Shadowing Practice: Jordan Peterson: "Stop Being Harmless and Start Being Dangerous" - Learn English Speaking with Video
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One of the things that Carl Jung said
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that I thought was really interesting
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when he was talking about the Oedipal situation in families I never forgot this So the Oedipal situation, roughly speaking, is when...
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I'll lay out the classic story Is when a child is seriously overprotected, usually a male child, by his mother Now, the reverse can be the case,
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and it can be a female child by the mother
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and all of that But I'll just talk about the classic case to begin with now, what Freud observed was that there were usually not very good boundaries in families like
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that and so the relationship between the husband
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and the wife was either strained or non -existent
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and the wife would often turn to the child to be what she isn't getting from the husband
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and so there's a great South Park episode about this a wonderful South Park episode where they, where, I don't remember that horrible little guy is the,
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that's him, yeah, yeah Yeah, and his mother brings in the dog whisperer to train him, and it's a brilliant episode.
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If you want to learn about the Freudian -Oedipal situation, you watch that, you've got it down cold, because she brings in this expert who then she wants to have an affair with,
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so that's a boundary issue.
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And he basically separates her son from him
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and imposes the same discipline on him that he would impose on a bad dog.
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Although he also trains the dog's owners all the time, because maybe it's not the dog, maybe it's the owner There's a horse whisperer movie too about the original horse whisperer
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that does a beautiful job of laying that out too
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because he's very good at fixing problem horses and unbelievably good at diagnosing
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psychopathology on the part of the owner He's got a gift for it, but anyways, what happens in the South Park episode is that the dog whisperer gets Cartman,
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yeah, straightened out.
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And he starts, like, dressing properly and doing his homework.
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And the mother is pursuing an affair with the dog whisperer, but he's professional.
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He keeps his distance, like he keeps boundaries around him.
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And then he leaves.
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And then the first thing that she does when he leaves is bribe Cartman, basically, out of doing his homework so that he can accompany her to,
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I don't know, a fast food restaurant or something like and
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so the reason she does that is because she's lonesome and doesn't have anybody else around and maybe she's also deeply, deeply, deeply terrified that if she helps that boy grow up,
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he will leave and she'll have nothing and so mothers who don't have something,
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say, outside their infants, not merely their children are more likely to fall into that, and it's no wonder, you've got to think that through and lots of women,
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really, most women, really fall in love with their babies, you know and so even if they start growing into larger children,
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that can be threatening because when the infant turns into a toddler,
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the infant is dead the toddler is there now, and you can radically interfere with that process that happens all the time,
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all the time, that's the classic Freudian Oedipal nightmare and that episode is brilliant,
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it's bloody brilliant, it just nails it and some of you have been in my personality class and watched Crumb,
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the documentary Crumb and that's another staggering exposition of exactly that kind of pathology anyways, one of the things Jung pointed out,
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so I knew this guy once who had a mother who basically was trying
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that trick and she was very smart and had lots of tricks up her sleeves, and there's just no way he was going to go for it he rebelled at every possible moment,
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and he basically became, I would say, somewhat hyper -masculine in response which is an interesting lesson with regards to the hyper -masculinity
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that boys often develop if they're raised by single mothers
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because they tend to go one of two ways and he just fought her at every step of the way, and it didn't happen but one of the things Jung said,
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which I loved, and you can really see this in the Crumb documentary is
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that the Oedipal mother basically entices the child says, look, here's the deal.
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You don't have to do anything, but you don't get to leave.
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But if you don't leave and you don't do these difficult things, then I'll take care of you.
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And the child has a choice all the way along there.
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I mean, obviously, he's outclassed in some sense, but it's not as obvious as you'd think.
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Little kids are tough, and they make decisions all the time.
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And so Jung thought about it more as a conspiracy than as something imposed on the child by the mother
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and I really like, it's actually a conspiracy between mother, father, and child, actually.
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And I think that's a good way of looking at it, even though it's really rough, because, well, should you hold the child responsible?
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Well, yes, but judiciously and not completely, because then if you deal with someone like that as an adult, and they're trying to escape from it,
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you have to go all the way back and figure out how the hell it happened, and then they have to adjust, they have to figure out where they opened the door, like inviting a vampire in,
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because they can't come in unless you invite them in.
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so don't invite them in, because once they're in, they're really hard to get rid of and they'll take all your blood, so that's a cautionary tale so anyways,
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Pinocchio doesn't know any better, and he's got the egotism of youth and he's offered the easy way to success,
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which is exactly what the fox tells him and off they go to see Stromboli so this is the song, I'm not gonna read it all well,
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it's great to be a celebrity in actor's life for me you sleep till after two, you promenade a big cigar,
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you tour the world in a private car you dine on chicken and caviar, an actor's life for me so it's all this idea of wealth
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and public exposure and zero attention whatsoever to anything regarding responsibility
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or discipline or learning and so it's a dual attraction, right? you get everything you want, and you don't have to do anything, geez, what a deal and so that's what the actor represents,
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it's a liar, fundamentally, it's someone who's acting out a deception they're a persona in the Jungian sense,
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so the persona is the mask you wear in public that you might even think you are, but you're not, it's this mask,
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and that's the persona so the fox and the cat are inviting the puppet to only become a persona and that's.. see,
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for Jung, you start as a persona
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and then when you start to investigate the parts of you
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that don't really fit in that persona that would be the shadow, then you start understanding who you really are and that's shocking, because the persona contains everything,
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roughly speaking, that you think is good and maybe even
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that your immediate culture thinks is good and then the shadow contains everything that's not part of that,
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and some of that's really bad but some of it is good disguised as bad, and you can't break out of the persona
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and transcend it until you incorporate a lot of what's in the shadow and so, for example, if you're an extraordinarily compassionate person, let's say, 98th percentile will say
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you're going to be sacrificing yourself to other people all the time
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and there are people who will find that extraordinarily endearing
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and it will be under some circumstances but the problem is
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that you will sacrifice yourself and that's a really bad attitude to have, for example, towards adult males it's a great thing for infants,
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but for adult males it is the wrong approach and
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so you will get taken advantage of continually by people who
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are looking for someone like you until you grow some teeth and you'll think,
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no, no, that's the opposite of compassion being able to bite hard is the opposite of compassion which it is,
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and so you'll have that pushed into the predator category I'm not doing that, I'm not getting angry, I don't like conflict it's like,
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until you bring that out of the depths and put it on so you can use it you're gonna be in trouble, and that's kind of Nietzsche's idea of the revaluation of good and evil
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you have a sense of what's good and a sense of what isn't with your conscience but it's not very smart, it's got things in the wrong boxes And a lot of the things that even nature itself,
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a lot of the things that you accept as untrammeled goods, like compassion, let's say, have a very dark side, first of all.
