Jordan B. Peterson on 12 Rules for Life

Tonight's talk is the most popular talk we've ever done in 15 years. Tonight is the third, so it's been a weekend of Jordan Peterson, which has been a huge pleasure. For anyone who doesn't know him, last night I think it was one babe in arms, and tonight it's probably my mother. He was an associate professor at Harvard University and is now the professor of Clinical Psychology at Toronto. His first book was a huge success; it revolutionized the psychology of religion, and his latest book, "12 Rules for Life," is set to do exactly the same.

Just a few housekeeping things: at the end of the talk, we're going to have a Q&A, which I'm going to moderate, so do prepare your questions. Please make them questions. Also, for those people in the live stream, there will be Post-it notes, and you can hand questions to the ushers, and we'll be taking those as well. I look forward to that. At the end of it, we're going to be doing not so much signing, but here on stage, a dedication. Everyone's book is, or pretty well everyone's book is already signed, so if you don't want a dedication, then just leave your book on the third page; you'll find the signature.

In order to make the queue run smoothly, and sorry to sound bossy, but he's not going to be doing selfies, just because it means he's got to stand up the whole time, and it'll slow down the flow. But he's very happy to be photographed, and you can photobomb him if you'd like. Also, because all of us, particularly me, are really keen for him to solve the problems of our lives, please resist doing that during the dedication, because it'll really slow everything down.

I think the three things that you can take away from this evening, and you'll be the judges: first of all, be inspired by the talk; secondly, read the book; and thirdly, marry a Canadian. I feel rather fortunate to have now done all three. Also, if you would like to tweet, it's hashtag "12 Rules for Life." So without further ado, please welcome one of the world's great public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson. Thank you. [Applause]

Well, that was nice! So, I thought I'd talk about my book tonight. I've given two talks now, and I didn't actually talk directly about it; I sort of talked around it. So I thought, I don't like to give the same talk twice, so I thought I'd actually walk through it and outline it a little bit. I hadn't spent most of the day memorizing the rules. You know, you'd think if you worked on something for three years, or it's been five years, I guess, you'd actually have it memorized. But memory is a very strange thing, and it's very particular and goal-oriented. I actually didn't have the rules memorized, and certainly not their numbers. So hopefully, I do by now. I guess we're going to find out, but I have a copy of the book here in case I forget.

So I think we'll go through them one by one, and we'll see how that goes. Seven o'clock, so all right, good. The first rule, which is kind of a comical rule, is "Stand up straight with your shoulders back." It's a meditation, among other things, on the habits of lobsters. I read some papers on lobsters about, must be 10 years ago, I guess, and they just absolutely blew me away. One of the things I've really loved about being a psychologist—and there's many things—but I've really loved psychoanalytic theory and the great clinicians: the behaviorists as well. I mean, Freud, Jung, Adler, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, the behaviorists like Skinner, and the cognitive behaviorists. I mean, I've learned a tremendous amount from reading the clinicians, and so if any of you are interested in psychology, I would really recommend reading the great clinicians because you learn so much about life; it's crazy.

But then, on the entirely other end of the spectrum, where I've learned most about psychology is from the really low, or what would you call them, the really science-oriented animal behaviors. That's where they turned into the neuroscientists, right? They were the animal behaviorists first of all, and then they turned into the neuroscientists. I've learned a tremendous amount from them; they're such clear thinkers. The best of the bunch, I think, there's two of them: one named Jeffrey Gray, who wrote a book called "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety," which is just a deadly book. It's impossible to read; it takes like six months to read it because I think he read like 1,800 papers to write it or something like that, and he actually read them. That's the cool thing, and he understood them, which is really something. Then there's another guy named Jacques Panksepp, who wrote a book called "Affective Neuroscience," which outlines his studies, for example, of rats. He was the guy who learned that rats laugh if you tickle them with the end of a pencil eraser, but they laugh ultrasonically like bats. So you have to slow down the ultrasonic vocalization before you can hear them giggle. You'd think, "Why the hell would you spend your time tickling rats with a pencil and making them laugh?" But see, what he demonstrated there was that there was a psychobiological basis for rough-and-tumble play, for example. It's a bloody big deal, you know, discovering a whole new circuit in the brain. That's like discovering a continent; it's Nobel Prize-winning stuff. Panksepp's "Affective Neuroscience," I would highly recommend that.

So there's this other book I know about too, which is "12 Rules for Life," which you could also look into if you want. Anyway, I was reading these articles on lobsters, and I came across this finding that lobsters govern their postural flexion with serotonin. I thought, "God, that's so interesting." It's so inflection; it's to stand up straight. I thought, "Wow, that's so interesting," because you know depressed people crouch over. I wonder if there's any link between those two things. Then I went and read a whole pile of papers on lobster neurochemistry. Lobster neurochemistry is actually quite well understood because they have a fairly simple nervous system, right? So if you want to understand a complex nervous system, it's a good idea to understand a simple one first and then sort of elaborate upwards.

It turns out that serotonin governs status; it governs status, emotional regulation, and posture in lobsters, just like it does in human beings. That just blew me away. One thing that chapter one is about is the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle, you can give it essentially antidepressants, and it will fight again. Now, that just blew me away. It's so remarkable because one of the things it tells you is that if you imagine that you could be lobster top dog or bottom dog—imagine there's 10 strata in the lobster hierarchy—you could be number one, right? Top lobster, number ten, bottom lobster. If you're a bottom lobster, you have low serotonin levels and high octopamine levels; that's the neurochemical that human beings don't produce. If you're a top lobster, you have high serotonin levels and low octopamine levels. You can move a lobster in its dominance hierarchy by moderating its levels of serotonin.

I thought, "That's so interesting," because what it means is that the counter that keeps track of our status—and we have a counter in the sense in our minds that keeps track of our status—is a third of a billion years old. What that also means is that the idea of the hierarchy—let's call it a dominance hierarchy, because within lobsters it's kind of like a physical prowess hierarchy or something like that—the idea of the hierarchy is at least 350 million years old. I read that, and I think, "Well, so much for the idea that human hierarchies are a socio-cultural construct." It's like, "No, that's wrong." It's not just a little bit wrong; it's unbelievably wrong. It's mind-bogglingly wrong, right? So hierarchies have been around for a third of a billion years, and we have a neurochemical system that modulates our understanding of those hierarchies.

Then also, this is the interesting thing too, and this is why people's reputations are so important to them. Among there are lots of reasons, but this is one of them: where this counter that you share with lobsters rates you in terms of your hierarchical position determines the ratio of negative emotion to positive emotion that you feel. That's also an absolutely mind-boggling idea for two reasons. One is it tells you why it's so hard on people to be put down because it doesn't just upset them in the moment; it changes the way their entire system responds to the world so that they now experience more positive emotion and less negative emotion. So that's really rough.

Then there's a corollary to that too, which is like there's a very tight relationship between your belief system and your dominance hierarchy position. It's complicated, but it's worth going through. Let's say that I have a certain amount of status as a professor, and I have the, let's call it the, what would you say? I've been granted the entitlement to a certain position in a social hierarchy. Now, the question is, why do I have a valid claim to that position? The answer hypothetically is because I know enough so that my claim to the position is valid. So then if you stand up in the audience and challenge my beliefs and show that I'm wrong, you might say, "Well, I get upset because I'm wrong." But the more accurate reason that I get upset is because you're indicating to the crowd that my position in the hierarchy of authority is invalid. By doing that, you lower me in the hierarchy, and you mess around with the neurochemical systems that are regulating my emotions.

So if you're interested, at least in part, in why people are so prone to defend themselves and their beliefs in the service of their position, then that's why. That's a great example of how you can learn these unbelievable things by stumbling across a rather obscure biological fact. It's just, what would you say? It's like a series of dominoes. That's also why biological facts are so useful. It's like we don't have to argue about whether or not social hierarchies are social constructs. A given hierarchy is influenced in its structure by socio-cultural conditioning, let's say, but the fact of the hierarchy—so like the part of your brain that detects and regulates your response to hierarchies is older than the part of your brain that recognizes trees. It's old; it's really, really fundamental. Almost all social animals organize themselves in hierarchies.

