THE 13 TRUTHS - JORDAN PETERSON - INCREDIBLE SPEECH

he's sad to see that people are disenchanted and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and aimless and and perverse and vengeful and and all of those things it's terrible and then to see people question whether that's necessary and then to start to rise out of it it's like it's so fun like last night I was at after my talk it's overwhelming I don't usually think about these things but I was I was after my talk last night and so all these people line up and you know they have their 15 15 seconds with me and they're

kind of tentative they're excited and a tentative when they come up to talk to me and then they have you know 15 seconds of time to tell me something I'm really listening to them and they're hesitant about whether or not to share the good news about their life you know and I think it's often because when people share good news about their life people don't necessarily respond positively you know they don't get encouragement and people need so little encouragement it's just unbelievable and so there comes something good and I think ah that's so good you

know somebody says oh I'm getting along way better with my father I haven't seen him for 10 years and now we get along great and then the power of that you can't overstate the power of that for individuals to get their life together the individuals an unbelievably powerful force and every single person who gets their act together a little bit has the capacity to spread that around them it's it's a chain reaction and so it's a lovely thing to see I have to treat yourself like you matter because if you don't then you don't take

care of yourself and you become vengeful and and and cruel and you you take you take it out on people around you and you're not a positive force none of that's good so you suffer more and so does everyone around you and there's a malevolence that enters into it none of that's good so that's what happens if you don't treat yourself like you matter and then what happens if you don't treat other people like they matter well you lie to them you cheat them you steal you you you enter into impulsive relationships with them they

can't trust you that doesn't go anywhere they don't like you you you end up alone at best and maybe like incarcerated at worst like that doesn't work and so you watch the people around you who thrive regardless of what they say they act out the proposition that everyone matters and then you have a functional society and I think ok well if if if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters you have a functional society maybe that's evidence that that proposition is true it's like I think it's I think it's true one of the

things that's really interesting about the Old Testament is that and the Jews in the Old Testament is that they don't take the path of Cain every time their walloped by God which is like fairly frequently they say we must have done something wrong and we have to set our self right and that's a an unbelievably heroic attitude because that's the alternative to cursing fate it's like you take the responsibility for failure unto yourself and you think well if I was just maybe if I just had my act together a little bit more if I took

advantage of every opportunity that was put in front of me if I wasn't resentful and bitter then I could have done something that would have tilted the situation in a different direction and like that's almost inevitably true Dostoevsky I think said something like every man is responsible for everything that happens to him and everything that happens to everyone else and that's you know that that's that's it's a crazy statement right it's a crazy statement and he was a pretty extreme person in many many ways but there's a level at which that's metaphysically true you know

because what happens is that it's you its failure to act often that's the most catastrophic you know I mean it's it's it's to not do the right thing when the when the situation presents itself and it's very specific you know you're constantly in situations where you could do the right thing if you were willing to take a risk that's actually a relatively moderate size and you know that you could take the risk and you know that you should take the risk and you don't and that happens to people all the time and then what happens

is the thing that they didn't oppose grows a little bit and they shrink a little bit and that starts a loop a psychologists have been not all psychologists obviously but the psychological profession is its neck deep in this in this pathology has been beating the self-esteem drum for fifty years oh no you're okay you should feel good about yourself like you're fine the way you are it's like you think well that's a calming message for people it's like no it's not it's not at all and I watch my audience this is like it's full of

people in the audience who think I'm suffering a lot more than I think is tenable a whole bunch of it's my fault my life is not in the order it should be I know I'm doing 50 things wrong it's like what the hell's wrong with me what's wrong with the people around me this is really serious and some you know well-meaning person comes up and says oh you're okay just the way you are it's like no one wants that message it's like no I'm not okay the way I am I'm not okay at all the

way I am I know that and so you know when I'm when I'm speaking to to when I'm speaking now I say to people well oh you're nowhere near what you could be that's that that's the positive message it's like yeah you're a mess but you don't have to stay that way cause you're a mess you know it obviously you're suffering away like like so much you can barely tolerate it it's like that's okay you can do something about it so yeah that's the thing that that turns the lights on it's like you have do

something about it 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 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 so 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 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 you're harmless you're not virtuous you're just harmless you're like a rabbit rabbit isn't virtuous yeah it's just just can't do anything except get eaten it's not virtuous if you're a monster and you don't act monstrously then you're virtuous but you also have to be a monster while you see this all the time Harry Potter's like that

