for Job, she thinks that’s all that’s left to him, and he refuses to do that.

So he maintains faith regardless of what’s happened to him. And that’s really the moral of the story of Job, which is that you are morally obligated to maintain faith no matter what happens to you. And there’s a practical side to that. So imagine that God and Satan conspire against you. There’ll be times in your life where it feels like that’s happening.

And then imagine that your reaction to that is to become bitter and resentful and hostile. Well, then whatever hell you’re in, merely as the consequence of the confluence of tragic events, you have opened a whole other hell underneath it. The hell of bitterness and resentment and ingratitude—and that turns into the desire for revenge very, very quickly. Think things are bad just because they’re bad. You wait till you see how bad they can become if you allow yourself to be corrupted by your unjust suffering.

And so I do think that this is the most practical possible advice that can be given to people, which is that you are morally required to maintain faith, to aim up, and to treat other people the way you would want to be treated no matter what’s happened to you. And that’s a hell of a thing to say. And, you know, you might say, well, that’s impossible. Some people have such brutal lives that they’re destined to be corrupt, but I would say that’s not true.

Like, I’ve met many people, particularly in my clinical practice, who had lives that were so brutal that you couldn’t even listen to them without it breaking you into pieces. Brutal, brutal childhoods of a depth of malevolence you can hardly conceptualize. Who decided despite that that they were going to aim up and they were going to maintain faith in themselves and the world. And so it’s like that’s on the table for people.

Privilege and Gratitude

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It seems like an odd paradox that the people who have been brought up under lives of the most privilege are often the ones that have the most complaints about the world, and people who have been brought up in deprivation a lot of the time are able to be perfectly in gratitude. Seems very strange that that’s the way.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, one of the things I saw at the university, I saw the faculty members, my peers retreat in the face of the advancement of the administration over, like, three decades to the point where the universities really became corrupted. And it didn’t really happen at Harvard when I was there in the nineteen nineties, although it was starting to fray around the edges slightly, but I really watched it at the University of Toronto in the twenty years I was there. The administration kept making demands on us, and every time they made a demand, we would fold. Every time.

10,000 micro retreats. So then the administrators took over the university, and then the woke types took over the administration, and that was that. Well, what I saw my faculty members do, the academics that I worked with, is that this is how the corruption starts. It’s like when you’re an undergraduate, you write down what you think the professor wants to hear to get the grade. And then you’re a graduate student and you have to, let’s say, get along with your professors and your supervisor. You have to tell them what you think they want to hear so that you can get your PhD.

And then maybe you are on the academic track and you’re an assistant professor. There’s three levels of being a professor. You’re not tenured as an assistant. So you really can’t say what you think or do what you think you should do then because you have to get tenured. And then when you’re tenured, well, you’re not a full professor yet. And so you don’t speak then. And back in the back of your mind, you have this idea. Well, at some point, I’ll have enough security so that I’ll be able to tell the truth. But that’s based on this weird idea that the courage to tell the truth is based on security.

# How Courage and Risk Are Connected

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, courage isn’t based on security. That’s a stupid theory. You’re not courageous if there’s no risk. So your notion is you’ll be courageous when there’s zero risk. Well, obviously, that’s a contradiction in terms.

You’re only courageous if there’s a risk. And not only that, by the time you’ve sacrificed your word for illusory security for fifteen years, there’s nothing left of you that’s true. You’ve already lost that a long time ago. You probably look back at the former self who was naive and thought that you could say what you think as just cynical about it. You know, that person just didn’t know how the world worked.

And then it’s the same thing that you pointed out. The idea that you become good because you have material plenty. That’s a silly idea. Why would that be the case?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like the same as assuming that all rich people have got taste. Right? Poor people who’ve got beautifully designed interiors and rich people who’ve got gaudy messes.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, then the poor people are actually rich.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Absolutely. There’s a report I wanted to bring this to you. It’s so interesting. So a recent report was released by the Harvard Graduate School of Education detailing the drivers of anxiety for young adults aged 18 to 25.

34 percent reported feelings of loneliness. 51 percent said achievement pressure negatively impacted their mental health. 58 percent reported lacking meaning or purpose in their lives in the last month. 50 percent reported their mental health was negatively influenced by “not knowing what to do with my life.”

There has been much examination of the well-being of teens aged 14 to 17. Not much has been known about those occupying the critical young adult years, and yet young adults report roughly twice the rates of anxiety and depression as teens. The young adults are not okay.

The Crisis of Young Adult Mental Health

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: I believe that. I saw even with my own kids that when I was a kid, probably the time between 13 and 15 was the most difficult transition, but I saw that become older by the time my kids—my kids are 30 now, basically.

By the time my kids were young adults, I could see that transition into adulthood was the place where the difficulties were starting to mount. I think, perversely, that the therapeutic world has a fair bit to do with this. Partly because therapists who are basically secular liberal protestants, that’s a good way of thinking about them, tend to conceptualize mental health as subjective. Right? It’s like mental health is something you carry around in your head, like you carry around your identity.

That’s why we have these ridiculous ideas that you can just define your own identity. I am whoever I say I am. Well, obviously, you’re not because other people have to go along with your game there, buddy, and they’re either going to do that, they’re not going to do it, or they’re going to do it voluntarily, or they’re going to do it by force. If they’re not going to do it, you’re screwed. If you have to use force, that’s not going to work.

And if you want them to do it voluntarily, then it’s not going to be all about you, obviously. Even no four year old can find someone to play with if he always gets to pick the game. Okay. So why might young adults be lost? Well, part of it is that they’re thinking—I’m not trying to be judgmental of a whole generation.

It’s a form of thought. Your mental health isn’t dependent on you. That’s not the right way to think about it. I don’t think you can be mentally healthy in the absence of a long term stable relationship. So you have to be married.

Let’s make that part of the precondition for successful adaptation as a young adult. You have to be married. So you have to establish your relationship with someone that integrates sexuality that’s there for the long run. Because “there for the long run” is the same as sane. There for tomorrow, there for the next minute, that’s not sanity.

That’s impulsiveness. That’s aimlessness. They’re the same thing. If it’s all about what you want right now or more accurately, all about what something in you wants this moment, that’s the definition of immature insanity. You have to commit.

So you commit to someone else, you commit to your family, you commit to your community. Like, there are multiple levels of identity that stretch out into the social world, and voluntarily adopting those levels of hierarchical responsibility gives you an identity. It gives you a purpose. It protects you from anxiety. It does that in all sorts of ways.

Like, you know, you said earlier that one of the things you do is seek for validation and you related that to uncomfortable experiences you had when you were very young. Well, it might not be precisely that you’re seeking for validation. You might be properly investigating how you should be embedded in a social hierarchy at every possible level. It’s like, well, people think their mental health is something that they just carry around in their head. And that if they just got the way they looked at the world right or if other people just played their game, then all of a sudden they’d be mentally healthy.

It’s like, there’s no difference between thinking about yourself and being miserable, technically. If you look at descriptive statements about yourself statistically, all the descriptors that are reflective of self-consciousness load on negative emotion.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re not thinking about yourself in a positive way? Really?

Self-Consciousness vs. Social Responsibility

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Not well, let’s take that apart. You like doing your podcast and you feel positive about it. Okay. But your podcast isn’t about you. Right?

So if you’re thinking about how you’re of utility to a broad number of people, you know, maybe you would take some satisfaction in that, but that isn’t exactly thinking about yourself, is it? It’s thinking about the relationship you’ve established with other people, and it’s a relationship of responsibility. Why do you like your podcast? You can pursue what you’re curious about, but you wouldn’t have to do that publicly. Okay.

So why do you do it publicly?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For a few reasons. First one being that it keeps me accountable. That was one of the main reasons that it kept me accountable because I knew that if I didn’t do it, if I wasn’t rigorous and precise and aligned with what I’d said and done previously, that there was an external eye that’s watching.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. That’s very interesting.

So I would also say that’s not exactly about you. That’s about your ability to establish harmony between what you say and the way you act and the expectations that an increasingly broad social community has of you as a consequence of what you say and how you act. Okay. That’s not about you. That’s about your nesting in a social hierarchy.

Right? And so I think you can. And then you might say too, well, maybe you’re thinking about yourself when you’re establishing an aim or a goal. Well, not if they’re good aims or goals. Because if they’re good aims or goals, and I would say what good means technically is an aim or goal that will play out well in the medium to long term across a multitude of situations, including many, many people.

So the solution that iterates across time that is situation independent and that’s broadly socially inclusive is a better aim. Right? It’s a higher aim because it integrates more. Alright? Now you might want to be setting up aims, and you might be pleased about how you’re progressing in relation to those aims.

But if those aims have the characteristics that I just described, they’re not about you. And then we could also ask, what do you mean about you? Exactly. What “you” are you talking about here? You know, and so we play these identity games in the modern world that are making people anxious and hopeless.

The Problem with Reducing Identity to Sexuality

And one identity game is, I’m defined by my sexuality. Okay. So let’s take that. I’m defined by my sexuality. Okay.

But what do you mean by your sexuality exactly? Do you mean the opportunity to engage in sex? Like, are you reducing sexuality as such to the act of sex? Okay. Let’s say you are.

So now what you’re telling me is that who you are is who you are when you’re sexually desirous. That’s what you’ve reduced yourself to, but it’s even more than that. It’s the kind of sexual desire that wants gratification right now with no relationship whatsoever. So not only have you now reduced who you are to your sexual desire, you’ve reduced your sexual desire to the minimal set of preconditions that would satisfy it. Well, then the first question that might come up there is, why not just use porn?

It’s a lot simpler. And the answer to that is, that is what people are doing. Well, it’s no wonder that they’re anxious and lonesome and aimless because they’ve reduced themselves to a short term desire. They found the easiest possible way of gratifying that, and they’ve abandoned everything that would be a much broader conceptualization of what sexuality would be if it was embedded properly in—how about a relationship to start with? And I’m not just—these aren’t just opinions.

So there are two different strategies of reproduction broadly in the animal world. One is zero investment. Fish, mosquitoes, million offspring, they all die but one. Right? So you can reduce reproduction in mosquitoes basically to sex.

And you make a million mosquito offspring, all you need is one to survive. Problem solved. Okay. On the opposite end of the spectrum, literally, are human beings because we have the longest dependency period of any animal by a large margin. We have a high investment strategy, sexual reproduction strategy.

So whatever sex is for human beings isn’t “you’re off and that’s over.” That’s not what it is for human beings. It’s embedded in a relationship. Now you might say, well, we could pull sexuality out of the relationship and just indulge in it for the pleasure. Okay.

So now let’s forget about all the other animals. Now we’ve got two types of human being. We’ve got the one night stand human being, repetitive one night stands, and we’ve got the long term committed relationship human being. And then we might ask, okay. What are the personality characteristics of the people in those bins?

So let’s go to the short term one night stand sequential relationship types. Okay. Who are they? Psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: All one night stand people?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: If they don’t start out that way, they’re going to end that way. Right? Because you can’t use yourself or other people for short term gratification. The definition of a psychopath is someone who uses someone for short term gratification.

Okay? So it’s definitional. Right? So and then you might say, well, I’m not like that. I just like sex.

It’s like, yeah. But if you practice that for five years, you’re going to become what you practice. You know? And I talked to Russell Brand about this a little bit on—and I can say this because it was on his podcast, so it’s not like this is secret.