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And second, are not enough to get you through life.
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You need the opposite virtues, too.
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And so you have to develop them.
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And so you get outside the persona to do that.
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And then this, so that's the positive feminine on the left.
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And then on the right, that's the gorgon, and that's the thing that fills you with terror when you look at it.
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There's another representation of the positive feminine.
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It's another representation of Mary.
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There are representations very much like this of Isis with Horus on her lap.
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And people often consider those precursors, they're Egyptian statues, precursors to the Christian iconography.
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And, well, I suppose in some sense they are, insofar as they predated them in time but the fundamental issue is that,
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well, this image has to be held up as transcendent.
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And by that I mean it's an image that's got to be at the basis of a value structure
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that actually works insofar as there's going to be human beings, because there aren't any human beings without the infant and the mother.
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And so if that's not held up as an image of ultimate value, then everything falls apart.
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And it's something our culture does extraordinarily badly.
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I had a client recently admit to me in ashamed tones that she wanted to have children.
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I thought, I said, well, you don't have to be ashamed of that, especially not if you're talking to me.
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And she said, oh, that's such a relief because I can't talk to anyone about it at work.
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They seem to think that it's, you know, degrading.
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I thought that you can hardly diagnose a culture as more pathological than that.
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That's so appalling.
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And it's so hard.
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It's one of the things I really feel badly for young women because they're not guided through this with any sense whatsoever.
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And I'll tell you what my experience has been working with women, and you can take this for what it's worth.
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and I've worked with women who've achieved the highest levels of their profession I don't mean just in academia,
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but in a number of different fields this is what happens we'll take the typical woman, conservative woman, because they're more typical,
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conscientious not particularly open, so they're dutiful people you know, they're existing within the structures of their society
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so I'll take female lawyers as a classic example so they're very good at high school, very hardworking, very intelligent but very dutiful,
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and often rather agreeable And that's important because it means to some degree
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that they want to please and they'll do what they're told
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And so part of the reason I think that women are outperforming men in elementary, junior high school, high school and university Is
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because they're more likely to be obedient And I know
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that to some degree because we did analysis of students in Quebec
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And found out that one thing that predicted grades over
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and above intelligence and conscientiousness Was agreeableness
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and agreeable people got better grades than their IQ and conscientiousness would predict and that's particularly negative for men, so imagine this is what's happening so,
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you're a borderline student, and you're also a bit rebellious and antisocial I'm going to fail you, like you're right on the cusp,
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don't like you much, you fail you have exactly the same grade profile, but I like you tick, you move ahead, you don't and
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so one of the things that's dividing men from women as they progress through school is the degree to
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which they're agreeable Now
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that works out to some degree for women insofar as the agreeableness moves them forward
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But they encounter the negative elements of being agreeable later in their careers anyways
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Their women are very good in high school then they go to college.
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They're very good in college They nail their damn grades.
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They do their studying they get their A's and they
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and they ace their LSAT
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So they're smart too then they go off to do their articling
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and they're really really good at it
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And then they get offered an associate position
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and they're really really good at it
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and then by the time they're 30 they make partner and let's say they're in high pressure, high paying jobs $250 ,000 a year,
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$300 ,000 a year, $500 an hour Okay, what's your life like?
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You work all the time, period 70 hours a week,
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75 hours a week, flat out and you don't get to make any mistakes
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and if your client calls you at 3 in the morning on Sunday you say, I'm really glad to hear from you Because
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if you don't there's some hot law firm in New York
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that'll take your client from you at a moment's notice And the client is paying you whatever the firm
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$750 an hour of which maybe you get 350
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and what they want is an answer about something really complicated Write bloody now
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and you can say all you want about the fact
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that women have a difficult time with that
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because it's a male -dominated Patriarchy any any female lawyer who's hit 30
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and his partner that has any sense at all knows that's complete bloody rubbish It's market determined right to the core.
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What happens to the women when they're in their 30s?
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They all leave the high -end law firms.
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Why?
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Because who in their right mind would want to live like that?
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That's the issue, right?
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Once you make about $60 ,000 a year for your family,
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but let's say for you personally Additional income makes zero has zero impact on your quality of life Zero
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So why work 80 hours a week?
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Well, men will do it, some men, very few.
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A handful of hyper -competitive men who are obsessed with hitting the pinnacle of the given dominance hierarchy they're in, will happily work 80 hours a week,
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and they'll forgo everything else.
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Relationships, family, children, way in the second category.
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And so those men are often very difficult to live with, too, because they're so obsessed with their career, it's hard to have a relationship with them.
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And maybe they don't have much of a relationship with their kids, but they're damn good at what they do.
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And part of that is they're smart and disciplined, and they'll work non -stop all the time.
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It's like an obsession.
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And that's the sort of people who run things.
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Those are the people who run things.
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Well, they're often also disagreeable, too, because you want to manage people?
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Really?
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They're not going to like you.
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You know, and it's not an easy thing to not be liked.
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And actually, if you're an agreeable person, and women are more agreeable than men, it's quite painful to be disliked, but if you're in a managerial and executive position,
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the probability that people are going to like you is quite low.
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Now, if you're a real son of a bitch, then they're going to dislike you more, but those positions are very stressful, partly because of the interpersonal dynamics,
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and they're also incredibly, incredibly competitive.
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So the women hit that at 30, and they're completely qualified, and the law firms are bloody desperate to keep them, because it's really hard to find highly qualified people,
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Especially once you put all that time into training them, especially if they're also good at bringing in business The law firms trip over themselves to try to keep them.
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They can't.
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The women think, why in the world am I doing this?
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Why in the world would anyone in their right mind do this?
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Especially because they're often married by that point, too, and generally they've married a husband who makes as much money or more than them.
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So they don't need the damn money.
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And so they think, well, there's more to life than this, which is exactly the right thing to think.