Now, the other thing that chapter one is is a bit of a meditation on what might constitute a hierarchy. One of my business colleagues, a former student of mine from Harvard—a very, very smart guy—has a graduate degree in engineering from MIT and a PhD in psychology from Harvard. So there's like one of him in the whole world, and he's a very smart guy. He helped me design the self-authoring suite, by the way, and he's been working for about 20 years on that. That's a suite of programs that helps people write about their lives that straighten them out. He told me to stop using the word "dominance hierarchy," and he said the reason for that was that it was infested with Marxist presuppositions. It really bothered me when he first said that because I've been using the word for years: "dominance hierarchy." We had a discussion about that. He said, "Well, it's predicated on the idea that you climb up the hierarchy, human hierarchy, as a consequence of the expression of power." It's like, "That's wrong. You climb up valid hierarchies as a consequence of the expression of competence." That's actually technically right. He was exactly the right person to tell me that because he had done his PhD on what predicts success in Western hierarchies, and the answer is quite clear: general cognitive ability, some prefrontal ability as well, which was what he specifically tested. So intelligence, roughly speaking, although it's a little bit more elaborate than intelligence, but that's close enough. Trait conscientiousness accounts for about 50 percent of the variance in long-term success.

You think, "Well, hey, how do you want your society to be structured?" It seems pretty good to me that smart, hard-working people are the ones most likely to succeed. That's not a bad empirical test of the validity of a structure, you know, especially given how much vagary there is in life. Lots of random things happen to people, but it's better to be born three standard deviations above the mean in intelligence in the West than it is to be born three standard deviations above the mean in wealth in relation to where you'll end up when you're 40. So he said to use the word "competence hierarchy," or we decided that. I think that's much better.

So chapter one is a bit of a meditation on the nature of hierarchies and the biochemistry of hierarchy, but it's also an injunction about how to present yourself because you want to present yourself to the world in a manner that doesn't disgrace you in some sense. That might be a good way to think about it. You don't want to disgrace yourself because the consequence of disgrace is emotional dysregulation: more pain, less positive emotion. The best way to present yourself is to stand up forthrightly and to stretch out, you know, and to occupy some space and to make yourself sort of vulnerable by doing that because you open up the front of your body, right? But it's a sign of confidence, and that way people are most likely to give you the benefit of the doubt. That's a good way to start regulating your mood.

Not only does it directly regulate your mood to stand up because it's so tightly associated—like posture reflection is associated with serotonin and emotional regulation—but also because if you straighten up and you present yourself in that manner, then other people are more likely to take you seriously. That means they'll start treating you as if you're a number one lobster instead of a number ten lobster, and that's another way that you can at least give yourself the bloody benefit of the doubt, right? And confront the world in a courageous manner. That's a really good way of figuring out how to establish yourself in multiple competence hierarchies because one of the general rules of thumb about how to be successful is to confront things that frighten you forthrightly and with courage. That's kind of a universal strategy for success, and so that's what the first chapter is about.

So that's quite fun. My graduate students—I told them these lobster stories. I have my graduate students when we used to vote for breakfast, and they were a very competitive bunch, very fractious and witty, and they were always trying to get one over on each other, right? Making some witty put-down or something like that. It got to the point in the restaurants where they put their claws in the air and clicked like this when they got one over on one of their colleagues, which was very peculiar and strange and very funny as well.

So that's rule number one. Rule number two is "Treat yourself like you're someone that you care about." That's a deeper chapter, I would say. Chapter one is kind of comical, but it's also got this serious scientific end, for example, and it's practical—like most of the rules are. Chapter two is a bit of a meditation on why. See, I read this piece of work by Jung a long while back, and it was a meditation on the injunction to treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated, something like that. What Jung pointed out, which I really liked, was that that wasn't an injunction to be nice to other people; it was an invitation to reciprocity. It was something like this: you should figure out how you would like to be treated, like you were taking care of yourself, not how you would like people to respond to you. It's more important than that.

It's like imagine you had a child that you really cared for, and someone said, "Well, people will treat this child exactly like you want them to, but you have to figure out what that is." Then you'd have to sit down for like a month and you'd think, "Okay, well, how do you want your child to be treated?" You don't want everyone just to be nice to him. You know, you want people to challenge them, and you want people to discipline them, and you want people to tell them when they're wrong. It's like you don't just want everyone to be nice; that's pathetic. There's no challenge in that.

So, well, you want to treat other people like you would like to be treated. Well, then you have to figure out how you would like to be treated. While you'd like people to fawn all over you and just lay everything at your feet, it's like, "No, that's not something you'd wish for for someone that you were taking care of." Then there's an additional problem, which is it's often the case that people will treat other people better than they treat themselves. That happens extremely frequently.

So one of the things I pointed out in chapter two was that if you have a dog and you take him to a vet, and the vet gives you your prescription medicine, you'll go buy the medicine, and you will give it to the dog, and you will do it properly. But if you go yourself to a doctor and you get a prescription, there's a 30 percent chance you won't even pick up the medication, and if you do, there's a 50 percent chance that you won't administer it to yourself properly. I really thought about that when I first came across that statistic. It was another one of those little facts I thought, "What the hell's up with that?" It's like you'll do it for your dog, so obviously you'll do it for something you care about, and you're conscientious enough so you'll actually do it. So like, why wouldn't you do it for you? Your dog likes you. You know, even your dog would rather that you did. But you don't. You don't.

It's actually one of the reasons that modern medicine doesn't work nearly as well as it could because people just don't take their medication. It's not only because they don't take care of themselves; there's some skepticism about doctors, but you could be just as skeptical about the vet. So it's a deep meditation, I would say. What I've done with these rules is they're very simple rules, and they're kind of comical and tongue-in-cheek in some ways, but what I've tried to do is pull them apart and show what's underneath them and to go down as deep as I possibly can.

In rule two, it's a bit of a meditation on why people don't like themselves very much, and I think there's two reasons really. One is that we're fragile and damageable and imperfect in multiple dimensions all the time, and that often just gets worse. Lots of things get worse as you get old, for example. So it's not necessarily that easy for a self-conscious being who's extraordinarily aware of his or her own fragility. But not just fragility—foolishness and errors in history. You know yourself better than anyone else knows you, and you know you might have a certain amount of dislike for someone you know because of something they did, but you know everything you did. Jesus, that's a drag, man. You know, you have to carry that along behind. It's like, really? I did that?

So there's that. It's like you're weak and kind of useless and prone to temptation, and you know all those things. You know that just shouldn't be that way. And then you're also capable of pretty vicious acts of malevolence, and so you also know that about yourself. It's a real existential question for people. It's like, why the hell should you take care of something as sorry and wretched as you are? That's really what the chapter is about. The answer in the chapter is, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, you're first of all, yes, you're pretty useless and terrible, but so is everyone else."

That's actually an existential problem, right? What I mean by that is it's a problem that every human being has always had and always will. So it's not just you; it's a universal problem. There is an answer to that, and one of them is to, what is it to say, "Love the sinner but hate the sin." It's something like that. Despite the fact that you're not all that you could be, the proper attitude to have towards yourself is the attitude that you would have towards someone that you genuinely cared for. It's incumbent on you to act as if you genuinely care for yourself, just like you would act towards someone that you actually cared about, some other person.

It's a reversal in some sense of the golden rule, right? It's a discussion of why that's necessary and also more than that, it's a discussion of why you have a moral obligation to do that. It's not just that you should because it would be better for you; you actually have a moral obligation to do that, I think, because you make the world a much better place, a much worse place if you don't take care of yourself. So you should bloody well take care of yourself, you know, because, well, that's what the chapter is about.

It's partly because you have something valuable to bring into the world. That's the thing about being an individual. It's the thing that Western civilization has always recognized: that as an individual, you have a light that you have to bring into the world, and that if you don't bring it into the world, the world is a dimmer place. That's a bad thing because when the world is a dim place, it can get very, very, very dark. So it's not just so that you feel better, not just so that you're a number one lobster. None of those things. You need to take care of yourself because you're in the best position to do that, and it's necessary for you to take care of yourself despite the fact that we're mortal and vulnerable and self-conscious and capable—not only capable of doing terrible things, but actually do them.