Russell had what Andrew Tate promises his followers. He had fame. He was charismatic, and he had more or less unlimited access to short term sexual gratification. Okay. In combination with, you know, the chemicals that make that even more likely, alcohol and cocaine, let’s say.

So what are the consequences? Well, I asked him, what were the consequences? You had this. He said, “despair, anxiety, and hopelessness.” Right.

But not just that because, you know, Russell got himself in trouble here month and a half ago, just about took him out. Well, it was his past coming back to haunt him. Like, and he had to scroll through his psyche and see, you know, well, in with all these short term relationships, these short term sexual gratification binges that I indulged in, did I ever cross the line? Well, the answer is, well, you’re going to have, like, 200 encounters like that. You’re not going to cross the line?

When you’re drunk, when you’re on cocaine, you’re going to cross a bunch of lines, and then it’s going to come back and haunt you. And so it’s very interesting to see in our culture back to the hopelessness and despair that you were mentioning that’s characterizing young adults’ life. It’s like, well, it’s all about me. That’s the self esteem movement. But then me becomes, it’s all about what I want.

And then that becomes, it’s all about what I want right now. Then it’s what the lowest part of me wants right now and to hell with everyone else. It’s like, okay. How are you going to play that game without being desperate? You’re going to be desperate as soon as you start playing that game.

And the other thing, it’s even worse than that because you’re going to end up with the porn star problem. You’re not going to be very happy about being with the people who want to play that game with you because they’re not going to be the people that are really going to make you feel that life is worth living. They’re going to be the people, especially on the female side, women who are willing to take advantage of themselves for short term sexual gratification. Those aren’t happy women. They’re usually damaged women.

And if they’re not damaged when they start playing that game, they’re going to be plenty damaged by the time they’re done with it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON:

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

Population Decline and Identity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The last time that we spoke, me and you talked about population decline, and the Census Bureau just released today predicting that the US population will decline for the first time ever by the year 2100 after peaking in 2080. So their estimates showed that the US population, which is about 333,000,000 at the moment, is expected to reach 370 million by 2080, but we’ll be back down to 366 million by 2100, and even immigration can’t offset this birth rate decline. Over the last two years, do you think things have got better or worse than you anticipated from birth rate and marriage rate standpoint?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: I think they’re probably still getting worse. And I think Elon Musk is one of the few people who’s called out the danger of, you know, a one child policy or the idea that we should decrease the population. I mean, things that don’t grow die.

But they die for all sorts of reasons, and we could tie this back to identity. You know, what’s my identity? I could say, well, it’s how I feel about myself. That’s the line that’s used everywhere now. You don’t get to tell me who I am. I know who I am. I can be who I feel I am. Well, first of all, I don’t even know what you mean by feel. Like, what does that mean? Your emotional state at the moment, and you can just impose that on everybody? That’s your theory? That’s the theory of a two year old, literally. That’s a very bad theory.

Well, where could your identity be other than that? One of my identities when I taught at Harvard was professor, obviously, and that was a good identity. But that wasn’t exactly something I was carrying around in my head. It was a pattern of relationship that I had with a whole bunch of people, all my students. Right? It wasn’t inside my head. Now there was a concordance between my representation of myself and how I was acting in the world, and that concordance was the health.

It wasn’t what I thought of myself. Like, part of the reason that you can take some, let’s call it gratification, from being a successful podcaster is that you’re actually a successful podcaster. It’s not in your head. It’s in 1,500,000 subscribers. It’s how many podcasts have you done?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 700.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. So it’s in 700 podcasts. It’s not something you’re carrying around in your head.

Taking Responsibility Without Credit

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you remember I love the 42 rules that created the twenty-fourth that you ended up coming up with, but there’s one that you didn’t use. If you have to choose, be the one who does things right. Not the one who is seen to do things.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. Absolutely.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I love that rule.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Oh, yeah. That’s a great rule. That’s a great rule. Yeah. Well, the thing is is that you can do almost anything you want if you’re willing to take responsibility for it if you don’t want credit.

One of the most effective political maneuvers I’ve ever seen, woman who’s so brilliant. I won’t tell you who she is, but she’s so sharp. She’s so brilliant. And she told me the last time I saw her, she’s had her finger in pies for, like, thirty years popping up in places you’d never expect. And I thought, I asked her, it’s like, how the hell did you pull this off? And she said, oh, I decided thirty years ago that I could do whatever I wanted if I didn’t want credit. And so that’s exactly what she’s done. And she’s had a stellar career. Stellar. And I’ve worked with other people who’ve done the same thing.

It’s very interesting. It’s very interesting thing to realize. You might say, well, why would I want the responsibility without the glory? It’s like, hey. Do you want the glory? Are you so sure that that wouldn’t just get in your way? You know, there’s something to be said for anonymity. And second, maybe you want the responsibility because that’s the adventure. You actually get to do the thing that someone else just wants to take credit for. Well, maybe doing the thing is plenty of reward in and of itself.

Identity and Responsibility

With regard to identity, you know, when I was a professor, I was also a husband and I was also a father. Well, those were identities, but they weren’t in my head. They were embedded in the relationship I had with my kids, and that was meaningful, embedded in the relationship I had with my wife. You can’t be isolated alone without responsibility and pursuing your hedonistic nonsense and not be insane and miserable. Those are all the same thing.

And so, you know, it’s got to the point I’ve said things that have made me somewhat unpopular, like, it’s very difficult for people to mature until they have a child. So you find a huge part of what you are in that relationship. It makes you responsible. It makes you grow up. It gives you the opportunity to mentor someone. You have someone around who’s more important than you. Well, that’s part of being mentally healthy. It’s a huge part of it.

This enterprise that I put together in London, helped put together Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. We’re trying to put forward a model of governance. It’s called a subsidiary model, and the idea is that people have multiple social roles that scale. Now there’s you. You should take care of yourself, integrate yourself, which means you can conduct yourself properly across the medium to long run. You’re self-sustaining. Then you can maybe extend that to your partner and then to your family and then to your local community and then to broader communities as you become more and more competent and able to take on that responsibility. That’s the alternative to isolated hedonic slavery, enslaved to your own whims, and it’s the alternative to tyranny.

Because if you take on all that responsibility, you don’t have any need for someone to govern you. And so that’s another example of how I blamed it on the therapist a little bit. I called them liberal, protestant, secularists. And that’s because they think about the locus of the psyche as interior, subjective. That’s what a liberal would do. It’s just not accurate. That isn’t the way the psyche works.

It’s not in your head. You know, it’s in your head and in the world at the same time. It’s truly the case that your sanity is the concordance between you as an individual and the world. That’s the sanity. It’s not the proper structuring of your psyche or your brain for that matter inside your skull. You’re distributed out into the world, and you should be. And that’s where you want to be. That’s where the adventure is. You want to be solipsistic? A solipsistic porn masturbator. Jesus. You want to be aimless and miserable. Well, god. It’s so pathetic. Why am I so unhappy? It’s because you think about yourself. No. You think about the lowest impulses in yourself all the time. That’s why you’re miserable.

Learning from Douglas Murray

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Whilst being at ARC, what I thought was particularly interesting was your live event that you guys did at the O2 in the evening time, and everyone was great. But Douglas, I thought, was just a tour de force that evening. What have you learned since being friends with Douglas? How’s he impacted you or influenced you?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, Douglas is very, very disagreeable. You know? And he enjoys combat. And that isn’t something that really characterized me. I don’t enjoy combat at all.

Part of the reason that it’s perverse, I suppose, in some ways. Part of the reason that I will engage in difficult conversations is because I don’t want to have them forever. And so, you know, one of the rules I had in my marriage, and it was a rule that my wife also was pleased to follow, was that if we have a problem, we’re going to deal with it right now, and we’re going to deal with it right to the bottom. And that’s very unpleasant. But if you do it, sometimes you only have to do it once and the problem goes away. And then you don’t have that bloody problem every day for the rest of your life. And sometimes it takes, you know, 20 times before it’s fixed, before you’ve got to the bottom of things. And that can be very unpleasant.

Douglas is very, very good at not letting people off the hook. He’s very tough, and he’s very good at defending himself. And there’s a pitilessness about him that’s extraordinarily admirable. It’s a judicious pitilessness. You know? And it’s a dangerous game to play because there’s another gospel realization, let’s say. The standards you judge other people by will be the standards that you yourself are judged by.

And the reason for that is, well, how are you going to judge everyone else and not apply the same standards to yourself? Like, that’s not going to happen because you become what you practice and you’ll turn the eye, the hostile eye that you turn on others, you will absolutely turn on yourself. There’s no way around that. And so Douglas plays a dangerous game because he’s very combative. But he’s also extremely careful. He’s very careful with his words.

And we’ve had a—he toured with me through Europe. I think we did nine shows together. We split the Q and A. He entered. He did a little bit of an introduction before my lectures. I really liked it. I thought it was great. It’s been a privilege to get to know him. Super sharp, very cultured person, very witty. So he has a great sense of humor, which is also fun, which also was one of the things that makes him a very dangerous opponent in a debate. Because not only does he have the facts at hand like Bjorn Lombard, but he’s devastatingly winning witty and cutting. And it’s fun to watch that. He’s the master at it.

The Power of Humor in Intellectual Discourse

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s interesting to think about the fact that all you need really in a live debate—I think I learned this from you and Sam ages ago. If you’re doing a live debate now that’s not a proper intellectual formatted opening remarks and so forth, if you manage to get sort of two or three real zingers, you won regardless of the content. If you do two or three real zingers, whole crowd laughs, guess what? You won.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the great public intellectuals have a vicious sense of humor. Right? And I mean, I also think that’s why so many of the successful podcasters have been comedians. Well, at the ARC conference, I think Constantine Kisin’s speech was the overwhelming hit of the convention. I think it’s got 600,000 views as of today, 650 on the ARC side, and about 600 on his own channel. And Konstantin did a beautiful job of merging intellectual content with wit.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, the interesting thing about my live tour that I’m about to start doing, bunch of my comedian friends have said to me, “Dude, I am so jealous of the tour that you get to do because no one’s expecting you to be funny. If you manage to be funny four times in ninety minutes, you’ve killed.”

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “If I’m not funny once every seven seconds, I’m a terrible comedian.” So the bar is set. And obviously coming in with Constantin’s background of comedy means that he is able to be by far the, you know, far and away funnier than most public speakers.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

The Culture War Trap

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But doesn’t get held necessarily to the same standards—he’s not expected to deliver one-liners all the time. One of the things that Douglas brought up when you guys were talking on stage that I thought was particularly interesting was the perils of smart people getting captured by culture wars nonsense. Do you ever think about how much time over the last decade some of the smartest people on the planet have had their attention, their cognitive horsepower just taken away arguing about whether men are men and women are women or not or whatever the idea du jour of the day is?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, this is how much time has been lost. So I’ve been partnering with the Daily Wire for about a year and a half so far, and that’s been very successful. They’ve been a pleasure to work with. But what they wrestle with constantly, all of them, all of the principles at Daily Wire would rather in some real way be concentrating on philosophical, theological, or dramatic matters. So which is partly why the Daily Wire is turning towards entertainment for kids, but also for adults, starting to make movies, for example, and TV shows.

They’d rather be doing that. I had Ben Shapiro. He participated in this seminar on Exodus that I produced with about nine other extraordinarily interesting thinkers. And Ben just shone. You know? He’s wasted. Is he wasted on the political? The political is necessary, but it’s “one nation under God” for a reason. Because the political isn’t the pinnacle. Never. It’s never the pinnacle. And if you’re capable of discourse at the pinnacle, political discourse is secondary.