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And so then they go and find a job that's nine to five and controllable, so that they can hire a nanny and have some kids and have a life.
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And it's like, yes, that's the intelligent thing to do.
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So we've got things backwards in our culture.
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We're thinking, at least in part, why aren't there more women in positions of power?
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Wrong question.
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The right question is, why are there any men at all who want those positions of power?
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Because it's not just positions of power.
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You have to be such a knothead to think that.
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Oh, it's a position of power.
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It's like, sure.
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But it's a position of overwhelming responsibility.
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And if you make mistakes, you're done.
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Right?
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It's not like you occupy that position of power and everyone does what they're told all the time, and your life is easy.
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It's like, forget about that.
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People are on your case to do exactly the right thing all the time, 100 % of the time.
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And maybe you want that, and maybe you don't so the, I don't know what people think, these people are all sitting in their offices with their feet up on the desk smoking cigars and oppressing the world,
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it's like, that isn't how it works, those people, they work flat out all the time so, and it's fine if that's what you want, and some people are like that,
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they're hyper -industrious people, right? from a trade perspective, no matter where you put them, if you put them in a forest with an axe they just wander around chopping down trees nonstop, right?
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Because it's built into them.
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But if you want to have a balanced life, and you should want that, you know, because the other thing you'll find, and this is God's gospel truth,
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is that the older you get, if you have any sense at all, the more important your family is to you.
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Like the utility of your career, maybe that peaks around 35 or 40, and it starts to decline pretty rapidly after that.
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And what happens if you're fortunate, you have someone in your life that you love, that you've woven yourself together with, and you have some kids,
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so that you have something to do from the time you're 50 till the time you're 80.
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And so it's a real mistake.
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It's a barren future without children, man, I can tell you that.
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It's a real mistake.
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And so we do a terrible job of, say, putting that image forward and saying, well, yeah.
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Now, you know, because women have access to the birth control pill now, and can compete in the same domains as men, roughly speaking, there is a real practical problem here.
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It's partly an economic problem now, because when I was roughly your age, it was still possible for a one -income family to exist.
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Well, you know that wages have been flat, except in the upper 1%, since 1973.
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Why?
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Well, it's easy.
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What happens when you double the labor force?
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What happens?
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You have the value of labor.
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So now we're in a situation where it takes two people to make as much as one did before.
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So we went from a situation where women's career opportunities were relatively limited, to where they were relatively unlimited, and there were two incomes,
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and so women could work, to a situation where women have to work, and they only make half as much as they would have otherwise.
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And now we're going to go into a situation, this is the next step, where women will work because men won't.
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And that's That's what's coming now.
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So there was an economics, economist article showing that 50 % now of boys in school are having trouble with their basic subjects.
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And you look around you in universities, you can see this happening.
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I've watched it over decades.
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I would say 90 % of the people in my personality class are now women.
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There won't be a damn man left in university in 10 years, except in the STEM fields.
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And it's a complete bloody catastrophe.
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And it's a catastrophe for women, because I don't know where the hell you're going to find someone to to marry and have a family with, if this keeps happening and you think,
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when you're 19, because you're so clueless when you're 19 you don't know a bloody thing, you think, well, I'm not really sure I want children anyways it's like,
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oh yeah, tell how well you've been educated Jesus, dismal, dismal without fail, I've got to tell you,
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without fail I've watched women go through their professional careers, many, many of them it's a very rare woman who, at the age of 30,
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doesn't consider having a child her primary desire.
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And the ones that don't consider that, generally, in my observation, there's something that isn't quite right in the way that they're constituted or looking at the world.
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Sometimes you get women who are truly non -maternal, you know, by temperament.
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They have a masculine temper, disagreeable, they're not particularly compassionate, they're not maternal, they're not that interested in kids.
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Fair enough, man.
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But there aren't that many of them.
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And and there's plenty who will not admit to themselves that that's what they most desperately want.
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Do you think women would be better off if they had kids earlier, focused on 3 or, say, in their 30s? Who knows?
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Like, it really is a problem.
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It seems like a more rational decision to me.
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Yeah, it's a really tough one.
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I don't think anybody knows the answer to that, because...
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35 and your kids are, say, 10, 11, then you can go get a bachelor's degree at the master's?
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Well...
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It seems to be more easy that way than having the career first and then trying to raise young kids.
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Yeah, I can't answer that, because I've seen women do a good job of it both ways.
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And you do get the odd woman who manages a high -powered career and kids, but Jesus, those women, man.
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Like, they buy more powerful microwaves because it'll take 45 seconds to cook the food instead of a minute.
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And I'm not kidding.
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It's like they're up at 5, they exercise for half an hour, they make breakfast, they get their kids ready to work, they go to work, they work 14 hours, 14 hour days, flat bloody out.
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They come home and work for another two hours to get their kids organized.
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They have a nanny to help them out, and then they work for two more hours before they go to bed at like 1, and then they're up at 5 and they do that again.
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And I'll tell you, you better be tough if you're going to do that physically, too, because you'll just burn yourself to a crisp.
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I've seen some women manage it, you know, but they're like, they're tough and they're rare because that's a hell of a regimen.
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And then if anything goes wrong, you know, you have a sick kid or something like that, or there's any sort of crisis in your family.
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It's just, you know, then it becomes too much.
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And I don't know the answer to that, you know.
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I mean, the advantage women have is they live about eight years longer than men.
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Because testosterone kills men. So...
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Well, that's right.
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They pay up front and gain in the long run.
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But it isn't clear how our society should sort this out.
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We don't know.
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And it's partly we don't know what to do now that women have control of the reproductive function.
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It's a big mystery.
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Yeah?
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But I think from a practical aspect, but this goes for both men and women.
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Even if women were to enter the workforce later on, they'd be at competition with people who are younger.
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And that's always a conflict in the workforce.
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And people are always hiring younger talent because they don't have a lot of experience in the workforce.
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Yeah.
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Yes, well, and the thing is, young stupid people have the advantage of being young.
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Middle -aged stupid people have the disadvantage of being middle -aged.
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And so if you're going to hire a young stupid person or a middle -aged stupid person, you'll go for the young stupid person.
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And by stupid, I mean, you know, I'm being sarcastic, obviously, but I mean without experience and just getting started in the world.
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You're much more likely to favor someone young because there's an instant explanation for their relative cluelessness.