Despite all that, you still have that responsibility. I wanted to hit the question as hard as I can to try to figure out, well, why are people contemptuous of themselves? There's plenty of reason; that's for sure. But the reasons do not justify the mistreatment of yourself. It's as simple as that. It's not a good strategy.

The next rule is "Make friends with people who want the best for you." That's a meditation on my own childhood and adolescence to some degree. I had friends who wanted the best for me and friends who didn't. You know, they were friends who—some of them were aiming up, and some of them were aiming down. If you have a friend that's aiming down and you do something that's aiming up, then they're generally not that happy about it. You know, they try to top your accomplishment with one of their own, hypothetical or real, or put down what you're doing or offer you a cigarette if you're trying to quit and you've kind of done that successfully, or a drink if you've been drinking too much and are trying to stop being an alcoholic. You know, or they're cynical and bitter and devoted towards no good, and sometimes that's family members too, and sometimes it's even part of you, you know?

But this chapter is an injunction to people: you have an ethical responsibility to take care of yourself. You have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the courage and faith and wisdom to wish you well when you've done something good and to stop you when you're doing something destructive. If your friends aren't like that, then they're not your friends, and maintaining your friendships with them might not even be in their interest.

It's a tricky argument to make because I'm not saying, you know, whenever anyone's in trouble, you should push them into a ditch and then give them a couple of kicks. That's not the idea. The idea is that I had a couple of rules I didn't write about. One was be careful about whom you share good news with, and another was be careful about whom you share bad news with. Everyone knows those rules ring in people's minds quite quickly. A friend is someone you can share good news with. You know, you go to them and you say, "Hey, look, this good thing happened to me," and they say, "Look, I'm so happy that that happened to you! Way to be!" And they don't think, "God damn it, why didn't that happen to me?" and like, "You know, you didn't deserve it. Here's a bunch of reasons you're stupid and why it won't work." It's like, that's not helpful.

So I would say, like, if people are, you know, what the other thing people are doing if they're trying to drag you down, let's say, is they're trying to see if you'll put up with it because they have this idea that maybe life isn't worth living and things aren't good. Then if they can besmirch, let's say, to use an archaic term, something that's pristine and good, then they demonstrate to themselves that there is no true ideal and that there's no necessary reason to be responsible and to strive forward. They use you, which is a test case. You know, "I'll just push you down into the low lobster bin and see how you respond, and if you put up with it, then yeah, my cynicism is fully justified."

Well, that's chapter three, and it's a painful chapter because it also details the suicide of one of my friends, which occurred over a very long period of time—not the actual suicide, but all the prodromal to it. So it's a contentious chapter.

Number four is "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today." The reason I wrote that was because I had this client. I'm a clinical psychologist, and I've spent 20 hours a week for 25 years listening to people tell me about their lives, you know? Those people were people who were just barely hanging on to the bottom of the world up to people who were so successful you can hardly believe it—like the entire gamut of people. That's been absolutely fascinating. It's like being a clinical psychologist, if you really listen, is like being immersed in a Dostoevsky novel all the time, you know? Because it's amazing what people will tell you if you listen to them. People are so interesting if you actually listen to them because they're so peculiar, like they're like penguins or rhinoceroses or ostriches. They're unlikely creatures.

With regards to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday and not just who someone else is today, this old client of mine, he was about 85 when he came to see me, and he was a financier and a kind of a mathematical genius. He made these little pendants out of a mathematical symbol for the most beautiful mathematical equation that was ever written. He made them out of gold, and he would hand those out. He had studied psychology as a young man, and he introduced me to this concept that I didn't know about called the Pareto distribution.

See, I'd been taught as a psychologist that most human characteristics were normally distributed, right? So most people were average, and some people were extreme. That's a pre- or a normal distribution. Intelligence is like that, and height—there's more people of average height than very tall or very short. Weight is like that, and lots of things are normally distributed, and psychologists tend to assume that everything is, but it isn't. Creative products are distributed in a Pareto distribution, and that's a whole different thing, and it's really important to know this. It's another fundamental fact, the knowledge of which can sort of transform the way you conceptualize, let's say, the political landscape.

So here's an example of the Pareto distribution: there's a rule of thumb that if you run a company, that 20 percent of your employees do 80 percent of the work, or 20 percent of your customers are responsible for 80 percent of your sales, or 20 percent of them are responsible for 80 percent of the customer service calls. Same thing. But that's not exactly the rule. The rule is worse than that. The rule is, in a given domain, the square root of the number of people operating in that domain do half the productive work.

So you think, "Well, you have 10 employees; three of them do half the work." It's like, "Yeah, okay. What if you have 100 employees? Then 10 of them do half the work. What if you have a thousand employees? Well, then it's 30, and if it's ten thousand employees, then it's a hundred." This actually turns out to be a rather ironclad rule. It applies across very, very many situations. It applies, for example, to the mass of stars and the size of cities. So you can see how universal it is as a law. It's something like those that have more get more, and those that have less get less. That's the Matthew principle, right? To those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away. The economists sometimes call that the Matthew principle.

What that lays out is a world that's rife with inequality. You know, you hear this idea that I think it's the 85 richest people in the world have more money than the bottom two billion. That's a Pareto distribution phenomenon. You might say, "To hell with capitalism for producing that." It's like, "Sorry, you got your diagnosis wrong." It's a natural law. No matter what society you study, you get a Pareto distribution of wealth. You get a Pareto distribution of the number of records recorded. You get a Pareto distribution of the number of songs written or goals scored. Like any creative product has that characteristic, and it's partly because as you start to become successful, let's say, people offer you more and more opportunities, and as you start to fail, people move away from you, and you plummet.

Okay, so that's rough. What it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do anything about it, although I am saying that we don't know what to do about it. That's the thing, you know, because you can modify the Pareto distribution of wealth, let's say, but we don't know how to do it without maybe disrupting the system so completely that it collapses, which is what happened in the Soviet Union, for example. In Maoist China, they were trying, at least in principle, to adjust inequality, but the cure was far worse than the disease.

The truth of the matter is we actually don't know technically how much inequality there has to be to generate wealth. We can guess, and you could say, "Well, there should be less," and you might say, "Well, there should be more." If you're left-wing, you'd say less, and if you're right-wing, you'd say, "Well, we'll just let the inequality flourish." But we do know that it's inevitable, and we also know that we don't know how to regulate it. So there is inequality. What that means is there's always going to be people around that are better at something than you are, and that's a problem because you can get jealous, and you can get bitter, and you can get resentful, and worse, you can get hopeless.

You know, because you look like, "Look, I have this friend of mine. He told me something so funny. He was decrying his lack of success in the world, and he compared himself to his roommate." He said, "You know, his roommate, his college roommate, was doing much better than he was, and his bloody roommate was Elon Musk." It's like, "Really? Like, it's like, oh, you're not doing as well as Elon Musk?" Well, it's not—I mean, you could see it would take it rather personally because they were roommates and everything. It wasn't like he was doing badly; like he wasn't doing pretty damn well. It's like, "I'm not as good as Elon Musk." It's like, "Yeah, well, you and like seven billion other people," you know?

But I thought it was instructive because, well, because you have to be careful who you compare yourself to. Now, you can't just not compare yourself to others, to successful people, right? Because then you don't have anything to aim at. One of the things I learned from Jung—this was a cool thing—I'm going to make a real lateral move here. Jung thought the Book of Revelation was appended to the Bible because the Christ in the gospels was too merciful. He was too nice a guy. Now, he's an ideal, right? Jung said, "Wait a second. An ideal is always a judge." That's the thing about an ideal because you're not as good as your ideal. So your ideal is a judge. Revelation has Christ coming back as a judge, and that was Jung's explanation at the level of the collective unconscious for the pasting of that remarkably strange and terrible book onto the end of the Bible.

So, well, anyways, my point is it's an ideal. You need an ideal because you have nothing to aim at, but an ideal is a judge, and you always fall short of the ideal. So how the hell can you have the benefits of having an ideal without having the crushing blow that goes along with having the judge that always regards you as insufficient? So I was trying to work that out in the chapter, and this is something I've had to work out a lot as a clinical psychologist. It's like, well, let's say you need a goal, but we don't want to let your distance from the goal crush you. So you got to set up a goal, and then you got to make the goal break the goal down into parts so that you can move towards it. You have a fairly high likelihood of doing it.

