This is the most popular talk we've ever done in 15 years.

Theme tonight is the third s.

Oh, it's been a weekend of Jordan Peterson, which has been a huge pleasure for anyone who doesn't know him.

And last night I think it was one babe in arms, and tonight it's probably my mother.

Hey, is a was a professor associate professor at Harvard University and is now the professor of clinical psychology, Toronto His first book was a huge success.

It revolutionized the psychology of religion, and his latest book, of the 12 Rules of Life, is set to do exactly the same.

Just a few housekeeping things.

At the end of the talk, we're gonna have a Q and A, which I'm good moderate eso do Prepare your questions, please make them questions on Dhe.

Also, for those people in the live stream, there'll be posted notes and you couldn't hand questions for the ushers and will be taking those as well.

S o.

I look forward to that, and at the end of it, we're going to be doing not so much a signing, but here on stage, a dedication.

Everyone's book is pretty but everyone's book is already signed.

So if you want to, if you don't want to dedication, then just leave you on the third page.

You'll find the signature in order to last night.

There was a huge queue, as you could imagine in order to make the cue run smoothly on.

Sorry to sound bossy, but he's not going to be doing selfies just because it means he's got to stand up the whole time and it'll slow down the flow.

But he's very happy to be photographed, and you can photo bomb him if you'd like.

I'm also because all of us, particularly me a really keen for him to solve the problems of our lives.

Please resist doing that during the dedication because it'll really slow everything down.

I think the three things that you can take away from this evening on you'll be the judge is first of all be inspired by the talk.

Secondly, read the book and thirdly, marry a Canadian.

I've feel rather fortunate to have now done a ll three Um, also, if you would like to tweet, it's hashtag the rules that 12 rules of life.

So without further ado, please welcome.

One of the world's great public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson.

Thank you.

Well, that was a nice No.

So I thought I'd I talk about my book tonight.

Um, I given to talks now, and I didn't actually talk directly about it.

I sort of talked around it, so I thought, I don't like to give the same talk twice.

So I thought I'd actually walk through it and outlined a little bit, so I had to spend most of the day memorizing the rules.

You know, you think if you worked on something for three years or being five years, I guess you'd actually have it memorized.

But memory is a very strange thing, and it's very particular and goal oriented.

And I actually didn't have the rules memorized and certainly not their numbers.

So hopefully I do by now.

So I guess we're gonna find out.

But I have a copy of the book here in case I, in case I forget.

So I think we'll go through them one by one, and we'll see how.

See how that goes.

Seven o'clock.

So All right.

Good.

Um hmm.

The first rule, which is kind of a comical rule is stand up straight with your shoulders back, and it's a meditation, among other things, on the habits of lobsters.

I read some papers on lobsters.

Boat must be 10 years ago, I guess, and they just absolutely blew me away.

And one of the things I've really loved about being a psychologist There's many things, but I've really loved psychoanalytic theory.

And the great clinicians, the behaviorists as well.

Mean Freud, Yung Adler, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow.

That behavior is like Skinner and and the cognitive behaviorist.

I mean, I've learned a tremendous amount from reading the clinicians.

And so if any of you are interested in psychology, I would really recommend reading the great clinicians because they know they learned so much about life.

It's crazy by reading them, so that's been fun.

But then, on the entirely other end of the spectrum, where I've learned most about psychology is from the really low are what would you call them?

The really science oriented animal behaviors?

That's where they were, who they turned into the neuroscientists, right?

They were the animal behaviors, first of all, and then they turned into the neuroscientists.

I've learned a tremendous amount from them.

There's such clear thinkers, the best of the bunch.

I think there's two of them.

One name.

Jeffrey Gray, who wrote a book called The Neuro Psychology of Anxiety, which is just a deadly book.

It's impossible to read.

It takes like six months to read it, because I think he read like 1800 papers to write it or something like that, and he actually read them.

That's the cool thing.

And he understood them, which is really something.