Well, it’s also evanescent. Right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s ways that it can tumble as well. There’s degrees of depth of political stuff too because what works on YouTube a lot of the time is reacts to insane woke TikTok or whatever.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. And it’s easy to get pigeonholed that way. Yeah. Is it a waste? It’s nonoptimal. But it’s a question—

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

The Balance Between Audience and Authenticity

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: An interesting question to be asked, right, about how much sort of ankle or skirt or knee do you need to show from an algorithmic perspective in order to keep the numbers churning because ultimately you’re producing what people click on. You don’t want to be completely beholden to your audience. That’s audience capture. But you also don’t want to be so unaware of having your finger on the pulse of what is trending.

You become obscure.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: And obsolete. Right. Well, in that balance. Well, in that line that you’re trying to walk when you’re dealing with matters that are the highest and also making them publicly accessible.

That’s a very, very tight line to walk. I mean, Jonathan Paggio has done a good job of that. Although his market is still relatively niche, and he certainly is more esoteric, let’s say, than the daily wire guys who tend to devolve into the political and that devolves into the cheap political from time to time. Right? The hit for hit’s sake or the chasing the algorithm and I mean, that’s the danger that all politicians have too is that and I’ve seen this with lots of political types who have developed a persona.

This is particularly true in The United States, I would say, because Americans are so sales money. And I don’t say that dismissively. It’s really hard to sell, to market, to communicate. I saw the Elvis movie recently, and I thought it did a beautiful job of laying this out because Elvis was a stellar talent. But his manager, who is a real shyster, was also a stellar talent.

Like Elvis wouldn’t have been who he was without his corrupt manager. And, you know, it’s sort of a deal with the devil, but you have to give the devil his due too. And the salesman part of American culture can easily devolve into a kind of narcissistic manipulativeness. That’s where it would go if it becomes pathological. But as you said, you have to be aware of your audience and you have to be delivering what there’s a market for.

And it’s very difficult to get those things right.

Wrestling With God

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is a question that I’ve got about your new book coming out next year. I haven’t seen any of it. And it sounds like based on what you’re reading at the moment, you’re trying to grapple with religious texts, especially the Bible. “We Who Wrestle With God” is the name of the book.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: “We Who Wrestle With God.” Yeah. Which is what the word Israel means. Israel means “we who wrestle with God.” And so well, it’s very interesting because it means the chosen people are the people who wrestle with God.

And you might say, well, who wrestles with God? And the answer to that is, well, everyone wrestles with God. Well, why? Because you can’t act without making moral decisions. Like, every step forward is predicated on a moral decision.

And so we’re all wrestling with God.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is God a moral decision?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: God is the spirit that guides you when you make the proper moral decisions. So I wouldn’t say God is the moral decision. He’s the spirit of moral decision. That’s actually not a bad definition. Like, part of what I’m trying to do with this book is to point out that a lot of what’s happening in the biblical corpus is actually definitional.

Right? Well, people modern people think the fundamental issue is, do you believe in God? But that’s not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is, what do you mean by God? And so let me give you an example of this that will make it clearer.

So there’s a medieval idea that God is the sum of bonum, which means the sum of all that’s good or the essence of all that’s good. Okay. You might say, well, I don’t believe in that. Now remember, this is the definition of God. Right?

God is the sum of all that’s good. Alright. So you don’t believe in that. Let’s take that apart. Do you believe that some things are better than other things? Well, people will say yes. Okay. So then you believe that there is a scale of good.

Is there something that all things that are good share in common? And the answer to that has to be yes, because otherwise you don’t have a conception of good. Right? The word good implies that across good things, there’s some essence.

Well, the medieval definition of God is the essence of good. Well, okay. Let’s say you don’t believe in that. Does that mean you don’t believe in anything that’s good? Okay. Then how do you act then? Because to act means to do something that’s better than what you’re doing now. Right?

There’s no action without movement towards the good. And what you might say, well, I don’t believe that there’s a unitary good. Okay. You believe there’s a fractionated good. Well, then what do you do when those things oppose one another?

Right? Which would be in a conflict of duty. What do you refer to to help you adjudicate between different goods? Well, generally, what you do is if you could pursue A, which is good, or B, which is good, and they conflict, then you pick the higher good.

Okay. Do you believe in a higher good? Well, if you don’t, you can’t decide between goods, which means you’re paralyzed. If you do believe in the higher good, then do you believe in the highest good? Well, the highest good is God.

What do you mean by that? By definition. Okay. So now you have a definition. Now then the next question might be, well, what’s your relationship with the highest good?

And you might say, well, I don’t have a relationship. It’s like, well, actually you do because you act in relationship to it. You can’t help it. One of the interesting things about the biblical corpus is that it’s based on the insistence that you have a relationship with being and becoming, a relationship, like a personal relationship.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When you say biblical corpus, you mean the collection of texts that makes up the Bible.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Because it’s a library of books, essentially. Right? The Bible is actually the first library of books. It’s written by a very large number of different people and aggregated over thousands of years and then sequenced actually sequenced into a narrative interestingly enough because no one really sequenced it.

Or by no one, I mean, no individual person. It was the endeavor of the collective or the spirit that possessed the collective over thousands of years. But the narrative is coherent, which is really quite something. And so the narrative is an investigation, number one, into the nature of God, number two, into the nature of relationship with God, and then number three, into the nature of the proper relationship with God, all of those things. And God is the sum of all that’s good.

So the Bible is an analysis of the human relationship with the good.

The Counter-Enlightenment

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What would have to happen after the publishing of “We Who Wrestle With God” for you to look back on that publication and consider it a success? What is it that you want to happen? What do you want people to feel or to take away from that work?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: I think we’re at the beginning of the counter-enlightenment. The enlightenment view of man is wrong. And out of the enlightenment view came science, but the science now indicates that the enlightenment view of man is wrong.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, the enlightenment types believe that we could orient ourselves in the world, let’s say, empirically, that and this is Sam Harris’s proposition. You can abide by the facts. You can orient yourself as a consequence of the dispassionate analysis of the facts. You can’t. And I would say the artificial intelligence engineers have figured that out.

The postmodern literary critics have figured that out. The psychologists and physiologists of perception have figured it out, and the neuroscientists have figured that out. So it’s not just the evidence that that view is necessarily incorrect is overwhelming and multidimensional. You can’t orient yourself by the facts. Why? Because there are as many facts as there are things. In fact, if you combine things, the nature of the combination is also a fact. So there’s as many facts as there are things and combinations of things. Well, you can’t orient yourself by that. That’s you drown in chaos.

It’s like you’re standing in the desert and there’s an infinite number of directions you could go. Well, how do you choose the direction?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that’s showing up in that most recent survey that I just mentioned. People feeling meaninglessness, purposelessness. I’m overwhelmed by—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: In the desert. Yep. They’re lost in the desert. That’s and the desert is the desert of facts. It’s dead facts.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Especially given how few people can agree on, is this a fact or is this counterfact indeed?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s also a problem. It’s not like the facts are necessarily self-evident. Some facts are, and I suppose to some degree, what the scientific corpus is is the elaboration of a set of incontrovertible facts. I’ve read recently that the whole Big Bang narrative is starting to come apart. You know, that was a fact for a long time.

Now I don’t know if that’s the case. I don’t know enough about it, but my sense is that the new discoveries from the Webb Telescope have made many of the presumptions upon which the Big Bang model was based questionable. So now I don’t want to fall down a postmodern rabbit hole because although the issue of what constitutes a fact is a very complicated issue. Anyways, you can cut to the chase by pointing out that we organize facts in a hierarchy of value. And see, the thing about I’m trying to make this case in the book.

You do this when you look at the world. You can’t look at the world except through a hierarchy of value. So for example, as we’re sitting here, there’s an infinite number of places we could be pointing our eyes. Like, I could be talking to you and looking at this little spot on the concrete floor or the spot beside it or the infinite number of spots surrounding it constantly, but I’m not. I’m looking at your eyes.

Okay. Why? Because I’m prioritizing them. So the fact that dominates in this landscape is the fact of your eyes. Why?

I can use your eyes to evaluate our shared focus. Right? And that’s why we look at other people’s eyes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s also why humans have got white around the outside of it.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. It’s so that we can see what other people are attending to so that we can get insight into the story. A story is a description of a hierarchy of value.

Stories and Reality

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Stories can be fantastical, though. Right? If they’re untethered to anything, I can make a Harry Potter as a story.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: If they’re untethered to anything, you won’t find them interesting.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because they won’t resonate.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: They won’t grip you. Yeah. They’re tethered. Stories are tethered to reality in a very, very complicated way because reality isn’t what presents itself moment to moment. There’s a huge debate among philosophers about mathematical abstractions.

Are they real? Well, you could make a case that a mathematical abstraction is more real than the thing from which it’s abstracted. How would you make that case? If you’re a master of mathematics, you master the world. So are the mathematical abstractions more or less real?

Narrative abstractions are abstractions. But you could say, this is what an archetype is. An archetype is a narrative abstraction that’s more real than the world, than the apparent world. It’s behind the scenes. And the biblical corpus is a narrative.

It’s a hyper real narrative. That’s the right way to think about it. It’s more real than real. It’s more real than reality.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How could something that isn’t the thing be more real than the thing?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s exactly the problem with abstraction. Right? Is the idea of a church more real than a given church? Well, it is in some ways because it encapsulates what’s similar across all churches. Right?

So it’s like a platonic ideal. A category is like a platonic ideal. Is it more or less real? Well, you could say that the reality this is what Plato said. The reality is a dim shadow of the essence.

The reality is less real than the ideal. And we certainly and that’s actually in some ways built into our perception. Like, we criticize the things that present themselves to us because they are poor reflections of the hypothetical ideal. You might say, well, the ideal isn’t real. It’s like, well, you could make the opposite argument, which is that the ideal is more real than the thing itself.

And I mean, I can give you an example of these patterns. So in the story of Cain and Abel, you have two patterns of sacrifice. Okay. Why is sacrifice an issue? The reason it’s an issue is because people exist in a sacrificial relationship to the world.

What does that mean? It seems to mean something like human beings are aware of their extended self. You know you’re going to be around tomorrow and next week and next month and next year and five years from now and ten years from now. Now it’s less certain as you go out, but you do have the sense of yourself as something that stretches across the decades. Okay.

And so what that means is that you have to conduct yourself in a manner that isn’t nearly immediate. You have to conduct yourself in a manner that will work across time. Now, how do people do that? They work. Work is a sacrificial gesture.

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

The Nature of Work and Sacrifice

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: So you work by definition, virtually. Work is the sacrifice of the present for the future. I mean, maybe someone can come up with a better definition of work than that, but I don’t think so. It’s like you put in time and effort right now. It’s something even if it’s perhaps not what you’d like to be doing at the moment, you put in time and effort because you believe—what the hell does that mean?

You believe it’ll pay off. Well, is that a contract with the future? Is it a covenant? Because the relationship that the biblical corpus insists characterizes human striving is covenantal. It’s a bargain.