So set a high aim, but differentiate it down so you know what the next step is, and then make the next step difficult enough so you have to push yourself past where you are, but also provide yourself with a reasonable probability of success. It's also what you do with children, right? You want to push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are, right? But you don't want to crush them with constant failure. So what you do is aim high and make the goal approximately difficult but proximal.

So anyways, that's one way of looking at it. But then the next thing is, you know, I've had clients—many clients in their 30s who are trying to—this is more true with women, I would say—a lot of women who are very high achieving, who established their career goals at 30 and then want to differentiate out their life. They want to have a husband; they want to have a family. They're trying to figure out how to do that. One of the things I've noticed is that around 30, you really have to stop comparing yourself in some ways to other people. The reason for that is that the peculiarities of your life are so idiosyncratic that there isn't anyone really all that much like you.

You know, because the details of your life happen to matter. So maybe you compare yourself to some rock star or something like that, and you know the person's rich and famous and glamorous and all that, but you know they're alcoholic, and they use too much cocaine, and they've had three divorces. It's like, how the hell do you make sense out of that? Is that someone that you should judge yourself harshly against or not? The answer is you don't know because you don't know all the details of their lives. And who do you know that you can compare yourself to? That's easy: you yesterday.

So here's a good goal. It's something like, well, aim high, and I really mean that. It's like—and we'll talk about that a little bit too—aim high, but use as your control yourself. It's like, so your goal is to make today some tiny increment better than yesterday. You can define better yourself. This doesn't have to be some imposition of external morality. You know where you're weak and insufficient, where you could improve. You think, "Okay, well, this is what I'm like yesterday. If I did this little thing, things would be just an increment better."

Well, that's a great thing because you get the ball rolling, and incremental improvement is unstoppable. You can actually implement it, and it starts to generate Pareto distribution-like consequences. It starts to compound, and I've seen that happen in people's lives over and over. People write me all the time and tell me that they're doing that. But I've seen that happen in people's lives continually. They make a goal. The goal should be, "How could I conceive of my life so that if I had that life, it would clearly be worth living?" So I wouldn't have to be bitter, resentful, deceitful, arrogant, and vengeful. That's sort of the bottom line, right? Because that's what endless failure does to you; it's not good.

And that's what life without purpose and a goal does to you as well because life is very hard. So you think, "Okay, well, I need to adopt a mode of being that would justify my suffering." You can ask yourself that question: "What would make this worthwhile?" I quote Nietzsche, I think, in that chapter. He said, "He who has a why can bear almost any how." That's a lovely line, man. I mean, it's a lovely line, and it's really worth thinking about.

So you think, "Well, how do I manage all this misery and suffering and futility?" It's like, "Well, I need to figure out what I would have to do in order to make that clearly worthwhile." And so then you have your goal, and then you think, "Well, I need to move towards that incrementally because I'm kind of useless and can only do so much, and maybe not even that." But all I have to do is be a little bit better than my miserable self yesterday, and that'll propel you forward very rapidly. You can succeed at it, which is also really lovely because why not set yourself up for success? You know, because otherwise you droop around like a number ten lobster, and you know that's just not good. You get all pinchy when that happens, and it's not a good thing.

So that was chapter four. Chapter five—geez, we're cruising along here. Chapter five is the one that I thought I would get in the most trouble for writing. You know, I figured people would be all over me for this, and so far they haven't been, but they still might be. It's called "Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them." I thought that would be contentious, first of all, because people would think, "Well, I never dislike my children." It's like, "Really? Really? You're going to really tell me that?" God, you know, and there's a more horrifying element to that too because as a clinical psychologist, I've seen the full Freudian nightmare, I can tell you that.

I've seen families where it's like this: the family members are standing in a circle, I'd say, and each of them has their hands around each other's neck, and they're squeezing hard enough to strangle the other person in 20 years. And that's the family. It's like, I mean, you know, if you haven't met a family like that, or well, then you're not paying attention. There's some reasonable possibility that you're actually in a family like that. So the idea that parents can't dislike their children—it's like, God, how naive can you get? If you think that, man, I don't even know where you'd start to straighten yourself out.

I could never dislike my children. It's like, yeah, well, those are the people who produce the most monstrous children too, I can tell you that. So, and then there's this idea Jung had, which I really love, which is the idea of the shadow. You know, it kind of got pop psychology and trendy sort of among the new age types too, but one thing I can tell you about Carl Jung is no matter what else someone might say about him, he is absolutely not new age. If you read Carl Jung and you understand him and you're not terrified right to the depths of your soul, you haven't understood a damn thing you've read.

One of the things Jung said about the shadow, which is the dark side of humanity, the dark side of each individual, was that its roots reached all the way to hell. He meant something very specific, both metaphysical and practical by that. The metaphysical element was he meant hell literally and metaphysically, but he also meant the more proximal kinds of hell. What he meant was that if you were able to understand your dark side, then you would see in yourself a reflection of the behavior that was present at Auschwitz, for example. The reason that people don't take the dark side of themselves seriously at all and even confront the fact that it exists is because no one wants to see that reflected within them.

No wonder! It's absolutely no wonder. You also believe that that confrontation with the shadow was an inevitable barrier to enlightenment, that there was no—you know, Joseph Campbell, who's a popularizer of Jung to some degree, has become well known for saying, "Follow your bliss." Campbell learned virtually everything he knew from Jung, but Jung—that isn't what Jung said at all. He said, "Pursue what's meaningful, and you'll encounter that which you least want to encounter."

That's, well, that's the dragon, right? That's the dragon that hoards gold, for example, and the dragon is also something that lives inside you, and it's not something that you take the encounter with lightly. There are very old stories about this Egyptian story about the god Horus, who was the Egyptian savior in some sense, and when he encountered evil, even though he was a god, he lost an eye in the battle. That's the famous Egyptian eye, you know, that everyone still knows about. That's the Eye of Horus that was torn out by Seth, who's the precursor to Satan.

So it's no joke. It's no joke. Back to children. See, I kind of knew this when I had my kids. I'd already undergone that to some degree and understood what it meant to be a bad person, a terrible person. One of the things I knew was that that manifested itself in families all the time: tyrannical father, overprotective mother—more rarely, overprotective mother, tyrannical overprotective father, tyrannical mother. It's usually the other way around. The terrible pathological familial drama that Freud made much of in the early 20th century, I'd seen that in many, many situations—dismal, brutal, awful.

I've seen parents punish their children, and you can also take a page from nature. If you really want to punish your children or anyone else, if you have someone you're interested in punishing, including yourself, you don't ever punish someone you really want to punish for doing something wrong because that's actually a bit of a relief to them. You know, that's the theme of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." The murderer gets away with it; it's a relief to him when he gets caught. It's like, no, if you really want to punish somebody, wait till they do something good, then you punish them because that'll teach them. You maximize the hurt that way; you decrease the probability that they'll ever do anything good again.

I'll tell you, man, if you want to have a good relationship with someone, that's one thing you don't do. You open your bloody eyes, and if they do something that you would like them to do again, then you tell them how much you appreciated the fact that that happened, and you hope that it replicates. You know, you see that? If there's one thing you can take away from tonight's lecture, that's an extraordinarily useful thing to know. Watch, and when people do something that they should do more of, say, "Look, I saw that you did this specific thing. I saw that it took some effort. Here's what it meant. Here's how I observed it. It's like, keep that up."

Man, if you love someone, you do that to them. That's encouragement. That's such a great thing. So anyways, back to children. I already knew that I was a pretty decent monster by the time I had kids, and I thought, "Well, my kids are little, you know, like a baby or two-year-olds." It's like, "I'm a horrible monster." So there's an uneven power problem here. I better not let that child do anything that really makes me angry.