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And it's a problem, you know.
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So I don't know what the answer is, but one answer certainly is, at least in part, is to start letting young women know what being 30
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and being female is like, because.. and also to disabuse them of the notion that there's something magical about a career.
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First of all, most people don't have careers, man.
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They have jobs.
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And the reason you get paid for a job is
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because you're being asked to do things you wouldn't do unless you were being paid.
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And so it's not some utopia of cigar smoking with your boots up on your desk, that's for sure.
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Not that that that would be such a utopia to begin with one of the things Jung said about the shadow
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and this is, I would say, one of the primary impediments to enlightenment is that
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if you start looking at your motives for misbehaving and I mean by that something very specific
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I don't mean that you're misbehaving by someone else's standards I don't mean that I mean, when you know by your own standards that you're doing something that's devious
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or malevolent or underhanded you know it and you still do it, so it's your own judgement you're bringing to bear on yourself if you look at why you're doing that,
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the longer you look at it, the deeper a hole you dig and so this is the motif of Dante's Inferno, fundamentally, so Dante's Inferno is a story about...
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I can't remember his name, unfortunately, it might be Dante, in fact, although I don't remember he's led into hell by Virgil,
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who's an ancient philosopher, thinker and hell has levels, so the outer level is,
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and this is a Christianized version of hell because there's hells of all sorts, but this is a Christianized version and so on the outermost levels of hell,
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which is sort of like normal life, are the ancient philosophers and they're still in hell because they weren't Christian,
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but it's kind of like cheap motel hell instead of the full pit thing, you know?
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And so then Dante goes deeper and deeper into hell until he gets right to the bottom of it, and it's been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly,
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Satan himself is encased in ice at the bottom of hell, surrounded by people who betray others.
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And so Dante's notion was
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that the worst of all possible violations of moral behavior was betrayal
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and that they're in the deepest levels of hell And I really like that idea, I think it's true, because...
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If you trust me, then you're manifesting the necessary courage that puts someone through life If you're smart,
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you don't trust me because you're naive You trust me knowing that I'm full of snakes and so are you,
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but maybe we could cooperate and move things along nicely And we could reduce each other to the word, to our word, and we could cooperate But you're awake,
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and then I betray that, then I'm undermining your necessary faith in life and humanity and you can really hurt someone that way,
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like, sometimes it's self -betrayal but you can really do someone in that way, you can really traumatize them,
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so that they can't recover and so it's a really terrible thing to do to someone and maybe it's the worst thing, and that was Dante's idea and it's tied in,
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that makes very interesting reading
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if you read it at the same time as Milton's Paradise Lost because those are metaphysical explorations this is what they are,
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they're metaphysical explorations of the terrible places you can end up
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and that people do end up and also a metaphysical explanation of what spirit takes you there so, because you might ask, well,
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why do you betray someone?
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and that is a deep question and so you'll have your specific reasons, but under that, there'll be some other reasons and under that, there'll be some other reasons,
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and under that, there'll be some other reasons And if you go all the way to the bottom, you come up with the ultimate reasons why you betrayed someone.
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And when you look at that, that will not be pretty.
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That's when your proclivity for evil, let's say, unites with the general human proclivity for evil, and you discover just exactly what you're capable of.
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And so Jung's notion was that, well, that was a full encounter with the shadow, which is, I suppose, partly what this course is about.
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Because one of the things that I believe I told you at the beginning was
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that I was going to try to help you understand
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how it might be that you could be an Auschwitz guard
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and to really understand that that's a horrifying thing to understand
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but I'll tell you if you want to grow some teeth
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that's a really good thing to understand
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so we were talking about your capacity to negotiate before like
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if you aren't a monster you cannot negotiate but if you've got that under control
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then you don't have to be a monster It's really paradoxical, so if you're just naive,
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well, you end up in jail and a marionette master has control over you, that's not helpful.
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So that's not good, that just means you're useless and you can be manipulated.
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You won't go out of your way to be malevolent, but it's mostly because you just don't have the skills, the organizational skills, or even the depth to do that.
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You're good because you're harmless, that's not good.
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That's easily manipulated.
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and so you think, well, how do you get out of that? well, partly you watch people, because you know what they're like
334
because you know what you're like but you also know what you could do, and would do, if you were pushed and
335
so you don't have to show much of that when you're negotiating with someone for them to take you really seriously
336
so it's a strange thing, you know but one of the things Jung pointed out too was that
337
what you most need to know will be found where you least want to look
338
and that's because you haven't already looked there
339
and so it's a little different for everyone, right?
340
because your particular place you don't want to look isn't going to be the same as your place
341
but you're going to have a place you don't want to look and what you haven't discovered, that's where it is and
342
so that's all partly going to be discovered by you looking at what you're capable of what you're truly capable of,
343
and people, especially on the compassionate end say, well, no, I could never be brutal like that and that could be true, but you can kill people with compassion,
344
no problem that's the Freudian Oedipal situation so think about working in a nursing home so there's actually a rule of thumb,
345
which I also use to guide my interactions with children
346
and also with my clients and I would say with people in general
347
do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves all you do is steal, you just steal it from them so imagine you're working with really elderly people you know,
348
they have Alzheimer's It's like really easy to do things for them, because, well, it isn't, because it's really a hard job
349
But it might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it
350
But you just speed their demise, right, by taking away the last vestiges of their independence And you do the same thing with kids, it's like, struggle through it,
351
man Well, so, let's think about the brain a little bit,
352
and I'll tell you a little bit about how the brain works and,
353
you know, a lot of the stuff I'm telling you right now is quite old, actually most of it was worked out in the 1980s but it's been remarkably stable,
354
as far as I can tell in some sense we're filling in the details and not in every sense, but in some sense we're filling in the details okay, so you take, this is from Alexander Luria,
355
who was the greatest, perhaps the greatest neuropsychologist who ever lived he was a Russian, worked mostly after the Second World War,
356
mostly on people who had brain damage
357
and he was interested in trying to outline the overarching picture of brain function
358
and so he did that partly by looking at its function, but also partly by looking at its structure trying to get both of those things working simultaneously
359
and so we'll go through a brief picture of how the brain works
360
and so one of the ways of..