The bargain is you make the right sacrifices and they pay off. That’s the bargain. Now you might say, well, that’s just part of the social contract, but the biblical corpus insists that it’s deeper than that. It’s built into the structure of reality itself. And then if you got the sacrifices right, the future would be paradisal.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve got it in my head that Carl Jung quote, “Beware of unearned wisdom.” That feels like it plays a role here. Like, the work that you need to put in in order to be able to arrive at genuinely knowing the thing, the difference between actually being attractive because who you are is attractive and you being able to be a pickup artist that is able to make the mouth noises and the hand gestures that cause—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Those are the fruits of false sacrifice. You could say that unearned moral reputation is the consequence of false sacrifice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But this is performative empathy, right?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Exactly. On the Internet. Definitely.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s the—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Same as praying in public. “Look at how good I am.” If the “look at” comes before the “how good I am,” right, it really wreaks havoc on the good claim.

Performative Virtue and Hidden Malevolence

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But it’s also—I spoke to Douglas about this. It seems to almost be a predictor. It’s an identifier that you should be a little bit more cautious about what this person could do.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Definitely.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know? Every single person that’s super sweet tea and nicey nicey—Lizzo. Do you see Lizzo was in the news recently?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: She’s the one that got in trouble for abusing her dancers. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Her dancers. Yeah. She made her dancers eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdamian strippers.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s a little on the hedonistic power mad side.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, she was supposed to be, you know, this bastion, like, for the girls and body positivity and all this stuff, but it turned out behind the scenes that she was treating her dancers terribly, body shaming them all of the time, but she was the one upfront that was the vanguard of this particular movement. But you’d seen the same with, was it Jimmy Fallon? I think he was caught up in a furor recently that he was a tyrant to work for and yet out front. Ellen DeGeneres, again the same. It’s almost actually like if somebody is—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s very much like that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Overloading on the sweetie, nicey. “I am here for the underlings” that you go—I’m a little bit suspicious of what’s going on there.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Mmhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you need to proclaim your purity and your good standing, if it’s all words and opinions and not deeds.

The Danger of Using God’s Name in Vain

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: One of the commandments, one of the 10 commandments is do not use God’s name in vain. Now people think that means don’t swear, and it sort of means that. That’s one of its, like, tangential meanings. But what it really means is do not claim divine motivation for self-serving behavior.

Right? And that’s performative compassion. So what you do is you elevate compassion to the highest place. So you make it your God, which is a big mistake because whatever God is, he is not merely compassion. You elevate compassion to the highest place, and then you say, “I feel sorry for people.”

And what that does is elevate your moral status to the highest possible place. Right? It’s completely unearned because this is something JK Rowling got so accurate with her Dolores Umbridge character. Right?

Who’s absolute power magic pirate? King with little kittens. Had the kittens on the plates. It’s like this toxic sentimentality. “I’m so nice.”

It’s like, yeah. I’d like to stay away from you, and your devouring niceness. And the Freudians knew about that in a very sophisticated way very early because the devouring mother, the Oedipal mother is the shadow side of compassion.

The Shallow Pond of Empathy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve been trying to come up with a term for this for a while. I like meaning things into existence, giving them names, useful. And at the moment, the best one I’ve got is the “shallow pond of empathy,” which is, at the moment, something which appeases people and does not cause them any discomfort immediately is always prioritized even if the net effect of that over the long term results in their suffering.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Absolutely. That’s exactly what the Oedipal situation is. It’s the prioritization of short term emotional comfort over medium to long term thriving. Right? Because the mother who kicks the child out of the nest says, this is going to hurt now, but the iterating consequences are positive.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Michelangelo’s Pieta.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Exactly. That’s right. That’s right.

And the moral of that story is that if you give up your children to the world, you will keep them. Right? That’s the sacrifice of Abraham. As Abraham is called upon by God to sacrifice his son, and he says, yes. So he doesn’t have to.

Right? You have to offer up your children to be broken by the world or you lose them. You undermine them. You destroy them. It’s a very paradoxical truth.

We were talking about patterns. Cain is the pattern of inappropriate sacrifice. He does everything second rate. He lies. He omits. He prevaricates. He pretends. He doesn’t offer his best. Abel’s the opposite. He offers his best, which means his light is shining on the hill.

Right? There’s no hiding. He’s giving it everything he’s got. The covenant with God is that if you give it everything you’ve got, you will prevail. And that’s what God tells Cain.

Sacrifice and Faith

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which to go through some of the threads from today. Instinct, staying true to that instinct, honesty, saying what you mean, not prioritizing, avoiding, someone else’s or your discomfort in the short term in order to believe that this is something which is going to make you feel better over the long term.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s a kind of sacrifice right there is that you’re willing to sacrifice your short term physiological and psychological comfort for a medium to long term benefit. It’s the essence of sacrifice to offer—this is something the atheists don’t understand about the biblical narrative is that the narrative insists that we live in a sacrificial relationship. It’s the essence of humanity to live in a sacrificial relationship. It’s like, was that true or not? Well, as you mature, your relationships are more sacrificial.

It’s less about what you in your narrow sense want right now, and it’s more about what’s good over the medium to long run, including other people. Well, that’s a sacrificial relationship. Now the covenant, you know, and this is a matter of faith. It’s the matter of the deepest faith. Do you—are you willing to act out the proposition that the way to make the world reveal itself to you in its most positive guise is for you to adopt the most appropriate sacrificial relationship?

What’s a big risk, isn’t it? Because you have to give up everything. That’s the deal. You give up everything that’s low. Everything.

Everything. Well, that’s what the Christian passion is because the Christian passion is an archetypal story because Christ is the person who sacrifices everything thoroughly, 100%. And the biblical notion is that there’s no difference between that and the descent of the God of the Old Testament into the space of human reality. So God is elaborated as a spirit in the Old Testament. That’s a way of thinking about it.

Fleshed out, right, into the law and the prophets, and Christ presents himself as the embodiment of that. So imagine—here’s the way of thinking about it. You can invite various spirits to possess you. That’s what you do when you give way to rage. That’s what you do when you give way to lust, let’s say.

You allow spirits to possess you. Well, what would you be like if you did nothing but allow the highest of spirits to possess you? Well, that’s the question that’s put forth in the New Testament. And part of the answer to that is if you allowed the highest of all possible spirits to possess you, you would be able to confront everything that life could possibly throw at you. And that’s what happens in the Christian passion because the worst that life can throw at you is the worst tragedy.

And the worst tragedy is the worst death, the worst and most painful death inflicted on the least deserving person. Right? That’s the ultimate reach of tragedy. Okay. That’s not enough.

Christ has to confront that, and he has to confront malevolence. That’s the harrowing of hell. So the idea is that to adapt fully to life, you have to allow yourself to be possessed by the spirit that will enable you to voluntarily face unjust suffering and death and evil. It’s like, well, you got an argument against that? How could it be any other way?

The Weight of Unmade Decisions

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of the things that I think I see people respond to this degree of pressure when they think about what is going to happen long term. I have discomfort that is in front of me now that I need to face, that I need to go through if I’m going to get to something in the future that I think that I’m supposed to do. And one of the solutions that they come up with, which isn’t a solution, but it kind of is to them, is “I’m not going to do anything.”

You know, that, no decision is kind of the same as a neutral choice.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of my friends, Alex, has got this quote which I love, and he says, “The heaviest things in life aren’t iron and gold, but unmade decisions. The reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make and you’re not making them.”

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yep. Yep. That’s yeah. Yep. No doubt about it.

Well, there’s no indecision. Right? There’s only—because you age. Like, you pay for your indecision. It’s a decision. It’s a decision to avoid fundamentally. No. And part of the moral that’s embedded in the story of Job and in the Christian passion is that you can master what you’ll face. And maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s true.

I mean, the clinical literature seems to indicate that it’s true because one of the things you do, if you’re a competent clinician, is you look at what people are attempting to accomplish. And maybe that needs some retooling. But let’s assume that they have a goal in mind that would work. Right? You’ve talked it through with them strategically. They have a well laid out vision. Okay. Now they’re laying out the vision, and they encounter impediments that stop them. And maybe they’re impediments that make them afraid and paralyze them. And so then what you do is you decompose the impediment just as we talked about earlier until you find a way they can advance that constitutes the genuine advance that they’ll actually do.

So what you do is you take the problem and you narrow it until they’ll face it. Then they face it. Then what happens? They get more competent. That’s what happens. And then they get better at facing all problems. So they don’t just learn how to deal with that specific problem. They learn a lesson that generalizes across problems. They get braver.

When you use exposure therapy, people don’t get less afraid. They get braver. That’s way better because braver moves from situation to situation. Okay. So the question is—here’s the question. If you faced everything that was put in front of you, who would you be? Well, the answer—the biblical answer is you’d be a true son of god. That’s the biblical answer. It’s like, well, do you believe that? Well, it depends on what you mean by believe.

Do you think that—do you have a better bet than facing what’s there? Well, you just have to be sensible about it for a moment. It’s like, is your theory that you’re going to adapt better using falsehood and avoidance? Because that’s the contrary theory. You either face it, and you do that predicated on the faith that something in you will respond if you do, or you don’t face it.

Those—that’s it. Those are the options. If you don’t face it, that’s faith too. That’s faith in the notion that avoidance and deception will suffice.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think that for a lot of people, it’s born out of fear. It’s born out of being a people pleaser—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And not wanting to hurt other people around you and not wanting to tell them things that they don’t want to hear or not doing or saying things that you know are going to upset the people that are around you.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. But in the short term again—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: In the short term again, you know, if you look at a good mother, a good mother upsets her kids a lot. “Quit doing that.” Why? Well, why? Why not just let your children do exactly what they want? The answer to that is well, first of all, it terrifies them because kids actually want—they want walls.

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

The Balance Between Freedom and Boundaries

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: They don’t want to be in the desert doing anything they want. They want a walled space in which they have the optimal amount of freedom. So a person who truly loves someone else doesn’t strive at all costs never to upset them. That’s the devouring mother. If you love someone, well, that’s the biblical quote.

You chastise them. What does it mean? It’s like, look. If you love someone and they’re doing something stupid and self-destructive and you can see it, it’s incumbent on you to say, “You know, this is going to upset you. But as far as I can tell, you’re doing something stupid and self-destructive.”

And then there’s going to be a tussle about that because they’re going to say, “Well, who are you to judge?” And that’s a perfectly good question. It’s “What makes you think you’re right? And here’s the reasons I’m doing this. And, you know, these are the terrible experiences that I’ve had that have led me to take this path.”

And sometimes that can be really compelling. You know, you meet people who are bitter and resentful and then they tell you about their life and you think, “Well, yeah.” But then you meet people who’ve had just as terrible a life, who aren’t bitter and resentful. Right? And they’re doing better.

And so even if it seems justifiable, maybe even if it is justifiable, it’s not justifiable.

Confronting Relationship Uncertainty

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of the most common situations I think that this people pleasing tendency would show up in is someone who maybe thinks that they should break up with the relationship but doesn’t do it and sticks about in order to protect their partner. And I found a thread on Reddit that was five questions to ask yourself if you’re unsure about your relationship:

If someone told you, you’re a lot like your partner, would this be a compliment to you? Are you truly fulfilled or just less lonely? Are you able to be unapologetically yourself, or do you feel the need to show up differently to please your partner?

Are you in love with who your partner is right now as a whole, or are you only in love with their good side, their potential, or the idea of them? And would you want your future or imagined child to date someone like your partner?