You know, now and then you hear about something horrible that happens. When I was in Boston years ago, I read about a woman who plunged her two-year-old daughter's arms into boiling water. You think, "Well, how in the world can that happen?" It's like, well, you know, she's probably hungover. She probably just lost her job. She's probably desperate in six different ways. She probably didn't have any decent disciplinary strategies for children. She probably didn't have anyone helping her. She was bitter and resentful and angry, and the child misbehaved at exactly the wrong moment.

You're going to be around your children a lot, and so you might want to have it so that they don't misbehave at exactly the wrong moment because all hell can break loose if they can. I didn't want that to happen, so I knew that it was easy for people to hate their children even though they mouth the words that they love them all the time. I saw very little evidence of that in many situations.

One of the things, you know, you have a natural affinity for children, and even more, maybe a more powerful natural affinity for your own children. So that's a good start, but you don't want to set them up as an enemy against you. You don't want to allow them to engage in the kind of hierarchical challenge that makes you irritable and resentful. That's not a good idea. If the things they do make you dislike them, the probability that they will make other people dislike them is extraordinarily high.

You can consult your own irritability, and you can say, "Look, kid, I used to tell my kids this, you know, when they were three or four. I'd say, 'Look, I'm not in a very good mood, and I'm likely to be unreasonable, so it'd be best if you'd go in your room and play for a while.' It's like, 'I like you, man. You're a great kid, but like, get the hell out of here for a while.'" You know, and they were fine with that.

We'd trained them already at that point to be able to go play by themselves in the room, you know, which is something a kid should be able to do anyways. But you need to know what sort of monster you are if you're going to be a good parent. If you think, "Oh, I'm not a monster," it's like, "Oh, yes, you are. You're just an unbelievably unconscious monster, and that's actually the worst kind."

The other thing about that chapter is there's an idea in it, and it's an idea that I think is well supported by the relevant literature, which is that your fundamental job as a parent, especially of a child from zero to four, is to make that child eminently desirable socially. So you're a successful parent if when your child is four, all sorts of other children want to play with him or her. That's really the—that's like if you want one marker of whether or not you've been successful, that's it.

Now, some children are a lot harder to get along with than others, and some children have a harder time playing, and so I'm not saying that every parent who has a child that isn't popular at four is at fault for that. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that reverse, which is you can be sure that you've been successful if your child is not popular at four.

But desirable as a playmate. So then you think, "Well, what have you done for your child?" Well, you've opened up the entire world of children to them because they know how to play, which is a very deep knowledge. It starts to become inculcated probably at the breast and certainly in the course of rough-and-tumble play at about two years of age. It's a deep embodied knowledge. They know how to play like a good, well-trained dog knows how to play. You know, you meet a new dog, and you go like this, and the dog goes like this. You think, "Oh, that dog, I can go like this, and it won't bite me," right? It knows how to play.

A kid who's awake and alert is just like that. A well-socialized kid, if you know anything about kids, is you can take a four-year-old and make a little play gesture at them, and they'll smile right away and start playing just right now. That's what you want for your kids. Then everywhere they go, other kids like them and will include them in their play. Play is the way that children develop, and so if other children include them in their play, then the children develop.

The poor kids that don't get befriended at the age of four—the literature on this is crystal clear. If your child is an outcast at the age of four, the probability that anything can be done about that is almost zero, no matter what you do. I hate to be so blunt about that, but I know the literature, and that's what the literature suggests.

Then the other thing is if you don't allow your children to engage in dislikable behavior, then adults will like them because adults actually like kids. You know, one of the things I loved about having little kids in Montreal—I lived in a poor area in Montreal; there were a lot of rough guys around there—and we used to roll our daughter around in the stroller. These rough guys, you know, like God only knows what they were up to. They were rough-looking guys, you know? We'd roll our daughter by them, and they'd smile and they'd crouch down and make little goo faces. You know, they were—you know, I tell you, one of the great things about having little kids is they bring out the best in other people.

You see a whole side of humanity, even among the darker parts of humanity. You see a whole side of them that you wouldn't normally see, and it's lovely. The thing is, if you're good to your kid in the real way, you can help them maintain that tremendous attractiveness that they have as young children and to respond to adults properly, like a puppy that wags its tail instead of growls and, you know, goes for your ankle. Then wherever they go, adults welcome them and teach them things and pat them on the head and smile at them genuinely instead of saying, "Oh my God, here comes that couple with that goddamn brat again." You know, which is a horrible thing to do to a child because then everywhere they go, all the goodwill is false.

You know, there's nothing that you can do to someone that's more terrible than to put them in a world where all the goodwill directed towards them is false. That's a terrible thing. So anyways, that's what chapter—that's chapter five. Chapter six is about—it's a rough chapter. It's about—I spend a lot of time reading about totalitarianism and about atrocity, like some brutal, many, many brutal things, brutal beyond the capacity of imagination even. I read a lot about individual criminals and serial killers and those sorts of people too, trying to get to the bottom of it.

One book I would really recommend is a book by Carl Panzram, which is an autobiography. Panzram is the name of the book, and he was a—here's a rough guy, man. His dying words to his executioner, to his hangman, he said, "Hurry up, you whoreson bastard! I could kill ten men in the time that it takes you to hang me." That was his dying words. You know, he said, "I wish the human race had one neck so that I could put my hands around it and squeeze." That was Carl Panzram, and not many people like that write autobiographies, but he did, and he told you why he was like that and why he thought that way, in case you want to find out, which I would recommend, by the way, because it's very useful to know such things.

But I have to remember why I told you that Panzram story. Oh yeah, chapter six is about that. It's about Panzram, and it's about the Columbine kids—the kids who shot up the high school—because I read their diaries, you know, and I understood them too, which is even better than just reading them. You know, you see these mass shootings all the time, and everyone does the same thing: "Oh, how did that happen? Why did that happen? How can it be this way?" It's like, "Well, why don't you read what they said about why they did it and just assume that that's the reason?"

If you go, "Oh, well, the Columbine kids—oh yeah, I was like, oh, they must have been bullied." Oh yes, because you know the natural response of anyone who's being bullied is to go arm yourself to the teeth, to plot the destruction of the entire city. I think it was of Detroit, to line your entire high school avenue with bombs and then to go and shoot your classmates. That's what happens when you're bullied. It's like, "No, that's not what happens when you're bullied. That's a stupid explanation. It's shallow beyond belief."

It really emerges only because people don't want to contend with the real issue. The Columbine kids, well, they were contending with the real issue. You know, they basically said quite forthrightly that in their own arrogant estimation, being itself was corrupt and unnecessary, and it would be best if it was eradicated in the most brutal possible way as fast as possible. You get to places like that if you dwell on revenge for three or four years in your mom's basement. You know, you can go to very dark places, and so that's what chapter six is about.

You know, Panzram, who was very brutally treated when he was a kid, and the Columbine guys who had their ups and downs, but nothing compared to Carl Panzram, say, were judges of being and decided that it was flawed and that they were the ones to set it right. It's a rough chapter, but it's more than that. It's a meditation on resentment because resentment is a key human motivation, and I would say it's a great teacher. To listen to your resentment is one of the best things you can possibly do. You have to admit that it exists first, and then you have to admit to the fantasies that it's generating, and you have to admit to what you would regard as the way out of it.

So that's all very difficult because it means learning things about yourself that you probably don't want to learn. But resentment only means one of two things: it means either, like, shut the hell up, grow up, quit whining, and get on with it. That's one thing it means. Or someone is playing the tyrant to you. It might even be you, and you have something to say and do that you should say and do to put it to a stop. Maybe resentment can show you the pathway to doing that.

There's a meditation on resentment, and one of the principles that I extracted from that is like a resentful person wants other people to change. If you're resentful, then your motivations aren't trustworthy. In fact, they're very, very dark, and that's why I went to the extreme with people like Panzram and the Columbine killers. Resentful people who want to change the world are not to be trusted. What should you do instead? How do you treat your own resentment? I would say, well, there's a great—I read this great line in that T.S. Eliot play called "The Cocktail Party." In it, this woman comes up to a psychiatrist, I think this is in this chapter, and she says, "You know, I'm having a really rough time of it. I'm suffering badly. My life is not going well."