Then there's another guy named Jack Pancks F.

Who wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which outlines his studies, for example, of rats.

He was the guy who learned that rats laugh if you tickle them with the end of a pencil eraser.

But they laugh ultrasonic, li like bats.

So you have to.

You have to slow down the ultrasonic vocalization before you can hear the giggle.

And you think, Why the hell would you spend your time tickling rats with a pencil and making them laugh?

See what he demonstrated there was that that there was a place circuit in mammals, that there's an actual There's a cycle biological basis for rough and tumble play, for example, It's a bloody big deal, you know, discovering a whole new circuit in the brain that's like discovering a continent.

It's Nobel Prize winning stuff and accepts affective neuroscience.

I would highly recommend that.

So there's this other book I know about two, which is 12 rules for life, which you could also look into if you want.

Anyways, I was reading these these articles on lobsters and I I came across this this finding that lobsters, lobsters governed their pasta reflection with serotonin.

And I thought, God, that's so interesting.

It's so in.

Deflection is this is to stand up straight.

Wow, that's so interesting because, you know, depressed people crouch over.

I wonder if there's any link between those two things.

And then I went and read a whole pile of papers on lobster and lobster neurochemistry.

Lobster neurochemistry is actually quite well understood because they have a fairly simple nervous system, right?

And so if you want to understand the complex nervous system, it's a good idea.

Understand?

A simple one first and then sort of elaborate upwards.

And it turns out that, um, serotonin governs status, uh, governs status, emotional regulation and posture in lobsters just like it does in human beings, and so that would just blew me away.

So 111 thing that Chapter one is about is the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle, you can give it essentially anti depressants and it will fight again.

Another just blew me away.

You know, it's so it's so remarkable because one of the things that tells you is that so, if you're imagine that you could be lobster, top dog or bottom dog.

Imagine there's 10 strata in the lobster hiring, and so you could be number one right Top law.

Mr Number 10 Bottom Lobster If your bottom lobster You have low serotonin levels in high arc top of me levels.

That's a neurochemical that human beings don't produce.

And if you're a top lost or you have high serotonin levels and lower top of mean levels, you can move a lobster in its dominance hierarchy by moderating its levels of serotonin.

And I thought that's so interesting because what it means is that the counter that keeps track of our status we have a counter in the sense in our minds that keeps track of our status is 1/3 of a 1,000,000,000 years old.

And what that also means is that the idea of the hierarchy let's call it a dominant Starkey, because within lobsters it's It's kind of like a physical prowess, hierarchy, something like that.

The idea of the hierarchy is at least 350 million years old.

And so I read that.

And I think, well, so much for the idea that human hierarchies are associate cultural construct.

It's like, No, that's wrong.

It's not just a little bit wrong.

It's unbelievably wrong.

It's mind bogglingly wrong, right, and it's right and so so hierarchies, hierarchies of being around for 1/3 of a 1,000,000,000 years, and and we have a neurochemical system that modulates are our understanding of those hierarchies.

And then also.

And this is the interesting thing, too.

And this is why people's reputations are so important to them.

Among there's lots of reasons, but this is one of them is the where this counter that you share with lobsters rates you in terms of your hierarchical position, determines the ratio of negative emotion to positive emotion that you feel, and that's also an absolutely mind boggling idea for two reasons.

One is it tells you why it's so hard on people to be put down because it doesn't just upset them in the moment it changes the way their entire system responds to the world so that they now experience more positive emotion in less than eight less negative emotion.

So that's really rough.

And then there's a corollary to that to which is like There's a very tight relationship between your belief system and your dominance hierarchy position.

It's complicated, but it's worth going through like let's say that.

So I have a certain amount of status as a professor and and I have the Let's call it the What would you say?

I've been granted the entitlement to a certain position in a social hierarchy.

Now the question is, why do I have a valid claim to that position?

And the answer, hypothetically, is because I know enough so that my claim to the position is valid.