too it's like he's flawed he's hurt he's got evil in him he can talk to snakes man he breaks rules all the time all the time he's not an obedient at all but you know he has a good reason for breaking new rules and if he couldn't break the rules him and his little cleat of rule breaking you know troublemakers if they didn't break the rules they wouldn't attain the highest goal so it's very peculiar but it's it's very there it's a very very very very common mythological notion you know the hero has to be

narrow has to be a monster but a controlled monster Batman is like that I mean it's it's everywhere it's the Tor story you always hear I know you stated in the last lecture that the importance for city aides in life and to kind of have goals to work towards right so my question was where do you how do you do that if you don't know where you want to go because that's kind of where I got stuck on you're your future off offering program because okay that's that's a good question that's a really good question

so there's this notion in the Old Testament that morality is following a sequence of prohibitions there's a bunch of bad things you shouldn't do and then basically you're good enough and and and I think there's wisdom in that I think that's kind of where children start right you I mean I love children and all that but they're they're they're crazy little creatures and they need to be you know civilized and partly what you do is you you lay prohibitions on them and mostly what you're trying to do is lay prohibitions on them for the behaviors

that if they manifested would make their life miserable so this is why this thing that I've said the people has become this crazy internet mean but that's to clean up your room and which which is a lot better and more useful than people think it's a lot harder to but the the thing the first thing you do I think and I learned this in part from Solzhenitsyn when he was trying to iron out his soul when he was in the gulag because he was trying to figure out how he got there how he contributed to

how he got there you know not Stellan and Hitler even though they were kind of to blame you know but he wasn't much he could do about that I think what you have to do and this is part of humility is you have to look around you within your sphere of influence like the direct sphere of influence and fix the things that announce themselves as in need of repair and those are often small things you know and they can be like your room put it in order because the thing is it isn't exactly so important

that your room is in order although it is what's important is that you learn how to distinguish between chaos and order and to be able to act in a manner that produces order and I think you can you can do something as simple as just sit on your bed and think okay there's probably like five things I could do today so that tomorrow morning is slide better than this morning was at least or at least I'm not falling behind and those who usually be it's like having to eat a toad in the morning right it's

like it's not gonna be something you want to do there'll be things you're trying to avoid there snakes essentially but if you ask yourself like you're asking someone which i think is a form of prayer if you ask yourself instead of telling yourself you know what is it that I could do to set things more right today that I would actually do it's usually some small thing because you're not that disciplined you know then you can go do it and then you you put the world together a little more when you do that and that

spreads out but you also put your you also construct yourself into something that's better able to call order forth from chaos and that makes you just incrementally stronger and then the next day you can maybe take on a slightly larger task and like you get the benefit of compound interest if you do that it's a tremendously powerful technique and they think if you do that at some point instead of just having to fix things up that are not good you'll start to get a glimmer of the positive things that you could do you know the

positive things that you could do that would actually constitute a vision and now that's what I would recommend if you're hungry and you eat well that's good but it's over and then you're on to the next thing right it's not exactly sustaining it's just necessary that's called consume Ettore reward by the way this other reward system is incentive reward and the incentive reward system works on dopamine this neurochemical dopamine which is also the neuro chemical tracks that opiates and cocaine and amphetamines the drugs that people really like to abuse alcohol often for some people activate

and so you might say if you don't have enough meaning in your life then you're more prone to addiction and that's definitely the case even with rats if you take a rat you put him in a cage by himself and he has nothing to do and then you give him access to cocaine he'll get addicted to the point where he won't do anything but take cocaine but if you throw the rat back in with a bunch of other rats and he gets to do rat things then it's very hard to get him addicted to cocaine

and so the purposeless rat is prone to addiction well it's the same with human beings now here's a corollary to that which is really cool so the magnitude of the reward you experience as you're moving towards a goal is proportionate to the importance of the goal so that means the more important the goal you pick the more possibility there is for the kind of reward let's say that it's really a state of being that is life-affirming and it is directly life-affirming in that you know like if you're in a football game and you're banned it's

an important football game and maybe you break a finger and you know normally that's that's a problem it hurts and you're gonna stop doing whatever you're doing but if you're right in the middle of the game then you'll be so amped up on this reward system that its analgesic it stops the pain it also suppresses anxiety so if you have a purpose then its analgesic it takes some of the pain out of life it's very positive in that it motivates and energizes you and focuses you and makes you able to remember and pay attention and