Then she says, "I hope that there's something wrong with me." The psychiatrist says, "What the hell do you mean by that?" She says, "Well, here's how I look at it. There's either something wrong with the world, and I'm just in it, and that's how it is, and then like, what am I going to do about that because it's the whole world? Or maybe I could be fortunate, and there's something wrong with me that's causing all this unnecessary suffering, and if I could just set it right, I could learn and I could set it right."

I've been thinking about that for a very long time, and I think, well, if your life isn't going the way it is, you know, you can find someone else to blame, which is pretty convenient for you and also relatively easy, or you could think, "Okay, I don't like life. I don't like the way my life is unfolding. Maybe I don't like life in general because it's tragic and tainted with evil. How do I know if my judgment is accurate?"

The question is, well, have I really done everything I possibly could to set my life straight? Because maybe I shouldn't be judging its quality or the quality of life itself, or being itself for that matter, if I haven't done everything I possibly could to set my life straight. Well, there's a task. Solzhenitsyn, who I'm a great admirer of, his book "The Gulag Archipelago" was one of the things that brought down the Soviet Union. He said that one man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.

You know, he said that with some authority. I think you could easily make the case that "The Gulag Archipelago" is the greatest book of the 20th century. I mean, there's other contenders, obviously, but he said when he was in the gulag camps, you know, meditating on how the hell he got there—and he had a rough life, man. I mean, first of all, he was on the Russian front at the beginning of World War II, and then he was thrown in the gulag camps, and that was just the beginning of his adventures, man. He had a rough life.

When he was in the camps, he was thinking, "What the hell? How did I get here? What's going on?" He had Hitler and Stalin to blame, right? So if you need someone to blame, man, Hitler and Stalin—that's great. But that isn't what he did. He said he meditated for a while once he realized that he might have something to do with, in some strange way, the way things turned out for him. He said he went over his life with a fine-tooth comb in his memory. He thought, "Okay, where did I go wrong by my own judgment? When did I take the path in front of me that I knew I shouldn't take?"

Because you all know that, right? You know, sometimes you don't know if what you're doing is good or if it's bad. It's just ignorance; you just don't know. But sometimes you bloody well know, and you do the thing you know you shouldn't do anyways. That happens a lot. Why do you do that? Part of it is stupidity; there's all sorts of reasons. But you certainly know you do it.

So Solzhenitsyn thought, "Okay, well, what would happen if I took responsibility for where I am in this concentration camp, and then I went over my whole life and tried to figure out all the things I did that were wrong by my own estimation that increased the probability that I would get here? And then what would happen if I tried to set them all right now in the present?" That's why he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago." One of the consequences of that, as I said, was it sped the dissolution of the Soviet Empire.

So hey, that's not bad, eh? Like you make a real confession, you really repent, you do your penance, which is writing this book, and you completely change the geopolitical landscape of the world. That's worth thinking about because it's not only Solzhenitsyn who did that; Nelson Mandela did something quite similar. It's not so impossible.

The idea that what you should do if you're feeling resentful about the nature of being or suffering too much for your own life, let's say, is straighten the damn thing out. Like seriously, try it for a year. Even try it for a week. Try not doing the things you know you shouldn't do. Try not saying the things you know to be false, and just watch what happens. You might as well give it a shot, right? Because you say, "Well, I'm all in for a year. You know, I'm going to do things right, and then I'll just stand back and kind of watch how things unfold, and maybe I'll reconsider at the end of that year."

It's like, try it! I mean, I would say I've had thousands of letters now from people who are saying, "Hey, I tried that, you know, and hey, you know, it worked." You know, I quit lying, and everything—do you ever see that Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on the rake over and over? That's like his whole yard is littered with rakes, and all he does is walk around and step on them, and then curse, step on a rake, and it hits him in the face, and he curses, and then he steps on another rake, and it hits—you know what I mean?

Stop doing that! You know exactly. Yeah, I don't know if we'll get through all 12 rules. I guess you'll have to read the damn book.

Anyways, rule seven—rule seven just about killed me. I've had a lot of bad health in the last year, and having to rewrite rule seven coincided with one of those periods that lasted about a month, and it was the hardest chapter by far. It went down the deepest by far, and it was really hard to get right. It's called "Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient."

I'll just tell you a little bit about the chapter because I figured something out in it and then explained it—something that took me decades to figure out. So there's this idea—it's a very deep Christian idea—that the Messiah is the person who takes the world's sins upon himself, right? That's a characteristic of Christ, right? The idea is something like Christ died for your sins. It's like, what the hell does that mean exactly? You know, and partly what it means—and I would say a slightly corrupted form of Christianity is that you just have to believe that that happened, and you're redeemed. It's like, well, let's leave that aside for a second.

But there's an idea there, a psychological idea, and you know that because the idea doesn't go away. It's lasted for thousands of years. It's like, well, so the idea signifies something. It has a psychological reality independent of its metaphysical reality, whatever that might be. So I thought about that for a long time. It's like, what in the world does that possibly mean?

Then I realized—and Jung knew this, Carl Jung knew this—that it was associated with this idea of the shadow. I had this client once who—oh, her parents, man, they were pieces of work. Her parents taught her—I swear to you that this is the truth—her parents taught her that adults were angels, literally. When I saw her, she was about 30, and she had a lot of strange symptoms, symptoms of sorts I'd never seen—psychosomatic symptoms. She had kind of like quasi-epileptic seizures at night, and no, but she stayed conscious during them. It was very difficult to understand it, and I won't walk through it, but her parents told her that adults were angels.

She was like 28; she had a university degree. I said, "Well, did you ever wonder about that?" I said, "Didn't you read any history?" She said, "Yeah, I read something about the terrible things that people did to each other, and I would just compartmentalize it." That was actually the key that I used to unlock what was wrong with her, which was eventually fixed, and I won't go into that.

But I said, I gave her this book. I gave her two books. I gave her a book called "The Terror That Comes in the Night," which is a book about sleep paralysis and nightmares because I thought that was what might have been bothering her. It turned out that wasn't it. Then I gave her this other book called "Ordinary Men," and it's a great book. It's a terrible book, a terrible dark book about this police battalion that was moved into Poland during World War II after the Nazis had marched through. It was all made of middle-aged guys who weren't like victims of Nazi totalitarian propaganda when they were kids. They were just, you know, bourgeois middle-class guys, kind of like all of us, let's say.

They went to police Poland, and they were going to have to do some terrible things essentially, but their commander told them quite forthrightly that if being involved in wartime policing was too hard on them, if they felt that it ethically violated them or psychologically violated them, that they could just go back to policing in Germany. Very few of them did, partly because they didn't want to abandon their comrades, let's say. They didn't want them to have to do the dirty work, you know? They ended up—they were normal policemen. They ended up the sorts of people who could take naked pregnant women out into the middle of the field and shoot them in the back of the head. That's how the book—that's the culmination of their training.

It's very interesting to read about their training because they were absolutely sickened by what they learned to do—like physically sick and vomiting, shaking, traumatized—but they didn't stop. If you want to know why, then you can read the book. I said, "Look, read this book, but don't bloody well compartmentalize it. Enough of that." It's like, read it like you're one of the damn policemen, which is how you should read history, right? You read about Nazi Germany, and you think, "Well, I'm Oscar Schindler. I'd save the Jews." It's like, "No, you wouldn't, right? You wouldn't because people didn't."

The probability is very high that you wouldn't, and no wonder. It's not surprising that it's unlikely, but you don't want to be inflating yourself with self, you know, with fictional heroism without actually knowing the facts on the ground. So I told her to read it and to understand that the policemen were her, and that's the thing to understand.

Well, the idea that the savior is the person who takes the world's sins upon himself is exactly that. It's exactly the same idea. It's like the way that there stops being Nazis is for you to know that the Nazis were you and for you to decide not to do that again. But you have to know. You see, this is the thing that people won't do. You have to understand that you could not only do what the Nazi camp guards did in Auschwitz, but that you could actually enjoy it. Then you have to decide that you're not going to do that anymore, and that's not an easy thing to figure out.

Well, and that's what that chapter is about. So that's a rough chapter, Matt. That's a rough chapter, and that's only a bit of what it's about. You know, there's a lot in there, and anyways, that's what that's about.