361
so you can look at the brain from front to back
362
and you can divide it roughly into two sections and one section has to do with sensory processing
363
and that's roughly the back half
364
and one section has to do with motor output now those things aren't as clearly differentiated as you might think
365
because there's very little sensation without motor output maybe the part that closes to an exception is smell,
366
I would say but you at least have to breathe in And when an animal is actively searching on a scent trail, it's breathing in.
367
So it's using its motor output constantly to modify the sensory stream.
368
It's really difficult to dissociate the two.
369
When you're looking at something, it kind of feels to you like you're a passive recipient of sense data.
370
But you're no such thing.
371
Your eyes are moving back and forth in multiple ways all the time, including the ways that you can control voluntarily.
372
So there's multiple involuntary systems that are moving your eyes in multiple ways.
373
And really what you're doing is feeling the array of the electromagnetic spectrum with your eyes.
374
You're feeling it.
375
And you're actively exploring.
376
If you're not a passive recipient at all.
377
So even in sensation, you can't purely pull sensation out from motor processing and say, I'm getting untrammeled, unbiased sense data.
378
Because you can't look at something without focusing.
379
And you can't focus without wanting to look at something.
380
You know, you can't just lie there with your.. well, you could, with your eyes half -crossed, but, you know, that's sort of like...
381
Imagine you dropped a video recorder from an airplane and it just spun around in an unfocused manner.
382
Well, that's the world sampled randomly, you know, what are you going to do with that?
383
Nothing.
384
And you know, you're concentrating on the auditory stream constantly,
385
and segregating out some things and suppressing others Like if you listen in the classroom,
386
you can hear probably four or five different types of mechanical noise going on at the same time
387
Most of the time in the classroom, that's silent, you don't hear it, like you don't hear your fridge except when it turns on or off, right?
388
You zero that out.
389
And so you're very selective in your perception.
390
So you can't really technically separate out motor output from sensory input.
391
And that's really useful to know, because it destroys the idea that you're just a...
392
You know, that there's a world of sensation out there that's imprinting itself on you, and that's how you get your information, which is really the...
393
That's the fundamental presupposition of the empiricists, of the raw empiricists.
394
There's a world of sense data out there, you sample it randomly, and that's what informs you.
395
It's like, yes, except that you're always an active harvester of the information.
396
So you can't get rid of the interpretive structure, a priori.
397
That was Immanuel Kant, by the way, who first established that in his critique of pure reason.
398
You can't get away from the fact that you're actively harvesting the data.
399
So you can say, well, where does human structure come from?
400
The sense data, that's sort of the blank slate idea.
401
It's like, no, wrong, because a blank slate cannot process information
402
You're actively engaged right at the beginning So that's another example of the knower and the unknown,
403
you know, working in a cyclical manner Because you interact with something, you divide it up into you and the world,
404
roughly speaking And I mean, you really make it that way, because you build yourself out of the information And then,
405
of course, that makes you a more differentiated processor with a broader range of skills then you interact with the unknown again, you gather more information, it differentiates the world,
406
it makes you a more differentiated harvester, and then so it's just continually cycling.
407
And that consciousness, the logos, the knower, is that thing that's doing that harvesting.
408
And you can never say it's not there.
409
Now what happens is that it's in its nascent form to begin with, low resolution nascent form.
410
Low resolution knower, low resolution category system, low resolution world.
411
But that's enough to kickstart it, and to start it differentiating.
412
And that happens as you develop as an individual, because you start out as a single -celled organism, for all intents and purposes,
413
a very low -resolution thing in a very low -resolution world, and that differentiates itself across time, but exactly the same thing happened over evolutionary time.
414
So, there isn't a time when those three elements aren't there, for all intents and purposes.
415
They're always there.
416
They're permanent.
417
Okay, so anyways, back to the brain.
418
Sensory unit, that's the...
419
the back half, roughly speaking, a huge chunk of that is devoted to visual processing in human beings most animals organized around smell, not us somewhat,
420
still, because smell is a very powerful evoker of memories
421
and it has a direct relationship with emotional systems because you need to know if something is edible or inedible,
422
terrible or good, very very rapidly but human beings are organized around vision,
423
so we have massive amounts of our cortex devoted to differentiated visual processing.
424
Now, the motor unit, so what you have is each of these little zones here, so for example, look at the back here,
425
that's the primary visual area and the secondary visual area, and then this is the primary auditory area in the middle of the brain here on the outside
426
and the secondary auditory area, and then this is for body representation, the primary area and in the secondary area.
427
And you can think about those areas of primary, secondary, and then tertiary.
428
Primary does the base level processing.
429
Tertiary expands that up into more abstract representation, or secondary expands that up into more abstract representations.
430
And tertiary are the areas where the senses come together.
431
And that's really what you seem to be most conscious of, right?
432
It's action in the tertiary areas, because you don't You can't really see the world as a separate, you can think about the auditory stream separate from the visual stream and all of that,
433
and you can think about touch separately, but you tend to consciously experience things as a unity, as a comprehensive unity of all the senses simultaneously.
434
So consciousness seems to occur only at the, most of the time, at the highest level of integration.
435
And Euleria would have associated consciousness more with the tertiary areas, where the senses are talking to one another.
436
Now, it's more complicated than that, because there's obviously subcortical structures all the way down to the spine that are involved heavily in what consciousness is.
437
It's not merely a consequence of cortical activity.
438
You know, we tend to think that because human beings have massively expanded cortical structures, and we think of ourselves as the most conscious creatures, and that's reasonable.
439
But you can take an awful lot of cortex off someone, and they're still conscious.
440
In fact, you can leave them with almost no brain at all, and they're still conscious.
441
So we really have a rough time trying to figure out what consciousness is and how it's related to brain structure. So...
442
Anyways, so that's the sensory unit, and then the motor unit, you have the primary unit, the secondary unit, and the pre -motor, or the prefrontal cortex.
443
The prefrontal cortex is particularly huge in human beings, so imagine that it's this primary and secondary areas that allow you to,
444
first of all, to act voluntarily, and then to play around in some sense with your actions.
445
You know, like, imagine that you're a child building with Legos, and you can think with the Legos without really having to think abstractly, right?
446
because you can play around and build different sorts of structures, and so you can think at the level, at a level of motor output without having to depend on abstraction.
447
But if you develop the prefrontal cortex here, which emerged out of the motor and premotor areas over the course of evolution, so it's a differentiation of those structures.
