Name: Dr. Jordan Peterson | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #328
Uploaded: 2021-03-11T01:59:48.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Jordan Peterson | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #328' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Dr. Jordan Peterson | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #328' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-03-11. Transcript available.

Dr. Jordan Peterson | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #328

Today's episode is brought to you by Magic Mind, the anti-procrastination sipper.
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Go to magicmind.co and use code THEOMAGIC for 20% off.
Today's guest is his second time returning to the podcast.
He has a new book out, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules.
For life, I am almost to rule number four right now.
And man, he's just, you know, I'm gracious for his time.
You know, I'm honored to be able to talk to a thinking man.
This man is a real thinker and an orator.
And sometimes I can think and sometimes I can talk, but rarely can I do both.
He's a professor. He's high level in so many fields.
He's a best-selling author, sold over five million copies of his first book, 12
Rules for Life.
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jordan Peterson.
I wish I could break and let myself on wine.
Shine that light on me
I'll sit and tell you my stories
Shine on me
And I will find a song
I'll be singing just from me
Dr. Peterson, great to see you again.
Hi, Theo. It's really good to see you, too.
It's been a while. A long while.
Yeah, it has been a while.
Thank you for the new rules.
I got to ask you, how many more rules are there overall?
Because it's starting to add up.
Well, originally there was a list of 42.
I published that on Quora.
I've heard that.
Yes.
And so, in principle, there's 18 more.
But of course, you know, there's an infinite number of necessary rules.
I don't think I'll publish any more rule books, however.
Yeah, I'm just letting you know, as someone who's trying to abide by the rules,
we're doing our best out here.
And we're glad that there's more.
But it's also, it's a lot to do, you know.
It's a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and you can only beat the same horse so many times.
Yeah, well.
I don't think that's actually a saying.
But now I've invented it.
Well, I've seen.
So, I grew up in some areas.
They had a little bit of mild animal cruelty by us growing up.
Nothing real heavy.
But, you know, probably, I'm glad some of it wasn't documented at the time,
actually.
So, I tried to get as far as I could into Beyond Order, into the new book.
And it's just, you know, it's hard.
There's a lot of, like, you have to take your time.
And you have to really absorb as you go.
And there was one part.
There's a lot of parts that stuck out for me.
But so far, there's a part in Chapter 3 where you talk about fear and you talk
about the fog.
And I wrote down a sentence that says that sometimes you're so afraid that you
will not allow yourself to even know what you want.
I think that's very common.
It really hit me hard.
Yeah.
Because sometimes, you know, I admit I'm afraid to, like, I'm afraid to even
map out, even to really write down and map out what I want.
But I don't know exactly.
I tried to really drop down and figure out what the fear was.
Like, why am I afraid?
Like, and I've had some trouble really figuring that out.
Like, am I afraid that I'll have to then do it?
Am I afraid that I'll then feel inadequate based upon what I really want and
where I currently am?
So, I just wanted you to maybe expound on that a little bit and just kind of
share, like, what did you think?
Why do I get afraid to really admit, even admit to myself what I really want?
Well, I think you put your finger on two of the fundamental reasons.
If you don't allow yourself to know what you want, then you haven't established
your conditions for failure.
Right?
I mean, if you're aiming at a goal and the goal is really clear, then you can...
Sorry, I lost you.
Oh, you did?
Yes.
Just visually, or can you still hear me?
I...
I can hear you.
Just...
Okay, there we go.
Sorry about that.
No worries.
Okay, you're back.
I might have been just being still, too.
Somehow I might get a little still.
No, it was...
That's low blood pressure.
Zoom minimized.
Okay, let's forget about that.
We can go back to this.
Okay.
If you know what you want, then you know when you're failing.
If you don't allow yourself to know what you want, you can keep that foggy.
If you don't set out the conditions for your success, then you can avoid your
responsibility, because again, that's not clear.
And the problem with wanting something is that, in all probability, you're
going to have to work for it.
You're going to have to make sacrifices, and it's certainly possible that you
want to avoid that.
You might be afraid to make it clear, because other people could deny it to you,
too, which is something I write about a fair bit in that chapter.
The problem is, and failing to make any of that clear protects you right now,
but it's really hard on you over the medium to long term.
Because if you don't make it clear to yourself what you want, or to other
people, the probability that you're just going to stumble into it is pretty low.
And you can put that off indefinitely day after day, but the problem with that
is that you age while you're doing that.
And there's obviously a price to be paid for that.
So that chapter, that's chapter three, Do Not Hide Things in the Fog.
I mean, it's a warning about failing to pay attention.
You know, knowledge emerges in a very strange way.
It emerges, obviously, when we learn something, we started out by not knowing
it.
And so what that means is that knowledge goes through a transformation process
from being absolutely not there to being explicit and fully detailed.
And one step of that process is emotion.
And so, for example, you might find yourself frustrated and disappointed about
the events of the day, but be unable to exactly specify why.
That's extremely common.