Chapter ten—chapter nine, let's see. I better—a little tired here. Oh yes, chapter nine is "Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't." This is a chapter about conversation and about the different forms conversation takes. It's a chapter about humility, and it's a chapter about listening. The humility element is it took me a long time to understand why there's religious injunctions supporting humility, to even understand what the word really meant in that sort of technical sense.

It means something like this: it means what you don't know is more important than what you know. That's a lovely thing to—then what you don't know can start to be your friend. You see, people are very defensive about what they know for the reasons we've already discussed. But the thing is, you don't know enough, and you can tell you don't know enough because your life is not what it could be, and neither is the life of the people around you. You just don't know enough.

What that means is that every time you encounter some evidence that you're ignorant, someone points it out, you should be happy about that because you think, "Oh, you just told me how I'm wrong." It's like, "Great! Maybe I had to sift through a lot of nonsense to get through the real message that you're telling me, but if you could actually tell me some way that I'm wrong and then maybe give me a hint about how to not be wrong like that, well then I wouldn't have to be wrong like that anymore." That would be a good thing.

You can embark on that adventure by listening to people, and if you listen to people, they will tell you amazing things if you listen to them. Many of those things are little tools that you can put in your toolkit like Batman, and then you can go out into the world and use those tools, and you don't have to fall blindly into a pit quite as often.

The humility element is, well, do you want to be right, or do you want to be learning? Then it's deeper than that. It's do you want to be the tyrannical king who's already got everything figured out, or do you want to be the continually transforming hero or fool, for that matter, who's getting better all the time? That's actually a choice, you know? It's a deep choice, and it's better to be the self-transforming fool who's humble enough to make friends with what he or she doesn't know and to listen when people talk.

Listening is a transformative exercise. If you listen to the people in your life, for example, if you actually listen to them, they'll tell you what's wrong with them and how to fix it and what they want. They can't even help it. If you start listening, because people are so shocked if you actually listen to them that they tell you all those sorts of things that they might not have even intended to—things they don't even know. Then you can work with that.

The other thing that's so interesting, you know, now and then you have a meaningful conversation, right? You don't have a good conversation with someone. You walk away and you think, "Geez, you know what? We really connected, and I know more than I did when I came away from that conversation." During the conversation, you're really engrossed in it, and that feeling of being engrossed is a feeling of meaning. The feeling of meaning is engendered because you're having a transformative conversation.

So your brain produces that feeling of meaning for it says, "Oh yeah, this is exactly where you should be right here and now. It's the right place and time for you," and that's a great place to occupy. A good conversation where people are listening has exactly that nature, and the reason it has that nature is because it is, in fact, transformative. It's one of the truisms of clinical psychology. If you're a clinical psychologist, a huge part of what you do is just listen to people. It's like, you know, they come in, they're unhappy, and they'd rather not be, something like that. You say, "Well, why do you think you might be unhappy?"

They don't know; they have some ideas, and they may have to ramble around for like a year before they figure out why they're unhappy. They get rid of a bunch of reasons why they thought they were unhappy that are untrue, and then you kind of get to the heart of the problem. Then you might ask them, "Well, if you could have what you wanted so that your life would be okay, what would that look like?" Then they have to ramble around a bunch about that because they don't really know, but the listening will straighten them out because people think by talking.

In order to think, you have to have someone to listen because it's very hard to think. Hardly anyone can think, and even the people who can think can only think about a limited number of things. But almost everybody can talk, and you can listen to yourself talk. If someone listens to you, then you also have a foil for your thoughts, right? Because you can watch the person when you're talking and see if you're boring or see if you're amusing or if you're engrossing—all of those things.

The other thing I outline is a Carl Rogers victim. He was a famous clinical psychologist. This is another great little tip. Rogers said, "Here's a trick to tell if you're listening." So let's say someone lays out their perspective for you, and then what you do is say, "Look, here's what I think you said. I think you said this and this and this and this, and then this. Is that right? Have I got what you're saying right?"

Maybe the person says, "God, you haven't been listening at all," and then they have to straighten you out. Or maybe they say, "Yeah, yeah, you got it." The nice thing about that is that you summarize their argument for them, which can be very helpful for you, but also you don't get to make the person into a straw man. If you're arguing with your wife, let's say, or your husband, a big part of you is going to want to win. That's stupid because if you win, you get to be top lobster, but they get to be bottom lobster. If you want to live with bottom lobster, then like more power to you, but I wouldn't recommend it, right?

Because you don't want that. You want to defeat your wife in an argument? Oh, well, great! If she was going to disappear tomorrow, no problem. But like you're going to live with defeated, miserable her for the next week? That's no good. So you listen, and you think, "Okay, well, here's what I think you said," and maybe even make it a little stronger and more elaborated than was the case with the original utterance so that you get the damn argument right.

Because you don't want to win; you want to fix the problem. That's the winning. So the summary with listening is so useful for that because the person can say, "Well, yeah, that's what I meant." It's like, then, well, then you have to grapple with that. Rogers said, "Well, people usually won't because, you know, if you live with someone and they tell you the truth about the situation, it usually means that there's something really stupid that you're doing." Well, them too, but there's something stupid that you're doing that you know you're doing that you actually have to stop.

That's difficult and unlikely, but if you don't stop, then you get to have the same damn problem every day or every week for the rest of your life. So it's probably better to undergo the misery of stopping it than the misery of continuing it. But that's the injunction to listen.

Rule 11 is "Don't bother children when they're skateboarding." That's a meditation on the difference between weakness and goodness. You see, one of the things that's happened in our society, and especially with regards to our attitude towards men, but also our attitude towards masculinity in women—so it's just as toxic for women—is that we seem to have concluded that strong men are dangerous. That's partly because we think Western culture is a tyrannical patriarchy, and the only reason you get to the top is because you misuse power.

All the men who are at the top of the heart are all misusing their power, and they're all tyrannical, and all the guys who have the aim and ambition to achieve that are just tyrants in training. That's sort of the basic attitude that we have towards our own culture and towards young men now, and that's just—everything about that is pathological and inexcusable and shameful. I mean, first, the claim that Western culture is primarily a patriarchal tyranny is like, well, first of all, it's historically ignorant beyond belief. Because what do you compare to what exactly? Like how many civilized countries are there in the world? You know, three dozen? The rest of them are run by brutal thugs, right?

It isn't just thugs at the top, man, because that isn't how it works in a country that's corrupt. The corruption is spread through the entire country. We're not like that, and that's—I mean, Western culture is fundamentally honest, and I can give you an example of that because people don't like that idea. eBay proved that because here it did. It was a very interesting thing because when eBay first popped up, like the cynic would say, "eBay is not going to work because I don't know you. You live on the other side of the country. You're going to send me junk, and I'm going to send you a check that bounces, and that'll be the end of eBay," right?

That's what a cynic would say. Then what happened was that brokers popped up and they said, "Well, look, we'll guarantee the exchange rights for a fee. Ten will make sure that you don't send junk, and we'll make sure your check doesn't bounce." What happened was the brokers couldn't find enough business, and the reason for that was all the transactions were honest—all of them. You know, it's like 1990. If you were on eBay and you have a reputation of less than 99, there's actually something wrong with you.

You know, okay

Which is a particularly pathological thing to do. There's a movement now to not let children have best friends. It's like, really? What the hell, man? That's so... yeah, there are so many things wrong with that idea that would take an entire another lecture just to scrape the surface. But mostly, it's just... I would not even start on that.

Um, final rule: it's called "Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street." It's a very... it's the most personal chapter in the book. It's a lot about my daughter, and my daughter was very ill when she was... well, when she was a kid, but particularly when she was a teenager. She had a very terrible time of it. She had juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and when she was between the ages of 14 and 16, it first destroyed her hip, which had to be replaced, and then it destroyed the ankle on her other leg, which had to be replaced. She walked around for two years on broken legs, and she was taking massive doses of opiates and could hardly stay awake. And she had this advanced autoimmune disease, which produced all sorts of other symptoms that were just as bad as the joint degeneration, but which are harder to describe. And so it's just bloody brutal, you know?