And this thread was just filled with people having existential crises, and it seemed to me to be a collection of people who had managed to believe that continuing to postpone the discomfort of the decision that they wanted to have around their partner, was somehow the noble thing to do or the good thing to do or the virtuous thing to do or the thing that ultimately would result in the best outcome, even though they knew that if they spread it out long enough and then it’s just hidden, we just shove it under the rug. So, yeah, that list of five questions, I think…

The Necessity of Conflict in Relationships

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, in most relationships, you can break up or you can have a thousand fights. You know? And if you have a thousand fights, then you don’t have to break up. You make peace that way, you know, because you’re different than your partner, so there’s things to work out there. And you might think about that as a compromise, but it’s not.

It’s that you’re different than your partner, and you have to find a game that you both want to play. That’s not a compromise. That’s a solution. It’s like you bring your skills to the table and I bring my skills to the table and then we figure out some game we can play where we’re both optimally utilized and it’s a better game than we could play alone. That’s not a compromise.

Well but getting to that is very difficult, and people bring all sorts of baggage to a relationship. And you have to—it’s just like disciplining children, really. It’s the same thing. Your children are annoying you. You can note that.

“Oh, they’re—I’m being annoyed by my child.” Okay. So what questions do you ask? “Am I a tyrannical son of a bitch who’s touchy?” Well, that’s why you need your wife because you can go ask her.

“My kids are annoying me. Am I a tyrannical son of a bitch who’s touchy?” And she said, “Yeah. You probably need something to eat, or you’re a bit of a prick that way,” or “You gotta listen because maybe it’s you.” Or maybe she says, “Yeah. That goddamn child’s been getting on my case too.” And then you ask each other, “Are we mutually tyrants?” It’s like, “No. That kid’s annoying.” Okay.

Do we want him to be annoying? Well, if you love your child, then the answer to that would be no. Because if he’s annoying you, he’s gonna annoy other people. He’s gonna annoy his potential friends. He’s gonna annoy other adults.

He’s gonna go through the world being annoying, and everyone’s gonna frown at him. That’s not helpful. So then you could just fix it, and that’s gonna cause some short term upset. You know, you’re maybe you have a 13-year-old child who’s very extroverted and disagreeable who, like, rules the roost. And every time the mother goes more than a foot away from her, she has a squawk fit because she’s learned to control.

Maybe the mother, you know, was still tied up with infant care and can’t put down a boundary. And so now you have to do something about this emerging monster of a 14-year-old child. And one of the things you do is every time the child is bossy, first of all, you note it, and you note that you’re not very fond of yourself for being tyrannized by a 14-year-old. That’s a bit of a status hit like it should be. So you have to notice, “I’m annoyed by this child.”

Then I should do something about it. Well, it’s gonna cause short term emotional distress. The same thing occurs when you’re dealing with your partner. It’s like, “You’re annoying me.” Okay.

Now maybe that’s me. So I should bloody well maybe we should have a talk about that. “You’re annoying me. Convince me that it’s me, and I should listen because maybe it’s me. And if I’m annoyed about you and I shouldn’t be, I should fix that.”

But maybe it’s you. So let’s find out exactly what’s going on. You know? And that’ll usually—man, that’ll—there’s just constant thrust and counter thrust in a discussion like that. And usually, you know, the conversational circle around whatever the hell the issue is till you get to the bottom of it, and God only knows where that is.

But then maybe you can sort it out. You know? And if you sort out enough of those things, you live in peace. And that’s something worth attaining. You know?

Addressing Small Issues Before They Grow

And I’ve thought forever in my marriage, there’s nothing—there’s nothing too small to fight about. Now, you know, I put in some rules that I used to have with my clients too. It’s like, if someone bugs you, you should note that, and you shouldn’t do anything about it probably. If they bug you twice the same way, then you think, “Oh, okay. That’s twice.”

But probably still you shouldn’t do anything about it. But if they bug you three times, then you can say, “Here’s what you just did.” And they’ll say, “Well, no. I didn’t do that.” And then you say, “Yeah. You did. And you did exactly the same thing in this other situation, and you did exactly the same thing in this other situation. So don’t be telling me you didn’t do it because you did it three times and I watched.”

Okay. Now they come up with reasons they did it. And maybe some of them have to do with what a stupid son of a bitch you are. And you should listen because maybe they’re right. But that’s at least the beginnings of the process by which you unravel the problems. You want to figure out, “Well, we don’t want to do this. This isn’t the way we want to treat each other.”

We want to get to a place where our whole life is like the best moments of the best dates we ever had. That’s a good goal. And that’s attainable. You gotta work, man. There’s a scene in Genesis, God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise because of their pride, their sin of pride.

They each have their own particular version of that sin, Eve’s sin and Adam’s, but they get thrown out of paradise anyways for pride. And God puts cherubs at the gates of paradise, and the cherubs, they’re kind of these monstrous angels, terrifying figures, and they hold swords that are on fire that turn every which way and burn. And you might say, well, what does that mean? And it means that well, a sword is something that cuts away. Right?

A sharp blade. And, and fire is something that burns. And a sword that burns burns and cuts away. And a sword that burns and turns every which way is a burning sword from which nothing can escape. Okay.

Now you want to walk into paradise. Everything that isn’t worthy in you has to be burned and cut away. Right? Well, that’s what that conflict is in a relationship. You know, it’s like that’s not suitable for paradise.

What does it have to do? It has to be cast into the outer darkness where there will be gnashing of teeth. Right? It has to be cut away and destroyed, and everything that isn’t worthy has to go.

The Michelangelo Effect

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, the Michelangelo effect is all about you and your partner becoming the idealized version of each other. Right? You are going to do for me the things that I want within your parameters of control that you want to be the best partner for me, and I want to do the same for you. And we’re both going to communicate to each other, and we’re going to stand our ground where we have boundaries, and we’re going to continue to compromise what we love.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Should do. Yeah. That’s what love should do. Like, if you love someone, if it’s genuine love, you see their hidden soul. That’s a good way of thinking about it. You get a glimpse of the light that they could reveal to the world if they revealed it. That’s what you see. And then to act in love is to encourage that to come forward and to discourage anything that gets in its way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s why I love the Michelangelo effect I’d heard of, and I’ve been using it.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: So why the Michelangelo effect?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is why. Michelangelo sees this huge, massive, unhewn block of marble.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: I see. I see.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And inside of that, he is able to see David. And over time, slowly, he will chip away, and he will chip away, and he will chip away. So you see something that isn’t there that’s inside of the thing, which is rough and unhewn and uncivilized and undomesticated and rambunctious and sometimes terrible. And you were able to, from that…

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s actually part of the uncarved block. So a child is an uncarved block in the Daoist view, and you remove everything that’s excess until what’s perfect remains. Right? And that’s—see, the logos in the old and new testament, the logos that creates the world is the judging faculty that separates the wheat from the chaff.

Right? And it’s not—it’s compassion in a sense because if you’re compassionate towards someone, you want what’s best for them, all things considered. But that compassion in the highest sense can’t exist without judgment because the judgment is this part of you isn’t worthy to continue. And certainly, that’s what you’re doing with your children when you see them misbehaving. You think, “No. That’s no. Not that. Not that. Something more sophisticated.”

Setting Boundaries with Children

Even with my little granddaughter the other day, she’s very, very playful, and she’s a very nice little girl. She’s very playful and very fun and funny and not neurotic. And so she’s a pleasure to be around. But she hasn’t seen me for a while, and so she was poking me, getting me to chase her around and poking me. And she come up and give me a whack, you know. And at one point, she whacked me too hard.

And she knew it, and I said, “That’s not fun. That’s not acceptable.” And then she stopped. But she was playing with that edge trying to find out where fun is and, you know, can—how hard can I hit grandpa? She does bloody well know.

She kinda knows, but she needs to know exactly. Well, I can’t let her get away with it because then she’s not fun to play with. She has to learn to come and give her grandpa a whack in exactly the way that elicits a playful response and that isn’t annoying. And so there’s a very—you know, you might think, well, it’s pretty harsh judgment to lay on a five-year-old. It’s like, no. It’s not. I would like her to be the most fun kid to play with that she could be. Right? And so I’m not gonna pretend that it’s okay when it’s not.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not setting that boundary is almost like a curse.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: It is a curse. Yeah. There you go.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We would—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because then how is she gonna play with other—with other kids if she doesn’t know—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’re not gonna be as forgiving as grandpa.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Definitely not. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We were talking before we got started. I had this conversation with Robert Sapolsky, and it was really, really profound. I mean, I know that he’s a brilliant guy, and this new book of his is about sort of free will and determinism, which has got an upper bound on how interesting that is for me. But he gave this quote to Andrew Heumann where he said “dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness, it is about the happiness of pursuit.”

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Mhmm. Right. That’s definitely right. And—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON:

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

The Journey vs. Destination

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I haven’t been able to stop seeing this everywhere. So, Morgan Housel, a friend told me this great story. He is an investor. He’s got a fund. He’s an author. He’s got a family. He’s got all of these things. They plan to go away on holiday.

And they’ve been planning it for a long time, and with the kids and the wife and him and all of his businesses, it was an arduous thing to go through to get themselves out there. And finally, they get there after the journey and the plane and the children and the crying and all of the rest of it. And he walks out on the balcony on the first night of this holiday that they’ve planned for forever. And his first thought to himself was, wouldn’t it be great if we came back here next year? It would be so great if we could come back here next year.

So literally during the supposed enjoyment of the destination, he was already thinking about the journey.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And, you know, “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” is kind of trite, but it puts a new perspective on it. There is no destination. Each destination is simply the beginning of the next journey.

And I haven’t been able to not see it. I see it everywhere. I see it everywhere in my own life.

Different Forms of Reward

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, there’s technically two different forms of reward. There’s consummatory reward. And so that’s the reward. That’s what an orgasm is. It’s consummatory reward.

It brings the behavioral and perceptual sequence to a halt. It ends it. Right? At the climax, it ends it. But then it’s over. That journey is over.

Then there’s the dopaminergic reward that Sapolsky was talking about, and dopaminergic reward is evidence of advancement towards a goal.

So there’s a corollary to that. Well, how do you become optimally engaged? Because dopamine facilitates engagement and focus, which is why drugs like amphetamines can be used for kids who are attention deficit disordered. You tap up the dopamine response, they lock on.

So they’re locking on to a goal directed pursuit. The problem with amphetamines is that they can lock you on so hard you can’t get out of the frame. So, like, kids on amphetamines will obsess, for example, cleaning up their closet. They can’t switch to the next activity.

Dopaminergic reward is reward that’s accrued in relationship to a goal. So what’s an implication of that? Pursue the highest possible goal.

Why? Because the kick from advancement is higher. Now you have to balance that. It can’t be you have to advance. Right?

Because imagine the rewards got two components. Number one is you’re moving towards something valuable. So you want it to be as valuable as possible.

But you have to be moving. So it can’t be so valuable that it’s out of your reach. If you’re

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: going to walk to the moon, I’m not going to be able to see every single increment that I make.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes. You want to get to the moon. That’s right. You can’t walk there. So it’s a bad plan.

You need something extremely valuable that you can move towards. So part of the reason that you establish a relationship with God, let’s say, is because that’s what sets the upper bound to your vision. It’s like I want things to be the best they could be. That’s a vision of paradise.

Well, that has to be fractionated into, you know, your proximal decisions, but lurking behind that should be this continual movement towards, what would you say, a heaven that recedes as you approach it. That’s the proper vision of heaven. A heaven is a place that’s perfect and getting better, both at the same time. That’s what music shows you because a great piece of music is perfect, but it’s just getting better as it unfolds. And you need that.