it quells fear and so those things are all direct and so then you might think well what's the best possible goal well and that's that's the purpose I would say of religious training and philosophical training it's like just what the hell are you doing in the world you have to treat yourself like you matter because if you don't then you don't take care of yourself and you become vengeful and and and cruel and you you take you take it out on people around you and you're not a positive force none of that's good so you

suffer more and so does everyone around you and there's a malevolence that enters into it none of that's good so that's what happens if you don't treat yourself like you matter and then what happens if you don't treat other people like they matter well you lie to them you cheat them you steal you you you enter into impulsive relationships with them they can't trust you that doesn't go anywhere they don't like you you you end up alone at best and maybe like incarcerated at worst like that doesn't work and so you watch the people around

you who thrive regardless of what they say they act out the proposition that everyone matters and then you have a functional society and I think ok well if if if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters you have a functional Society maybe that's evidence that that proposition is true it's like I think it's I think it's true good damn schedule and stick to it ok so what's the rule with the schedule it's not a bloody prison that's the first thing that people do wrong is say well I don't like to have to follow

a schedule it's like well what kind of schedule are you setting up well I should I have to do this then I have to do this then I have to do this you know and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do it's like wrong set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want that's the trick it's like okay I've got tomorrow if I was gonna set it up so it was the best possible day I could have practically speaking

what would it look like well then you schedule that and obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's gonna go along with that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're gonna insist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were that then at the beginning of the day right that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of those in a row you just dig you know you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it's like sorry that's just not a

good strategy it's a bad strategy so maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe more than that depending on how far behind you are but even that you can you can ask yourself okay well I've got these responsibilities I have to schedule the damn things in what's the right ratio of responsibility to reward and you can ask yourself that just like you'd negotiate with someone who is working for you it's like okay you gotta work tomorrow okay so I want you to work tomorrow and you might say okay well what

are you gonna do for me that makes it likely that I'll work for you well you could ask yourself that you know maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for fifteen minutes I don't know whatever turns your crank man but you know you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself like you're negotiating with someone that you care for that you would like to be productive and have a good life and and that's how you make the schedule it's like and then you look at the day and

you think well if I had that day that'd be good great you know and you you're useless and horrible so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero right and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy another rule is well aim for 51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake or because you're gonna hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward one of the main reasons that people do get what they want is because they

don't actually figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you let's say which would even be better than what you want right because you know you might be what wrong about what you want easily but maybe you could get what would really be good for you well why don't you well because you don't try you don't think okay here's what I would like if I could have it and and I don't mean I don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it

to deliver you goods for status or something like that that isn't what I mean I mean something like imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for and then you thought okay I'm caring for this person I would like things to go as well for them as possible what would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case well people don't do that they don't sit down and think alright you know let's let's figure it out you've got a life it's hard obviously it's

like three years from now you can have what you need you got to be careful about it you can't have everything you can have what would be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it well my experience with people as being is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it then they get it and it's strange because they don't necessarily made me late an idea about what would be good for you and then

you take ten steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you know you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success and so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and so there's a proposition here in the proposition is if you actually want something you

can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want an answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but the asking isn't a whim or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious about it you have to think okay

like I'm taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation and I don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that I would aim at sit on your bed one day and ask yourself what's what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis absolutely screw up my life and if you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the

question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing right so it's it's a fairly it's a fairly limited attempt first of all we're not gonna say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense but we will presume that there are things that you're doing that for one reason or another you know are not

in your best interests there's something about them that you just know you should stop there are kind of self-evident to you other things you're gonna be doubtful about you're not gonna know which way is up and which way is down but there are things that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do now some of those you won't stop doing for whatever reason you don't have the discipline or maybe there's a secondary payoff or you don't believe it's necessary or it's too much of a sacrifice or you're angry or resentful or or afraid who knows

so forget about those for now but there's another subset that you could stop doing it might be little thing well that's fine stop doing it and see what happens and what will happen is your vision will clear a little bit and then something else will pop up in your field of apprehension that you will also know you should stop doing and that you could stop doing because you've strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you were doing before that just puts you together a little bit more and you can do

that repeatedly for for an indefinite period of time and and you know that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear and final picture of what constitutes the truth and the good but it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad and you know that's not a bad start [Music] the next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness well so and although of the two aspects of conscientiousness say orderliness and and industriousness the better predictor is industriousness so the question is well