As a test of your faith, there's almost nothing that's more direct than a serious illness inflicted upon an innocent child, right? And so the chapter is a meditation on that and also on, well, what to do in a situation like that. Because everyone is going to have a situation like that in some sense, you know, because you're being faced with illness in the people that you love and in crisis. And so it's just... it's a practical guide to coping with those sorts of things.

One of the things you do when you're overwhelmed by crisis is you shorten your time frame. You know, it's like you can't think about next month. Maybe you can't even bloody well think about next week, or maybe not even tomorrow, you know? Because now is just so overwhelming that that's all there is. It's like... and that's what you do. You cut your time frame back until you can cope with it. And if it's not the next week that you see how to get through, then it's the next day. And if it's not the next day, then it's the next hour. And if it's not the next hour, then it's the next minute.

And you know, people are very, very, very, very, very tough. And it turns out that if you face things, it turns out that if you face things, you can put up with a lot more than you think you can put up with, and you can do it without becoming corrupted. And she did recover quite fully, much as a consequence of our own machinations, because she figured out what was wrong with her and then took the necessary steps to fix it, which is nothing short of a bloody miracle as far as I'm concerned.

Anyways, part of the cat bit is I actually start by talking about our dog, who actually died about a year ago, but he's still alive in the book. I let people know because dog lovers love dogs, and if you love cats, then they think you don't like dogs, and then they don't like you. So I also pointed out at the beginning of the chapter that, you know, if you want to pet a dog on the street, that's okay too. So you don't have to get up in arms about it.

But the idea is that, you know, you have to be alert when you're suffering. You have to be alert to the beauty in life, the unexpected beauty in life. And that's kind of what I was trying to get across with the idea of the cat. There's this cat that lives across the street from us called Ginger, and Ginger is a Siamese cat. And cats really aren't domesticated; technically speaking, they're still wild animals, but they kind of like people. God only knows why, but they do, you know?

So Ginger will come wandering over, and our dog looks at her, but they're friends. And she rolls over on his back, and Seco used to, you know, nose her a bit, and then she kind of mows you over and lets you pet her if she was feeling like it that day. And, you know, you have to look for that little bit of sparkling crystal in the darkness. When things are bad, you have to look and see where things are still beautiful and where there's still something that's sustaining.

And, you know, you narrow your time frame, and you be grateful for what you have, and that can get you through some very dark times, and maybe even successfully if you're lucky. But even if unsuccessfully, then maybe it's only tragic and not absolute hell. And you can do that, you know? In the worst situation, you can make it only tragic and not hell. And there's a big gap between tragedy and hell, you know?

There's nothing worse at a deathbed than to see the people there fighting. Death is bad enough, but you can take that, as terrible as it is, and make it into something that's absolutely unbearable. And maybe, I think, and this is sort of what I close the book with, is this idea that if we didn't all attempt to make terrible things even worse than they are, then maybe we could tolerate the terrible things that we have to put up with in order to exist. And maybe we could make the world into a better place, you know? And it's what we should be doing and what we could be doing because we don't have anything better to do. And that's what the book is about, and that's the end of "12 Rules for Life." Thank you.

[Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Well, we've overrun joyously, and normally I would have sort of cut the talk or done something so we can have questions, but I really didn't think it was appropriate. This evening's talk was absolutely luminous and inspiring. So I'm going to do one question, one question only, and I'm going to leave Jordan to actually decide what's the question he's going to ask.

So I'm going to take three from the audience, and I'm going to read out three that have come from the live stream. One from the live stream is: How do you challenge the identity politics of today? The second is a more personal one: Where do you fall short yourself in these 12 rules, and is it a constant adjustment?

Now let me take three questions from the audience, and I'll leave Jordan to then decide which is the last question that he wants to ask. So first hand there.

First of all, it's an honor to be at your lecture, and the question is: I wanted to ask, like, for example, some people, like for example, Stefan Molyneux, who interviewed you, puts, I think, tremendous attention to admitting thoughts of parents and admitting the harm that was done when getting better and working through adverse childhood experiences. And I wanted to ask you about that and what you think about that.

And then if you take the young lady just here, we need...

Sorry, my question is about chapter nine, about being humble and listening to what your enemies are saying and criticizing you. I'm a kind of person who kind of speaks my thoughts, so I speak them to my friends and see how they bounce at them. So I noticed that there's always a group of my friends who always criticize what I'm saying and not even try to understand where I'm coming from. And I've always wondered how to deal with that. I mean, I want to listen to what they're saying, but they're not understanding what I'm... they're not trying to listen to what I'm saying. So what would you do in that situation?

Can you answer that very briefly?

Okay, there's a line in the New Testament that's relevant to that: "Do not cast pearls before swine." And what that means is that if people are not listening to you, stop talking to them. And that's really... that is the best piece of advice that I can give you. And what happens is that if you stop talking to people who aren't listening to you and start watching them instead, they will tell you what they're up to. But if you have things to say, you say them, but you find people that will listen. Talk to them. The ones who aren't listening, pull back because you're devaluing what you have to say by offering it to an audience that does nothing but reject it. And that's a good guideline to life in general. So pull back.

Yeah, and our last question is the gentleman over there in blue.

Thank you, Dr. Peterson. It brought a smile to my face when you mentioned the work of John Taylor Gatto, and I just wanted to know what you think the relationship is between the classic Trivium and the Holy Trinity, and if there is, how has that changed over time?

And then...

Okay, and then you're going to be back on stage dedicating...

Yes, yes. I think I'm going to answer: Where do you fall short? You know, like I wrote these rules. Why did I write these rules? Well, you know, and especially when I said, "Well, you should try to improve yourself instead of trying to set the world straight," or instead of worrying about what other people are doing wrong, you may say, "Well, that's a hell of a thing for someone to say who just wrote a book called '12 Rules for Life.'" It's like, you know, but the thing is that I wasn't just writing that; I was writing that for me as much as for anyone else. And I mean that sincerely, you know?

I had an opportunity to spend somewhere around five years meditating on how you should conduct yourself so that your life is what it could be. And like I'm in the group of people that I'm advising, and you know what I mean? It's like all of these things are very difficult to stand up straight, to remember that, and to treat yourself like you're someone worthwhile, and to make friends with people who are good for you, and to tell the truth or at least not to lie. I mean, these are all ideals, right? That especially taken as a whole, they constitute a kind of ideal. And you never... you never attain the ideal.

And not only that, it recedes as you approach it, right? Because you straighten yourself out, you think, "Well, I've got it now," and you're thinking, "Oh, wait a minute, there's more to go. There's still more to go." And then you get that much farther along the line, you think, "Oh yeah, I thought this was the end of the road." It's like, "No, there's plenty of imperfections left to iron out." And so it is a constant adjustment.

But there's something about that that's also positive because you might say that it's not so much that there isn't such a thing as a good person; it's that our idea of what constitutes good isn't right. Because a good person is someone who's trying to get better, and no matter how good you are, there's better that you can get. But the real goodness is in the attempt, right? It's in the process, to use somewhat of a cliché, you know?

And I'll close with this, and it's a good... wait, wait, close. You know, and this is a psychological observation: the central figure of Western culture is Christ. And we can look at that psychologically because Christ is the dying and resurrecting hero. And what does that mean psychologically? Well, it means that you learn things painfully, and when you learn something painfully, a part of you has to die. That's the pain, you know? When a dream is shattered, for example, a huge part of you that constituted that dream, maybe even the biological substrate of that dream, has to be stripped away and burned.

And so life is a constant process of death and rebirth, and to participate in that fully is to allow yourself to be redeemed by it. And so the good is that process of death and rebirth voluntarily undertaken. It's like you're not as good as you could be, so you let that part of you die. And if someone comes along and says, "You know, there's some dead wood here, man. It needs to be burned off," you think, "Well, that stuff's still a bit alive. When that burns, it's going to hurt." It's like, "Yeah, well, no kidding." But maybe the thing that emerges in its place is something better.

And I think this is the secret of human beings. This is what we're like, you know, unlike any other creature, is that we can let our old selves die and let our new selves be born. And that's what we should do. And so where do I fall short in these 12 rules? Well, endlessly. Because, well, here's a way of thinking about it: until the entire world is redeemed, we all fall short. And that's probably a good place to stop.

[Applause] [Music]