448
So this is dealing with the real world.
449
This is dealing mostly with the real world, but starting to abstract and experiment a little bit and then this part deals with abstractions, pure and simple.
450
So, you know, I can lift this, and then I can play with lifting it,
451
and then I can put it aside and think about it abstractly.
452
I can think about all the different things that I might do with it.
453
I say, well, I could throw it, I could take it apart, I could toss it in the air, I could juggle it, I could use it as a doorstop, right?
454
I could kick it across the room.
455
And so basically what I'm doing there is I'm using my prefrontal cortex to generate an abstract representation of the world,
456
and then to plot out motor strategies before implementing them.
457
And that's basically what abstract thought is, very, very fundamentally.
458
It's the hypothesis of abstract action, and then the analysis of the outcome, and then the implementation into action.
459
And I think that there's something about that that actually defines the difference between intelligence and conscientiousness Because weirdly enough,
460
you know, the correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness is zero
461
No relationship whatsoever Which is quite strange because conscientious people plan
462
and so forth But I think what it is is
463
that intelligence is an indicator of the effectiveness of abstraction
464
And conscientiousness is an indicator of the probability of implementation And those are very, very different problems.
465
And you don't just go from abstraction to implementation, because if you did, you wouldn't be able to think, right?
466
The thinking has to be torn away from the implementation.
467
Or what you're doing isn't thinking, it's just acting.
468
So I think that accounts for the psychometric independence of those two phenomena
469
It's annoying because you can think up something that you should do
470
and you won't do it Because there's no deterministic causal pathway from the conception to the action So that's kind of annoying,
471
it seems to take something like willpower in order to transform the abstraction into an implementation
472
And we don't understand that very well It's easy to understand the resistance to doing it, because the default position of your body should be something like,
473
never do anything, except eat.
474
You know, because doing something requires the expenditure of energy and resources.
475
And so unless you have a really good rationale for it, you should probably not do it.
476
And so the body is sort of intransigent by nature.
477
It's an oversimplification.
478
You have to come up with a good reason to impel it into motion.
479
And you should, because you have to pay for action.
480
You have to pay for it with energy and resources.
481
So there should be resistance against it, but it's still annoying.
482
So, okay, so that's one way of thinking about the world.
483
The world's something to sense, and the world's something to act upon.
484
And so the brain has fundamental divisions of sensing and acting upon.
485
But it's a constantly interacting loop.
486
You can't separate them, really, any more than we are separating them conceptually.
487
The classic and archaic way of thinking about perception is the world's full of objects, you see the objects, you think about them, you evaluate them, then you act on them.
488
It's like, no, that isn't how it works.
489
First of all, the world is not made out of objects.
490
The world is made out of, I think, the world is made out of tools and obstacles.
491
And it's because you can't not perceive the world in relationship to you.
492
What you perceive, actually, are the meaning of objects.
493
You perceive the patterns.
494
a tool is something like a meaningful pattern or a useful pattern it's something like that and so look,
495
again, you look at, I might say to someone, describe this room
496
now you're going to pick a level of description that's very particular you're going to pick one
497
that other human beings could understand so it's going to be predicated on your size, for example it's going to be predicated on your knowledge that
498
that other person is a lot like you and has a lot of the same underlying structures and motivations.
499
And that's an implicit predicate of your description.
500
So we're going to say, well, it's kind of an ordinary classroom.
501
It's got 20 rows of tables that each have five chairs at it, and each of them does have five chairs.
502
There's some posts that hold them up.
503
There's a couple of speakers.
504
There's a podium.
505
There's a screen.
506
There's some additional chairs.
507
There's a scattering of people.
508
There's some electronic equipment.
509
And so, you know, of course, that there's an infinite number of things I could be describing in this room.
510
Right?
511
Like I could be describing, there's a lot of color variation in that tile.
512
So if I look at it, I can see that it's unlike the other tiles, because the light is reflecting off it.
513
So it's got a shiny white element.
514
There's about, God only knows, a million different scratches in it, each of which are unique.
515
I can't even really tell what color it is.
516
It kind of looks like an off grayish green.
517
But if I was painting it, to get a reasonable representation, I'd have to have at least six or seven shades of green,
518
ranging from quite dark to almost white.
519
And that's only if I look at it from here.
520
If I look at it from here, well then, you get the point, right?
521
I mean, there is an infinite number of details in this room.
522
There's an infinite number of facts in this room.
523
That's also why I don't believe that you can derive an ought from an is.
524
It's like, you know, that's the old Humean issue, right?
525
You cannot derive ethical guidelines from factual knowledge And I think the reason for that is, which facts are you going to pick?
526
How are you going to select them?
527
There's an infinite number of them, even in a constrained situation So, merely by attending to some and not attending to others,
528
you're already using an ethic because you can't attend to one thing
529
and not another without being ensconced in one of these value structures
530
because the value structure is what determines the direction of your attention
531
and so you can't make the argument
532
that you're using the infinite number of facts
533
that are available at your disposal to govern how you're looking at the facts you're not, that isn't what you're doing it's not possible to do that so what do you do?
534
well, you describe the things in the room that would be relevant to other people, otherwise you're going to bore them to death, or they're going to think you're insane.
535
Or an artist, maybe, because an artist might do the kind of concentration on a detail that I just described, but he's obviously or she's obviously trying to paint the thing or represent it somehow.
536
So it's still tool -like.
537
Well, why do you want to know that there are tables?
538
Well, because you sit at them.
539
Why do you want to know if there are chairs?
540
Because you sit in them.
541
No, what about the screen or the camera equipment?
542
Well, they're all usable tools.
543
And so that's what you describe.
544
You describe the world at the level of usable tool.
545
Or you might also say, look out for that girl who's in the third row.
546
She's trouble.
547
And so you might call out someone if you're describing the room, because there's somewhere in that room that if you go, you're going to get into trouble.
548
And so those are sort of the things that seem to me to be relevant.
549
There are tools that move you along your way, facilitators, that's another way of thinking about them.
550
And there are obstacles that get in your way.
551
And there's a tiny set of those, otherwise you get overwhelmed.
552
You're not going to go anywhere where it's all obstacles, right?
553
You don't even want to be in that place.
554
You want to be in a place where it's mostly this.