what can you do about your industriousness and the answer to that is well that's kind of rough too because there's a strong genetic component but you can work on micro habits with regards to your conscientiousness and I think the best micro habits this is partly to do with this future authoring program processes I think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value and the future authoring program helps people do that and basically it does a situational analysis of it helps

you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis I would say and so the questions are something like well alright you're gonna have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so what are the potential sources of motivation well you could think about them in in the Big Five manner you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're a disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity

if you're high in neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know what would you want from your friendships what would you want from your intimate relationship how would you

like to structure your family what do you want for your career well how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you gonna regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to auger down you know because alcoholism for example wipes out you know five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control and then and then so maybe you know you you you develop a vision of what your life what you would

like your life to be and that associates the so the goal well once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the micro process has become rewarding in proportion in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your your incentive reward system you know we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion win it can see you moving towards a

valued goal okay well what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle the more the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is well you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as I can tell what you do is you specify your long term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to

stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a unique individual you want it you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything

and the answer that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the sub components of human existence and I already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to

have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc you know those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's that's a bad that's a bad deal for you so so once you but once you setup that that goal structure let's say and that's really in many in many ways that's what you should be doing at

universities is that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you aim at that and then use everything you learned as a means of building that person that you want to be and and I really mean want to be I don't mean should be even those things those things are gonna overlap and it's important to distinguish between those because that's partly and this is back down to the micro routine analysis so as I saying well you're gonna try to make yourself more industrious

okay number one specify your damn goals because how are you gonna hit something if you don't know what it is that isn't going to happen and often people won't specify their goals too because they don't like to specify conditions for failure so if you keep yourself all vague and foggy which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well then you don't know when you fail and people might say well I really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful it so I'll keep myself blind about when I fail

that's fine except you'll fail all the time then you just won't know it until you've failed so badly that you're done and that can easily happen by the time you're 40 so so I would recommend that you don't let that happen so that's willful blindness right you could have known but you chose not to okay so once you get your goal structure set up you think okay if I could have this life looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's gonna be you know anxiety provoking and threatening and there's gonna be

some suffering and loss involved in all of that obviously the goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort you will have to necessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of control it's a terrifying doctrine but it's not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward there's a pathway forward and the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being that has some nobility so that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone

who's capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering and that the pathway forward as far as the existentialists are concerned is by while certainly by the avoidance of deceit particularly in language but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions of existence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them and the thing that's so interesting about that is no up to as far as I'm concerned and some of this is from clinical experience you know if you take people and I've told you this and you expose them

voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals their self defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for ten years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the death by your own definitions right within the value structure that you've created to the

degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they'd get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left

at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world in a number another way that you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now my experience is with people that were probably running at about 51% of our capacity something

mean you can think about this yourselves I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day you know inefficient studying watching things on YouTube that not do you not want to watch that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done that's probably four hours right there no what do you think well that's 2025 hours a week it's a hundred hours a month that's two and a half full

work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth twenty dollars an hour which is a radical under estimate it's probably more like fifty if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting fifty thousand dollars a year and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting fifty thousand dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because I'm not gonna last nearly as long and so if your

life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you be who knows how much more efficient ten times more efficient twenty times more efficient that's the purrito distribution you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely it's off the charts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to make things better they

actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocide allor all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if people start really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are our major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt

it isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know you think well there's nine seven billion people in the world we're going to peak at about nine billion by the way and then it'll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so

it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do but that's simply not the case it's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network you're a node in a network of course that's even more true now that we have social media you'll you know you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion and so that's how you're connected and the things you do there like dropping

a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think and so if you act that way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that's better than living a meaningless existence it's better for it to matter but I mean if you really ask yourself would you be so sure if you had the

choice I can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price I pay is that nothing matters or I can reverse it and everything matters but I have to take the responsibility that's associated with that it's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path now when you say well denialists suffered dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantages they have no responsibility so that's the payoff and I actually think that's the motivation say well I can't help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed it's

like yeah maybe maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so that's a pretty good deal all things considered especially when the or when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world well what Solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the twentieth century it's

not just him even though he's the best example is that if you live a pathological life you pathologize your xiety and if enough people do that then it's hell really really and you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the four tit fortitude to do that and you'll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit or even more importantly if it's a light if it's a place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends because that's what happened in the 20th

century