This is part of the problem with a static utopian vision, something Dostoevsky criticized. If you gave people nothing but consummatory reward, he famously says, so that they can do nothing but sit in tubs of hot water, eat cake, and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, Human beings would break that all to hell in a moment just so they have something interesting to do.

The Desire for Lack

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What was that quote that you said on Rogan years ago, if we were to make the world sufficiently perfect, the only desired lack would be for the desire of lack itself? What’s that? What is Kierkegaard. What’s the profit?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Can you remember the profit? Well, Kierkegaard pointed out that if we make the world easier and easier, so this is perhaps part of the problem with the material plenty that’s at hand, is that at some point, what becomes lacking is lack itself.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yes. Yes.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It’s optimal deprivation.

You know? And if everything is delivered to you on a platter, it’s like, what the hell are you even doing there? This happens in the story of Abraham. So Abraham, who’s the father of nations. Right?

So Abraham gets it right. He has everything at the beginning of the story. He has rich parents. He’s got nothing that he has to do. He’s like 70 when the story opens. He’s been taken care of hand and foot his whole life. And the voice of God comes to him and says, I’m the God of your ancestors telling you, get out of your zone of comfort. Get out into the world. And Abraham’s pretty old by this point. But for whatever reason, he decides that he’s going to forego the comfort for the adventure.

And then as Abraham progresses, he makes the requisite sacrifices, each becoming more difficult as he ascends. And he adopts this pattern of relationship with the God that calls them to adventure that literally makes them the father of nations. And so you can even think about that biologically if you want. You might as well. People like Dawkins think reproduction is sex, and that’s why he can talk, for example, about the selfish gene making itself manifest in sex.

Reproduction isn’t sex. Sex is a necessary but insufficient precondition for reproduction. Abraham adopts a mode of being, a sacrificial mode of being that establishes the optimal environment for his sons, who then established the optimal environment for their sons and their sons and their sons. So you can imagine that what Abraham is doing, this is what the story means, is he’s adopting a mode of behavior that works best all things considered across multiple generations, And he sacrifices everything to that. It’s this incredibly expansive vision.

Finding Difficulty in a Comfortable World

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Given that we’re in a world which is comfortable and we have created buildings in which there are heavy things that you pick up and put down in the same place because it’s simply so rare that you have to pick up heavy things. Right?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Right.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: The proliferation bumps on the roads

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: for the same reason. Proliferation of ice baths and sauna and even reading to some extent, you know, difficult reading difficult things. Where should people go given that they are in a world which is more comfortable than ever before? Where should they go to encourage them to find difficult channels?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Truth is what’s optimally difficult. The truth is optimally difficult. That’s a really wonderful thing to know. The truth is adventure. There’s no distinction.

Partly because if you’re going to just say what you believe to be true, you have to let go of the consequences. You can’t predict the consequences. Well, there’s no difference between not being able to predict the consequences and having an adventure. They’re the same thing. Right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because if you knew the consequences, it wouldn’t be an adventure.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s not an adventure if the consequences are foregone.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The same as it’s no sacrifice or courage if there’s no risk.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. Right. It’s exactly the same. And so it’s a wonderful thing to know that optimized adventure is to be had in the truth.

Think in every given situation. So Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount that to orient yourself properly, and it’s often viewed as this hippie paean. Take no thought of the moral. The moral will take care of itself. You know, God takes care of the sparrows. He’ll certainly take care of you. It’s like a hippie wet dream. It isn’t what that isn’t the core of the message. The core of the message is very straightforward. Christ says, aim up to the highest thing you can possibly imagine.

So that’s the relationship with God. You put what’s at the pinnacle properly at the pinnacle and you aim at that. And then you concentrate that and it’s that and treating other people like you would like to be treated yourself. That sets the moral frame. Then you attend to the day and the cares of the day.

It’s like once you’ve established the proper moral frame, you pay attention to the day and you live in truth, and that moves you towards that destination. You have to have the orientation right. You have to be aiming up. But then it’s just a matter of, what would you say, abiding by the truth. That’s the logos that sets people free and doing it right.

Nothing Well Done Is Insignificant

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Doing it properly. Right? There was one of the other rules that didn’t make it into your book. Nothing well done is insignificant.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah.

Well, you accrue so Christ tells his followers in the gospels to store up treasure in heaven, not in the places that moss can eat and rust can destroy. Well, what is that what is meant by that? Well, it’s meant by the same it means the same thing that you just pointed to, which is that if you run yourself through a disciplinary process, so you accomplish something. Maybe it doesn’t you don’t attain the goal you were aiming at, but you accrue a new way of looking at the world in a set of skills. Well, if you just keep doing that, you have multiple ways of looking at the world and more and more skill.

Well, that’s that’s your storehouse of treasure. You know, the reason women use wealth as a proxy for attractiveness is because wealth is a proxy for competence. It’s not competence because you can be rich and useless. Now it’s not that easy, but it can at least happen temporarily. But women use markers of wealth to assess competence.

And the competence is the treasure, not the wealth. Because if you’re competent, you could be thrown into the desert and you’ll make it bloom.

The Story Behind Physical Appearance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve said this about people that go to the gym. So from the outside, someone that goes to the gym and has got a good body or whatever, this is the body and this is what you get to touch during sex when you’re intimate. Right? But the story that someone who has a good body tells you about the sort of person that they are is much more important, I think, than the way that it manifests physically. It’s someone who is reliable, who is able to overcome hard things, who is self disciplined. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a marker for just this whole big long laundry list of things. They’re able to deal with pain and discomfort which is kind of sexy in a way.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well and it’s the perfect materialist disciplinary strategy, right, because it’s very concrete.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mhmm.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well you change your body. It’s like, is that a spiritual pursuit? Well, it is insofar as it requires, you know, long term discipline and sacrifice. And you might hope, and I think this is likely the case, that, you know, you can get stuck in the bodily self improvement niche and focus on that too obsessively, but you can also use it as a stepping stone to discipline pursuit itself, and lots of people do that.

The Manopause and Reassessing Values

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think I told you the last time that we chatted about the manopause, this thing that I’d come up with so I noticed toward the end of my twenties that lots of guys who had been training with a particular modality, usually bodybuilding, usually exclusively for the way that they looked, realized as they approached their thirties that they were getting out of breath going up a set of stairs and that they maybe couldn’t touch their toes, and they looked fantastic. But no. They just felt like they should maybe start to value different things, And they then changed their training, and they would go and do Brazilian jiu jitsu or yoga or CrossFit or, you know, some other form of whatever. And that precipitated a change in everything else. And I saw this in myself.

Right? I get toward the end of my twenties. I’ve achieved success in many of the ways that society tells a young man that he should value success. There was a discordance. Something felt off.

And you then think, okay, well, maybe I need to assess whether or not the things that I’ve been told I should want are things that I actually want to want. And very quickly, you realize I don’t know. It feels like a quarter life crisis. I think so many men go through this. They go, I either succeeded or didn’t succeed at a game that I was told that I was supposed to value playing.

And upon reflection, I really don’t care for it as much as I thought I did. Mhmm. Maybe there was some elements. I was so proud of what I’d done with my business partners. I was so proud of the things that we’d achieved.

But then there was other stuff where I was like, why have I attached so much of my sense of self worth into this and this and this? And then you start you have to assess.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON:

# How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs

The Burning Bush: A Metaphor for Transformation

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: The difference is what happens in the story of Exodus when Moses encounters the burning bush. So he’s just going about his business as a shepherd, and he’s doing alright. He’s got two wives. He likes his father-in-law. He’s well regarded in this new country that he’s in.

He’s left Egypt where there’s a price on his head essentially for killing an Egyptian who was tormenting one of the Hebrews. Anyways, Moses is just going about his business as a shepherd, which was a very tough job in those days. And this thing catches his eye, this glimmer, this clean, and he goes to investigate.

So what does that mean? It means as you’re progressing through life, something will capture your interest. And in the story you just told, it’s like somebody decides they’re going to start going to the gym. There’s something about becoming physically fit that calls to them, which is an interesting thing. Because it calls to them.

It’s not even necessarily a decision they make. It’s more like a possibility that makes itself manifest that’s of interest. So they decide to pursue it. So they look into it more deeply. Well, so Moses approaches the burning bush, and he gets closer and closer.

A bush is a symbol of life. Like, it’s a tree, a tree of life. And a tree of life that’s on fire is being, that’s the life, the tree, and becoming, that’s the fire, the transformation.

So a burning bush is the symbol of being and becoming as such. Now it’s something that beckons. So now you pursue your physical fitness because it’s called to you. And you concentrate more and more on it.

You get more and more disciplined. But as you get more and more disciplined, you start to transform. And so your vision starts to change. Now what happens to Moses is that as he gets closer and closer to the burning bush, he starts to realize that he’s on sacred ground.

So he’s going deeper. The investigation is taking him deeper. So he takes off his shoes and continues to approach. He’s still going down the same trail, pursuing this thing. And then the voice of God itself speaks to him from the midst of the burning bush.

And that’s what turns him into a leader. And so what does the story mean? It means that as you walk through life in your normal mode, things will call to you. And if you pursue them, they will take you deep. It doesn’t really matter what it is that calls. What matters is that you pursue it and you pursue it to the depths. And as you pursue it to the depths, you will become transformed.

And if you do that without reservation, that will turn you into the person who frees the slaves and opposes the tyrants. And that is how it works. That’s the call.

And that can happen in any direction, virtually any direction. You just have to pursue it with sufficient faith.

The Value of University Education

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of the things that’s been, I guess, derogated a lot by pretty much everybody at the moment is university education. And I had such an interesting time at university almost exclusively outside of my education. All of the good things that happened to me while I spent five years at Newcastle didn’t include what I was taught.

It was never inside of the lecture theater. It was everything I was doing outside of that. And lots of my friends, and it’s very trendy on the Internet too, mock higher education as useless pieces of paper. It’s not you don’t need it in order to be able to be successful. It’s certainly the thing that I’ve ended up doing.

This podcast didn’t require me to go to university. Maybe in some ways it did. But definitely from a qualification perspective, it didn’t. But I think I’m still relatively pro university experience.

And, you know, you’ve got Peterson Academy launching, which is your new thing. I wondered how you thought – basically, are universities salvageable given that so much that’s good about the university experience has almost nothing to do with the education side of it?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Are they salvageable? Some are, I imagine. Hillsdale does great. It’s a conservative college in Northeastern US run by Larry Arnn.

They have a 1% dropout rate as opposed to the typical 50% dropout rate. And they provide a classical, what used to be a liberal education, liberal arts education. It’s a more conservative enterprise given how the Overton window has shifted. But Larry’s students concentrate on physical fitness. His philosophy department tends to meet in the weight room, which is pretty interesting.

He has weight benches scattered all around the campus. About a third of the students take music courses, so the place is very musical. It’s a very disciplined place. The quality of education is extremely high. So there are institutes that are holding to their mandate.

I think that’s rare, and I think, overall, the universities have become irretrievably corrupt as far as I can tell. And so we had hoped that we could provide something approximating an alternative, but you put your finger on one of the complexities in doing that. It’s easy to think that a university is the transmission of knowledge from experts to empty vessels, the students, let’s say. So it’s lectures, tests, and accreditation. But that’s not really what a university is.