555
And then there's the biggest category, though.
556
This is what's cool and this is so important, is the biggest perceptual category is that which is not relevant at this time.
557
Because it contains everything.
558
You know, like when you're writing on this pad, you assume the entire world around you is constant, and therefore you can ignore it.
559
It's everything out there.
560
All the transformations that are taking place, you turn to zero
561
and you just focus on maybe the space that's occupied by a single letter, the whole world shrinks down to just that single letter, and everything else is ignored.
562
Well, what happens if something goes wrong?
563
This is why this is so important.
564
What happens if something goes wrong?
565
An indeterminate set of those irrelevant entities has now become relevant.
566
That's the problem, is the invisibility disappears.
567
And so, for example, you're all treating each other in this room right now as ignorable entities, roughly speaking.
568
You could all be blobs from a perceptual perspective.
569
And if you look at how you see the room, except for the person that you're focusing on, everyone else is a blob.
570
And some of them are virtually invisible blobs.
571
And that's fine, because you're adequately represented as a blob unless you do something
572
that disturbs the ongoing flow of goal -directed action.
573
Just like the gorilla thing, right?
574
So the damn gorilla was invisible because it didn't get in the way, even though you'd think of course you'd see a gorilla.
575
It's like everything that doesn't get in the way is invisible.
576
Except for that small fraction of things that you can use for your purpose.
577
And that's how you perceive.
578
So it's so mind -boggling that, because it puts perception into the realm of ethics.
579
It isn't what you'd expect.
580
You see what you're aiming at.
581
And you know that.
582
You know that.
583
You're standing on a street corner, and you look up, and soon there's ten advanced chimpanzees like you,
584
right beside you, looking up to see what the hell it is that you're aiming at Because they assume, just by watching you, that if you're focusing your perception on something,
585
and you're fixated on it, that it's relevant and important It's tool -like, or maybe obstacle -like, it's relevant for some reason And so,
586
we live in a landscape of relevance And that's a mind, to me, that's an absolutely mind -boggling idea, because
587
that is way different than living in a landscape of facts
588
It is not the same thing even a little bit And there are philosophers who've pursued that idea quite,
589
well, I would say to quite an incredible degree Heidegger is probably the one who's done
590
that more than anyone else But the 19th century pragmatists were very interested in that as well But because you think,
591
you know, the classic scientific idea is something like you perceive a universe of facts and derive conclusions and act.
592
It's like, no, you don't.
593
You perceive a landscape of pre -categorized relevance that's dependent on your ethic.
594
Jesus, it's so peculiar, that.
595
And so that brings up real questions like what ethic best structures your perceptions?
596
Well, that is the interesting idea, as far as I'm concerned.
597
Okay, so then we can make this a little bit more interesting, I think is the right way of thinking about it.
598
Okay, well, so you've got tools and obstacles, but they're not dead, that's the other thing.
599
Because we're in an ethical landscape, because we're in a motivated landscape, whether something is a tool or an obstacle actually matters to you.
600
And we can actually define matter.
601
Matter is a weird word, because there's matter, and then there's the things that matter.
602
And you could say the world is made out of matter, or you could say that the world is made out of things that matter.
603
And I would say you act like the world is made out of things that matter.
604
You might say, I don't believe that, I believe it's made out of matter.
605
But no, you don't, because that's not how you act.
606
It might be what you say you do, but it is not what you do.
607
So why do things matter?
608
Well, first of all, irrelevant things don't matter.
609
And thank God for that, right?
610
Because if everything mattered, it's...
611
Well, you're either...
612
you're either in the midst of an LSD trip,
613
or you're schizophrenic, or you're in real serious trouble so you want most things to be irrelevant,
614
now that's kind of dull and takes the glory and the glamour out of the world but from a cognitive perspective, it's definitely an advantage so,
615
irrelevancy, man, that's critical, and a huge amount of what you have done is learned irrelevance
616
It's the basis of your cognitive knowledge, is learned irrelevance.
617
What to ignore.
618
Okay, fine, so that zeroes things out.
619
You turn most of the world into zero.
620
Well, then you have this small subset of things that are beneficial to you, that you can use for the purposes of your current operation, which we'll define in more detail.
621
You can use that for the purposes of your current endeavor.
622
And then you have obstacles.
623
And so, for example, if I'm late for class, so I'm in a particular state of mind, and I walk in here and I see that,
624
I'm going to get a little burst of negative emotion.
625
It's irritation.
626
And the reason for that is that is not a recycling bin then.
627
It's an obstacle that some dimwit left there just to annoy me.
628
And I mean, you know what I mean.
629
That's how you react to the world in a situation like that.
630
It's like, it's not a recycling bin.
631
If it's here, and I don't want to stand there, then it's a recycling bin.
632
If it's there, it's an obstacle.
633
And as soon as I look at it, it isn't that I see it and then get annoyed.
634
It's that annoyance is part of the perception.
635
Because it's an obstacle in my pathway, the emotion comes along with the perception.
636
It's not laden on top of it.
637
It's not, oh, that's a...
638
I don't think that's a recycling bin.
639
That's in the wrong place.
640
Now it's in my way.
641
I should be annoyed.
642
That isn't what happens, is the annoyance...
643
My suspicions are that the damn annoyance is faster than the object perception.
644
Because it's a more primordial circuit.
645
So you actually...
646
Now, there's a great book, if you're interested in this sort of thing.
647
There's a great book called An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, which was written by a guy named Gibson back in the 70s, and it's brilliant.
648
His fundamental conclusion is, I think, wrong, but it doesn't matter.
649
The book is not only brilliant because, see, he was the guy that came up with the idea of affordance, and an affordance is something that affords some utility,
650
and that can be positive or negative, and he thought about the world as being full of furniture, roughly speaking, something like that and that what you saw,
651
what you perceived directly was the affordance and so imagine the visual cliff experiment
652
so let's say I put a piece of glass over top of this, the space between these two tables no chair there
653
and I take a duck and I put the duck here
654
and the duck walks out on the glass the duck doesn't care, it'll just walk out on the glass Well, it's an aquatic animal, and so if there's depth underneath it, it doesn't really bother a duck.
655
But if you put a human infant on there, old enough to crawl, the human infant will look over and that's not going on that glass.
656
And you might say, well, what does it see?