You know, you go home to your partner and you be in a bad mood and, you know,
you'll snap at them for something and they'll say, well, what's up with you?
And you'll say, well, nothing.
You're just being annoying when it's perfectly clear to both of you that there
is actually something up with you.
And then that disappointment and frustration, anger and sadness, let's say, or
anxiety is a sign that something isn't right.
But it isn't like it isn't necessarily that you're repressing knowledge of what's
not right.
It's that you just you actually don't know.
And the emotion is the first step in the process by which that knowledge
emerges.
And you might have to sit and think and talk to your partner or to a friend for
God only knows how long before you're actually going to put your finger on what
it is that you're upset about.
And it could be very far removed from whatever happened to trigger you in the
moment.
And so that's the fog.
And you can keep things in the fog just by not doing that.
It's really easy.
It's no more difficult than just sitting there doing nothing because creating
knowledge is active and difficult.
Yeah, well, it's, you know, we've created and we've created such a perfect fog
these days.
Like really, the fog has been it's become such a bit.
The fog is such a business.
Every little thing that they can that can be created to take away your
attention from or that can take away our attention from figuring out who we are.
Or like kind of spelunking inside of ourselves and trying to get some answers
has really been created.
It's almost it's pretty masterful how much has been created out here on the
outside to keep our attention away from delving inside of ourselves.
Well, you know, attention is the basic currency, right?
Everyone fights for it.
And it's incredibly valuable.
And it certainly is the case that it's also very tempting to turn your
attention to things that grasp your short-term interest rather than, say,
pursuing the causes of negative emotion.
That's a good example.
And, of course, we have massive corporations working night and day to
continually attract our attention.
And there's something sinister about that, obviously, but you can't exactly lay
responsibility at their feet because there isn't that.
There's a tremendous overlap between educating people, informing them and
making them attend to you.
And the lines between all of those things are very foggy, let's say, and
difficult to lay out.
It's certainly the case that one of the ways that you can keep yourself in a
fog about yourself is by distracting, is through distraction with external,
with anything in the external world.
And, obviously, computer technology, cell phones, games, well, not negative in
and of themselves, perhaps, are there at any moment to distract you.
At any moment, yeah, the little things that are time consumers, like, yeah,
there's companies, there are businesses where that is their, that's their
business, is to get your attention.
Everything's trying to get our attention.
Sometimes I worry that the forces that are out there that have, like, started
to, you know, really create algorithms even on how to get our attention and how
to keep it, that those forces are stronger than our human abilities to keep
them away from us.
Do you feel like that that's true or do you feel like that that's just a fear?
I really do believe that that's true.
I, look, as far as I can tell, we are teaching computers to, to read our minds
as fast as we possibly can and they're way better at it than they were 10 years
ago and they're going to be so much better at it in five years that we won't
even be able to imagine it.
And when I say read our minds, I'm not talking about something magical, but.
Oh, yeah.
For example.
You're not talking about, like, guess what's happening.
It's not like, like, they're going to guess what we're thinking or guess what
we want for dinner or anything like that, probably.
Well, they might, but they won't do it by directly reading our brainwaves or
anything like that.
They'll, they're already algorithms that target advertisements to send at you
are pretty good at deciding what it is that you're motivated to pursue.
And now.
Oh, yeah.
I actually just got an ad on my phone for your new book, actually.
So, yeah.
Oh, well, good.
So I'm involved in the same process, the same nefarious process.
I'm just joking.
Go on.
That, that I think it's Facebook, but I might be wrong about this, that owns
Oculus and the headset, the VR headset company.
Now, you can, you can track eye movements with a VR headset and psychologists
use the tracking of eye movements to map attention in high detail.
Now, look, if you look at our eyes, you see that there's a colored circle and a
dark circle in the middle.
And then that's surrounded by white.
And that makes your eye very visible to other people, animals too, but to other
people, particularly.
Human eyes are quite unique in that regard.
And it looks like we've evolved to have highly visible eyes.
And the reason for that is that other, we communicate with other people and
they can read our motivations by watching our eyes.
So if you stand on the corner and you look up at nothing in the sky and you
stand there long enough, someone else will join you.
And then if there's two people, then there'll be 10 right away.
And the reason for that is that we, and this is again, something uniquely human.
We attend to where other people point their eyes, assuming that if they're
interested in it, we might be interested in it too.
And so that's, and human beings are visual animals.
About half our brain is taken up with visual processing.
We're much more visual than virtually any other animal.
And so computers are soon going to be able to track where we place our eyes,
which of course, advertisers are incredibly interested in.
And that's going to speed up the ability of high-powered computational devices
to understand human beings as a group, but also each of us individually to an
immense degree, immense degree.
And so, and I, I think we're probably 10 years away from computers that
understand us better than we understand ourselves.
AI machines are going to get extremely good at this because it's so lucrative
to, to be able to gauge attention.
There's, there's nothing that's more valuable than that.
And so.
Do you feel like it should, do you feel like there should be let, it's hard to
say there should be legislation becaus