It’s an apprenticeship. If you’re fortunate when you go to university, you find a professor or two that you can work with who really teach you how to think. They’re usually those professors are generally quite rare and you’re fortunate if you do establish a relationship like that, especially at a big university where the student to faculty ratio is absurdly high, like 200 to one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was in lecture theaters that were 300 to one. I didn’t get a relationship like that with any of my professors.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. And that’s really not good because you need an apprenticeship relationship to become educated fundamentally. We started this. We’re formulating Peterson Academy.

We’re hoping that we can provide people with extremely high quality lectures. I’m fortunate as you are to be able to reach out to people who are charismatic and well educated, and we offer them a good financial deal and we treat them very well. And they come down to Miami and they record a relatively short lecture series, eight hours. And, we’re implementing state of the art testing procedures, and we’re going to be giving out a certificate that you will have to earn to acquire. And so we’re hoping that the quality of our graduates will be such that the certificate will speak for itself as a marker for conscientiousness and educated expertise.

We’ll see. We’re also building out the social side of it because as you pointed out, a huge part of what happens to you when you go to university is social and socialization. You get to make a whole new group of friends. It’s a big deal.

It’s one of those times in your life where you can parcel off who you were and you can become something new.

Reinventing Yourself

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, you remember every single summer, at least for me, maybe this is because I was chronically so unpopular in school. I would come back every summer, imagining that I would be able to reinvent myself. I’m going to be the cool kid this year. I’m going to be the sporty kid this year or whatever. But the big one is age 18 because you’re not even in the same town.

No one even knows who you are. No one even knows what to think about who you are.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And, that for me was the big inflection point of me going from the child that I was to the sort of young adult that I was going to end up with.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. Well, if you’re fortunate, you have a number of times where that happens – make a relatively clean break and you can invent yourself anew.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just to interject that, there’s an idea called monk mode, which has kind of become a bit of a meme online, but I first read about this years ago, and it involves an extended period of isolation to work on yourself, to reflect on your flaws, to kind of do the inner work, to introspect. It’s usually tied in with meditation, with improving your diet, with improving your physical fitness, your mental fitness, all of these different things. And, that I’ve almost seen it as if doing that and focusing on yourself for a short space of time that’s very, very – you know, it’s maybe a couple of months really, really focusing on you.

Still going about and doing your work and doing the rest of the things, but outside of that, just really, really trying to make yourself as good as possible. Periodizing that, for me, was one of the most powerful inflections aside from the lifestyle change.

The Power of Confession and Self-Examination

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, that’s what confession is supposed to be fundamentally. I mean, when you take stock of yourself, you confess. You confess to yourself and you make your sins a reality. You assess yourself for your insufficiency, and you proclaim your insufficiencies. And that well, then you can start working on them.

It’s like, it’s painful. Here’s all the things that I’m not. Here’s all the things that I’m not that I would like to be. That’s painful self examination.

But the advantage is you get all your problems on the table. And the advantage to that is that problem by problem, there’s likely some hope. Like, for example, you said you were unpopular when you were a teenager, but that doesn’t mean that you had to carry that forward into university. There was a possibility that – so how did you get out of that? What did you do?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The main reason, I think, was that I didn’t really understand how to relate to other kids. So I found myself obsessing over the way that other kids would wear their shirts or tie their ties or the sort of shoes that they would wear.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Right. So you were looking at external models.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was and that’s why they had friends and I didn’t. And I didn’t realize that it was just I wasn’t socially adept. I didn’t understand how to relate to other kids very well. And I think I just got to the stage, especially when I went to university, that I’d spent enough time for me to have learned at least some rough hewn social skills and now finally was able to sort of cast off some of the presuppositions that had maybe been following me.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: What were the opening points for you? Like, do you remember the first friendship you made in university?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, yeah. The guys that I lived with.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: So these were roommates?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Okay. That’s a thing that’s hard to duplicate online. Because having a group of roommates is a formative experience.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It was crazy for me. I didn’t know because, again, only child, two parents living in a small house. I didn’t know that you were supposed to knock on someone’s bedroom door before you were to go in. I’d never done that.

I spent my eighteen years, I’d never had to knock on anybody’s bedroom door. Because, like, mom and dad are down like, who else is there? I’m not gonna knock on the kitchen door to see if the dogs would mind me going into the kitchen. And so many of those things, I’m looking back on it now. It’s so ridiculous not knowing that that was something that you were supposed to do.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, not knowing those elementary skills, though, that can be a huge impediment. You know, I have people in my clinical practice. We spent hours practicing how to introduce them and to shake hands because you want to be expert at that. Because if you’re not good at that at all, like, if you’re really bad at it, you’re screwed.

You can’t even tell someone your name. And so how are you going to make a friend then? You announce yourself as incompetent with your first move. And then if you do if that happens to you 10 times, you’re so terrified.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Disincentivized.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Terribly. Terribly. And so you should become expert at that. That’s something you can do with your kids so they can become expert at introducing themselves.

You know? Shake hands. Do it with a bit of a firm grip. Look at the other person. Try smiling. Match your tempo to the other person.

The Danger of Online Personas

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Another dynamic that I’ve been thinking about recently, I was at a retreat in LA a few months ago, and one of the guys that was there had said he’d stopped talking and writing on the Internet because he noticed that the story he was telling in public, he began feeling the necessity to live up to in private.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And I think that whether you’re a writer or just someone that’s got 500 followers on your Instagram and a Facebook from back in the day or whatever, there is an online persona that people put forward that they then almost feel is more real than what they are, and then they try and reverse engineer themselves to fit this new…

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s the problem with writing essays that contain what your professor wants to hear. So you can’t do that without altering your soul. You can’t do that. You cannot construct for yourself a false persona designed to extract resources from the world without that becoming part of you. Like, there’s no one is that sophisticated.

The Danger of Falsehood

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: No one can have two selves like that. And it’s part of the reason why you have to be very careful about what you say and do is that when you practice falsehood, you become false. It’s not like those are beliefs that are just in your head. You rewire yourself so you start to literally see the world through the frame of your falsehoods. That’s a very bad plan.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve heard you say, if you say things long enough, you’re going to believe them.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: You become them. It’s even worse than believing them. It’s deeper than that. They’re built into you as unquestioned implicit axioms.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And as we said earlier on, this can go in either direction. Right? You can fake it until you make it one small step at a time moving toward a vision which you know is positive, and you continually reassess to ensure that you’re not getting hijacked and going in the wrong direction.

The Pinocchio Metaphor

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yes. Or you can do a generated so look. In the Disney Pinocchio movie, which I’ve analyzed to death…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’ll miss the Pinocchio. Yep. World leading Pinocchio scholar.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: So Pinocchio exactly. Exactly. Pinocchio is trying to get rid of the strings that pull on him every which way that aren’t under his control and to become something genuine. Okay. So he has three basic temptations.

One is to lie. Right? So that’s the nose. Another is to be an actor. And when I first came across that in the movie, I thought, what the hell is going on here?

One of Pinocchio’s temptations is to be an actor. Now why would the Hollywood people do that? Why would they denigrate the actor? And then I thought, oh, it’s not an actor. It’s a false persona.

To be the actor instead of the real thing. To be the appearance instead of the reality. To take the credit instead of doing the work. Right? To be false.

Next temptation is to be neurotic. It’s so interesting, especially in the world that we have now, how perspicacious these animators were. Pinocchio is literally enticed onto the Island Of Pleasure by a false doctor who diagnoses them with an illness he doesn’t have. And the story is, look how sick you are. You’re working too hard.

You need to go to Pleasure Island. Well, Pleasure Island is run by slavers. Right? So it’s perfect. Well, be careful what you practice.

Be careful what you practice. Right? You can be the actor of your own ideal, and that’s a way of stepping forward. But when you make false claims to who you are to gain status in consequence, you are perverting your soul. What’s the soul?

The soul is something like the structure through which the world reveals itself to you. It’s something like that. So you don’t see much of the world. Right? You see it through narrow apertures.

You see what you allow in. That’s another way of thinking about it. You better make sure it’s the bright part of the world revealing itself to you. And that isn’t going to be the case if you lie.

Attention vs. Intellect

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of the problems, I think, that a lot of the people listening to this podcast and certainly a lot of my friends who are smart and cerebral encounter, they think themselves into problems, and they struggle to use their intuition because they are able to come up with a reason about why they should or should not at any moment. You know, talking about the soul or the inner voice or the conscience or, you know, you might refer to it as God that’s coming through the best version of yourself. People that ruminate and introspect are very capable of talking themselves into or out of something that feels like there is—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: They worship the intellect.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How would you advise somebody who enjoys thinking about things deeply—

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Mhmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: To cast that off and be able to hear themselves a little bit more clearly?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: There’s a difference between attention and intellect. There’s something to be said for paying attention. It’s not the same thing. Like, the intellect let’s say the intellect produces thoughts. The attention gathers information.

Right? So if I’m, well, if I’m conducting a podcast, let’s say, I’m paying attention to what I don’t understand. I’m not thinking. It’s not the same thing. I mean, sometimes I think because the person will say something and it’ll set off a train of thoughts.

But often what I’m just doing is like, well, do I understand what you just said? That’s a matter of attention. I have to note my ignorance. I’m attending to my ignorance. Well, this is what Rogan’s great at this.

You’re great at this as well. If you attend to your ignorance, then you know what to do. You just ask the question. It’s like, well, I don’t understand this. That’s a form of humility to attend to your ignorance.

That’s a good thing for those who worship the Luciferian intellect to do, is to attend to their own ignorance. It’s not about what you know. It’s about what you don’t know. You already know what you know. So why not investigate what you don’t know?

Well, how do you do that? You attend to your ignorance. What’s the definition of humility? Humility is attending to your ignorance, and you can do that wherever you are.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that not still an intellectual exercise? Here are the holes in what I know, therefore, I’m just going to continue to ask the questions until I fill them.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, it’s not something completely divorced from… It’s the difference between questioning and answering. Like, I would say, this is, let’s say, definitional. The Luciferian intellect has an answer.

The Luciferian Intellect

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s when you say Luciferian intellect, what’s that?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: The Luciferian intellect is the intellect that wants to place itself in the highest position. And there’s lots of people, smart people tend to be Luciferian because they think that their fundamental value is their intelligence. And they think that intelligence is the fundamental value. And then they’re often very annoyed if they’re very bright and the world doesn’t lay itself out at their feet because they think, well, I’m so smart. Everything should just be coming my way.

Because they prided themselves on that. It’s like and intellectual pride, well, that might be the cardinal sin. The Luciferian intellect is the intellect that wants to put itself in the highest position. It challenges God. That’s what Satan is.

That’s what Lucifer is literally in the Miltonian story is Lucifer is the spirit who attempts to usurp God. That’s what the communists did. That’s what the fascists did. That’s what we do when we build Towers Of Babel. And we can easily elevate the intellect to the highest possible place, especially smart people.

They do that all the time. It’s better to attend to what you don’t know. This is why Rogan’s a very good example of this because Rogan is not an intellectual. He’s a seeker. Those aren’t the same thing.

Rogan is always like a bloodhound. He’s on the path of what he doesn’t know. And the consequence of that is he knows a lot. You know? 2,000 podcast, 2,500 podcast.

He’s done, like, 2,500 high level graduate seminars, something like that. It’s crazy. And so his questions get better and better as he fills in the gaps. Is it intellectual? No.

No. It’s not. It’s there’s a difference between an intellectual pursuit and a spiritual pursuit, and the remediation of your own ignorance is a spiritual pursuit. It’s predicated on humility. How am I stupid? How can I fix that?