657
And you could say it sees a space between the two tables and infers that it might fall, but it's like eight months old.
658
Like what the hell?
659
Is it inferring that?
660
No, it's not.
661
It sees a place to fall off of.
662
and that's Gibson's fundamental point, is that you don't see a cliff, you see a falling off place and of course, why wouldn't you see that? because if that isn't what you saw,
663
you wouldn't be here, because one of your dopey ancestors would have wandered off the cliff
664
and died the ones that saw a falling off place, they just stayed away from that and you know,
665
if you have vertigo, and even if you don't if you're up on the 35th floor of an apartment building,
666
and you walk out onto the balcony It's really interesting to notice your perception, because you might think, well,
667
you see the space, and you become afraid.
668
It's like, no, you don't.
669
You walk closer to it, and your body...
670
You perceive the damn thing with your body.
671
You can also see it, but you perceive it with your body.
672
It's like, don't go there.
673
Don't go any closer.
674
There's an automatic mapping of that place on to do this, go away from there.
675
And that's underneath and faster than the actual, quote, conscious object perception So,
676
anyways, the other thing about Gibson's book that I love is he is so clear, that guy, he's such a good writer Because he takes you through a very complex argument,
677
but it's just a pristine example of reasoning The whole book is reasoning, it's brilliant, brilliant So, anyways, if you want some background on that idea,
678
the idea of perception of utility, let's say um that's a great place to look, but it's also worth thinking about it from a biological perspective because of bloody well,
679
of course you're going to see the world as what matters because you're the sort of creature that cares about what matters, mostly because you don't want to die
680
so you can't remove the fact that you don't want to die from your perceptions well,
681
if you did, well, you can imagine what would happen if you did you know, you'd do something like wander off a falling -off place, and that would be the end of you, so...
682
You know, we're doing pretty remarkably in many ways as a species.
683
I mean, we'll lift about 250 ,000 people out of poverty today.
684
Right.
685
And hook about 300 ,000 people to the power grid.
686
You just imagine what the world would be like if people stopped making it worse.
687
Right.
688
Just that.
689
They wouldn't even have to work hard to make it better.
690
I mean, that would be imaginable.
691
But if they just stopped making it worse.
692
You know, I always think there's this great Tom Waits reading of a Bukowski poem called Nirvana.
693
I love it.
694
It's about this kid who's on a bus and he's really lost.
695
And they go up in a hill and stop at this restaurant.
696
And he goes in there and everything is good inside the restaurant.
697
The people who are serving get along and they're laughing with each other and they make an excellent cup of coffee.
698
It's just a diner, you know.
699
It's nothing fancy but the tables are well scrubbed
700
and the food is clean and properly prepared
701
and everyone's grateful to be there and he has this little fantasy
702
that he could just stay there
703
and no one else notices then he goes back on the bus
704
and continues on his trip but it's good to think here's the opposite of
705
that and everyone has been to a place like this so imagine a diner okay
706
walk in and you put your hand on a table
707
and it's sticky yeah and you know what
708
that means it means get sticky like
709
that means it hasn't been properly wiped for a thousand a thousand times right it's got
710
that kind of varnishy stickiness on it right
711
and then the waiter waitress comes over but a little later
712
or maybe a lot later than she showed up
713
and she looks none too happy to be there and she isn't
714
that polite and then she brings you a cup of coffee
715
and the cup is chipped and it's dirty and the coffee is bad
716
and the cream is sour and when you mention
717
that you get a bad look you know you go downstairs maybe to use the washroom
718
and like every step along the way is a descent into into uh grime
719
and misery and you come back up and you order your breakfast right and the aid
720
is overdone on the bottom and underdone on the top.
721
And then you get your toast and it was burnt, so they scraped it and then they put cold butter on it just in the middle.
722
The orange juice is only orange in color, not in taste.
723
Right, right.
724
And the bacon tastes like pink.
725
Terrible.
726
You think, okay, what is that place?
727
Is that a diner
728
or is it a place designed to make everyone who comes in there a worse human being
729
and that's it and and that's a good example of the difference between doing things
730
and doing right and doing them wrong it's you can go into a diner
731
and it can be a good place you know they serve you a decent coffee you get a good breakfast
732
it's and and the place is run by someone who actually cares
733
that that little corner of the universe is operating properly
734
and you come out of there a better person than you did when you with you.
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Why Practice Speaking with This Video?
This video offers rich, conversational English perfect for english speaking practice. Jordan Peterson’s tone is natural—part storytelling, part analysis—making it ideal for shadow speech (repeating phrases aloud to mimic rhythm and intonation). The mix of anecdotes (like the South Park reference) and complex ideas exposes learners to real-world language use, helping you master casual and formal registers. Shadowing this content builds confidence in following dynamic, unscripted speech, a key skill for everyday communication.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
- Conditional structures: "If you want to learn about the Freudian-Oedipal situation, you watch that, you've got it down cold." This informal conditional ("if + present, present") is common in spoken English for giving advice. Practice repeating it to sound natural in casual conversations.
- Relative clauses: "the mother is pursuing an affair with the dog whisperer, but he's professional. He keeps his distance, like he keeps boundaries around him." The use of "like" to introduce examples (instead of "as") is typical in spoken English. Note how it softens explanations, a useful trick for fluency.
- Colloquial phrases: "nails it" (meaning "captures perfectly") and "tricks up her sleeves" (secret strategies) are idioms that add color. Shadowing these helps you recognize and use them in context, avoiding awkward literal translations.
Common Pronunciation Traps
Peterson’s speech has subtle traps for learners. Words like "pathology" (puh-THOL-uh-jee) and "Oedipal" (EE-duh-puhl) have stress on the second syllable—misplacing stress can make you hard to understand. He also uses contractions heavily ("he's", "don't", "it's"), which are essential for natural rhythm. A shadowing app or shadowing site can help you slow down and mimic these nuances. Focus on his pauses between ideas; they’re not mistakes but tools for clarity—practice matching them to improve your own pacing.
Whether using a shadowspeaks tool or simply repeating aloud, this video is a goldmine for honing speaking skills. Its blend of storytelling and analysis ensures you practice both fluency and comprehension, making every shadowing session count.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you did, you wouldn't be |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have been · I've worked · they've married |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is seriously overprotected · be held · be liked |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | response which is · people who will · men who are |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.