So then, if you stand up in the audience and challenge my beliefs and show that I'm wrong, you might say, Well, I get upset because I'm wrong.

But the more accurate reason that I get upset is because you're indicating to the crowd that my my position in the hierarchy of authority is invalid.

And by doing that, you lower me in the hierarchy and you mess around with the neurochemical systems that are regulating my emotions.

And so if you're interested at least in part, in why people are so prone to defend themselves and their beliefs in the service of their position, then that's why.

And so that's a great example of how you can learn these unbelievable things by stumbling across a rather obscure biological fact.

It just it just what would you say?

It It's like it's like a series of dominoes.

And that's also why biological facts were so useful.

It's like we don't have to argue about whether or not social hierarchy says.

I said.

There are hierarchies are social constructs a given hierarchies influenced in its structure by socio cultural conditioning?

Let's say, but the fact of the hierarchy so like the part of your brain that detects and regulates your response to hierarchies, is older than the part of your brain that recognizes trees like it's old.

It's really, really fundamental, and so and almost all social animals organize themselves and social in hierarchies because now the other thing that Chapter one is is a bit of a meditation on what might constitute a hierarchy.

One of my business colleagues, a former student of mine from Harvard, very, very smart guy.

It's got out graduate degree in engineering from M.

I.

T.

And a PhD in psychology from Harvard.

So there's like one of him in the whole world.

He's a very smart guy, and he helped me design the self authoring sweet, by the way.

And he's been working for about 20 years on that, Um, that's a suite of programs that helps people write about their lives and straighten him out.

He told me to stop using the word dominance hierarchy, and he said the reason for that was that it was infested with Marxist presuppositions and really bothered me when he first said that because I've been using the word for years, dominance, hierarchy, he said, We had a discussion about that.

He said, While it's predicated on the idea that you climb up the hierarchy human hierarchy as a consequence of the expression of power, it's like that's wrong.

You climb up valid hierarchies as a consequence of the expression of competence, and that's actually technically right.

He was exactly the right person to tell me that because he had done his PhD on what predicts success in Western hierarchies.

And the answer is quite clear.

General cognitive ability, some prefrontal ability as well, which was what he's specifically tested.

So intelligence, Roughly speaking, it's a little bit more elaborate than intelligence.

But that's close enough.

And trade conscientiousness accounts for about 50% of the variance in long term success.

And you think, Well, hey, how do you want your society be structured?

It seems pretty good to me that smart, hard working people are the ones most likely to succeed.

That's not about empirical test of the validity of a structure, no, especially given how much vagary there isn't life.

Lots of random things happen to people, but it's better to be born three standard deviations above the mean in intelligence in the West than it is to be born.

Three standard deviations above the mean in wealth in relationship to where you'll end up when you're 40.

So, he said, to use the word competence hierarchy, or we decided that I think that's much better.

So Chapter one as a bit of a meditation on the nature of hierarchies in the biochemistry of hierarchy.

But it's also an injunction about how to present yourself, because you don't you want to present yourself to the world in a manner that that doesn't disgrace you in some sense that that might be a good way to think about it.

And I don't want to disgrace yourself, because the consequence of disgraces is emotional dis regulation, more pain, less positive emotion.

And so the best way to present yourself is to stand up forthrightly and to stretch out, you know, and to occupy some space.

And 2 to 2.

You make yourself sort of vulnerable by doing that, because you open up the front of your body right.

But it's a sign of confidence, and that way people are most likely to give you the benefit of the doubt, and that's a good way to start regulating your move.

But not only does it directly regulate your mood to stand up because it's so tightly associate ID like pasta Reflection is associate with serotonin and emotional regulation, but also because if you straighten up and you present yourself in that matter than other people are more likely to take you seriously.

And that means they'll start treating you is if you're a number one lobster instead of a number 10 lobster.

And that's another way that you can at least give yourself the bloody benefit of the doubt right and and and and and and confront the world in a courageous manner.