One of the things I really taught my kids, tried to teach them was ask stupid questions. Right? And that means you have to admit to your own insufficiency.

That’s what humility is. And then you have to publicly announce it. Here’s how I’m stupid. Can you fix me? And, you know, sometimes that is embarrassing, although much less frequently than people think.

Usually, if you’re in a crowd and you have a stupid question and you’ve been paying attention, 80% of the crowd has the same question. And they’re relieved that you asked it. In fact, they’ll think you’re brave. It’s so interesting. Because you’re afraid.

When you ask a question, if you’re in a university seminar, you’re afraid that what you’re going to do is expose your stupidity and be shamed. And what happens is exactly the opposite. Is everybody who’s too cowardly to ask that question now thinks that you’re courageous. It’s exactly the opposite of what you think.

Yeah. That happens all the time. Always in my graduate seminars, the kids that asked the most ignorant questions, assuming they were paying attention. Because you can ask a stupid question. You know?

Stupid question is you’re fiddling with your phone and the class has just covered something and you didn’t notice and you ask. Well, you know, clue in. That’s not a real question. That’s just you’re just wasting people’s time.

But if you’re genuinely ignorant I never had a student who asked a genuine question that I thought was a stupid question. Never. And I’d never treat a student that way. It’s like, no. No.

If you’re if you… it’s so cool too because sometimes the stupidest questions cut to the heart of the chase. You know, it’s the kids who would ask a really basic question that also forced me to really understand what I was teaching. And that’s a reflection of their humility. It’s that humility in the pursuit of the ideal. That’s not an intellectual exercise. Not in the strict sense. It’s definitely what generates knowledge, though.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That seems to be a good stepping block toward earned wisdom as well.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: That’s earned wisdom. Yep. Yep. Earned wisdom through humility. Right.

What’s Next for Peterson

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What have you got coming up next? What can people expect from you over the next few months?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, what I’m working on right now is I’m going to finish this book hopefully by December. It’ll be published in November, but I’m going to go on tour, weirdly enough, about the book probably starting in January. I’m going to do an American tour, and then I think I’m going to go to Africa and to South America and to Southeast Asia. That’s the plan.

And I’m very excited about this new book. I’m hoping it’ll be the best book that I’ve ever written. It’s going to be more difficult book than the last two were, but not as difficult as Maps of Meaning.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which I presume.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. It’s more… it’s heavy. It’s deeper.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you been fighting with trying to make it accessible?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: No. Not really. Right. I’ve been just trying to lay the argument out as clearly as I can. Like and I think that’ll do the trick.

And I have to go over it again and edit it and make sure that it’s no more obscure than is absolutely necessary. No. I want to lay it out so that it’s comprehensible. And I’ve had a lot of success with the biblical ventures that I’ve already embarked on. I did a series on Genesis in 02/2017, which turned out to be quite influential.

And then I just did a seminar on Exodus with a group of thinkers, and I know there’s a hunger for analysis of deep stories. And I also have good people around me that can help me grind my way through the stories and understand them. And so I’m very much looking… I’ve been having quite a good time writing this book, actually. It’s very difficult to write, but it’s been extremely exciting and interesting. And I’m hoping… you asked me earlier, what would I consider success with this book.

I don’t think that you’ll be able to read this book and understand it and be atheistic. I think I can demolish the atheistic argument permanently. And it’s partly… it’s a weird thing because it’s not like all of a sudden people are going to throw themselves at the feet of God and worship. It’s like it requires a reconsideration of what we mean by belief.

And I walked through some of it. It’s like, do you believe in the good? Well, there the difference between believing in good and believing in God is it’s a very narrow difference. Now there are important differences, but it’s still a narrow difference. And the thing is if you don’t believe in good, you’re aimless.

And if you’re aimless, you’re hopeless. And if you’re aimless and hopeless, you’re anxious and fractionated, and people can’t unite in their beliefs. Like, the alternative is not good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Reversing the enlightenment is no small task.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, hopefully, we can save the best of the enlightenment as well.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s like, the, Chesterton’s fence of Chesterton’s fence. Like, how many different fences are in the field, so to speak, and if we turn this one out, we’re trying to plug it back in, but which bit of it’s going back in the ground?

Science and Religion

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Things that’s very interesting, and I think people like Dawkins have started to realize this, and I know that people like Douglas Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Neil Ferguson have recognized this, is that with the death of God, many other things die. Things you don’t expect. And one of the things that dies when God dies is science, and no one expected that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How so?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Because science as a practice is a religious practice. It’s predicated on religious axioms. You have to believe that there’s such a thing as truth. You have to believe that the truth is understandable.

You have to believe that understanding the truth is good. You have to believe that there is such a thing as good. Right? So imagine, to be a scientist, you have to imagine that, first of all, that the world is comprehensible to the human intellect, but more that if you investigate the mysteries of the material world that that will be beneficial. Right?

Science and Religion

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Those aren’t scientific claims. Those are metaphysical claims. And that metaphysical claim is nested in a story. You know, when the enlightenment types, they’ve portrayed the scientific revolution as something contrary to the religious substrate, and that’s not accurate. That’s a French revolution.

That’s a Luciferian intellect history. It’s not true. The universities grow out of the monasteries. That’s where the universities came from. And science as a widespread enterprise got its start in the universities.

They grow out of the monasteries. That’s not questionable. Like, if you go to Harvard or if you go to Oxford and Cambridge, it’s just starkly evident. The layout of the colleges is a monastic layout. So the idea that there is some fundamental contradiction between religious belief and the scientific enterprise, there’s nothing about that that’s true.

Part of the reason that we’re losing the scientific enterprise right now is because we’ve unmoored it from its metaphysical substrate, and it can’t survive. If you’re going to be a scientist, you have to put the truth above all else. Scientists are very rare. You have to believe in the truth to be a scientist. I think Dawkins believes in the truth, by the way.

So he’s an atheist, but a very—he’s much less of an atheist than he thinks. That’s my impression. Lying scientists are atheistic or just malevolent. Dawkins is a truthful scientist, and insofar as he’s pursuing the truth and insofar as he believes that pursuing the truth will set you free, then he’s walking down a path that’s Christian to its core. Now I know he doesn’t like that idea, but he also doesn’t like the fact that the scientific enterprise seems to be collapsing in terms of its reliability and validity everywhere.

Advice for Life on the Road

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I appreciate you, mate. I appreciate the time that we get to spend. There always seems to be at a very interesting inflection, again this time.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: The inflection this time is you’re out on tour.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I am. What’s your advice for me? How am I going to survive life on the road?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Make sure that when you step on the stage that you understand how unlikely it is that you have the privilege to do this. And make sure you remember that all those people who came to see you, they’re hoping for something from you. They put in some time and energy to come and see you. It matters what you do. You go out on that stage with gratitude.

Right? That’ll help a lot. You gotta remember that. It keeps you on the ground too. You should be grateful that they’re not throwing rocks at you.

Right. How ridiculous is it that you get to do this? How unlikely is it? Insane. Right.

Exactly. So you keep that first and foremost in your mind. You remember that you should be stunningly grateful for the miracle that you have the opportunity to do this because it’s ridiculously improbable.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah. Trying to do that without getting overwhelmed is becoming an increasingly difficult task.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Well, part of the way you handle that is that you parse off the jobs that other people can do. You know? When you’re out on tour, the social element of that can be overwhelming. So you have to protect yourself from that to some degree.

But the other thing you do is anything anyone else can do, get someone to do, and get someone competent and reliable so that all you’re focusing on is getting to the next show on time in the right frame of mind. That’s your job. Other people have their jobs. Make sure you’re surrounded by people who do their jobs. Like, our tours so far, they become increasingly well run.

I don’t worry about travel, hotels, meals, transportation, none of that. I worry about getting to the venue one hour ahead of time, getting my head in the right place, which has to do with this attitude of gratefulness that I described, and then trying to address a serious problem with all the people who are participating in the audience. And then if it’s too much, then distribute the responsibility some more.

Winding Down After Shows

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do you wind down after a show?

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: I watch the Trailer Park Boys.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Of course you do.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Yeah. Yeah. Well, after being that good, you have to not be so good for a while. And the Trailer Park Boys is a very good way of doing that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Counteract a little bit. Yeah. I texted Rogan about this yesterday, and I thought that he would—you know, god knows how many shows that guy’s done. I thought he would have some wisdom for me. I said, every time that I do a show, I’m so excited.

After I finished, I find it difficult to kind of wind down. And I’ve got four shows back to back, then we fly to Dubai, then we’ve got all these shows around The US and Canada. And, I’m nervous that I’m not going to be able to sleep, and then if I don’t sleep, then I’m not going to be able to perform as well tomorrow, and then it’ll spiral. And I thought that he would just have some wisdom, and he said, “that’s a tough one, man. To be honest, I’ve never had any problems sleeping.” I was like, well, that’s not helpful, I guess.

But now I’m excited. I’m excited, and I’ll check back in with you once everything’s done. We’re going to record one of them properly, fully properly record it, like a special. So that’ll be maybe we’ll put it up. Maybe it’ll just stay for posterity. I don’t know. But, we’re going to have it. So, yeah, I’m excited.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Well, good luck.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you, man.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Good luck. It should be a blast.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah. I’m definitely going to learn a lot. And as we’ve said today, pushing through discomfort and doing different things, and following something close to instinct. A lot of the things that I’m saying are, I think, vulnerable in some regards, I guess. You know, the things that are meaningful to me. And, yeah, I hope that people take a lot away from it, and I hope they have done from today too.

Connecting With the Audience

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: So one of the things I do when I go on stage is, like, I spend the first ten or fifteen seconds looking at the audience. Like, I don’t mean to—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ve seen you do this a lot. I would technically refer to it as stalking. But yeah. It’s not far from a stalk.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: It’s good. I look everywhere. And this is an exposure technique. You don’t want to be afraid of the audience at all. And you don’t want to be talking to the audience.

So I look at people and I see, you know, I look everywhere and, you know, you can’t see in the back rows if it’s a big place. But, fundamentally, I look everywhere I can and I look at individuals and I’m marking them out as people and then I’m remembering, you know, I’m talking to all these individual people who come here and then that’s easy because you can talk to individuals and they’re your guests, say.

That’s another thing for your staff to know too. It’s like everyone who comes to one of your events has to be treated in the most positive possible way because they’re looking to you for something, and it’s very hard on them if they’re treated inhospitably. And so, you know, one of the things we’ve tried to do—I travel with a fair number of people now, but everyone knows that, like, rule number one is treat the audience members. Even the ones that have some trouble and maybe even are troublesome—treat them like they’re guests because they’re guests, and you’re bloody lucky that they’re here.

So don’t get all high and mighty about it. Because they put in their time and effort to come here, and they’re looking for something. So that’s part of that gratitude and then it’s fun. Right? That keeps it fun. It’s like you’re so privileged to be there talking to them. That’s what you gotta have in mind. What a privilege it is that these people are coming to listen to what you’re doing.

That’s a good deal, man. That’s as good as it gets. So you want to have that firmly in the back of your mind and the front too.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’ll try my best. Jordan Peterson, ladies and gentlemen. Jordan, thank you so so much for today. I’m looking forward to the next time we get to catch up.

DR JORDAN B. PETERSON: Good to talk to you, Chris.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode with Jordan, you will love my conversation with Douglas Murray, which is available right here. Go on. Tap it.

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