#502: Jordan Peterson on Rules for Life, Psychedelics, The Bible, and Much More

I think it's useful to draw a distinction between thinking and paying attention. If you're thinking, you're kind of walking down a programmatic trail. If you're paying attention, you just open your eyes and let your mind go where it will, and ideas will occur to you. They'll pop up in your field of consciousness, and for me, that's often informative.

Resentment tells you one of two things: One is that someone's treading on your territory and something needs to be done about it, or that you need to grow the hell up and stop complaining ... It isn't necessarily obvious, when you feel resentful, which of those it is, but you need to figure it out.

I firmly believe that the world is not the way we perceive it; it's deeply strange, and I do believe that the hallucinogens reveal that ... I don't think that attempts to drive them underground have been particularly fruitful. One of the consequences of the war on drugs is now we have like 500 psychoactive chemicals instead of 20 or 30 because chemists keep chasing the law ... Making it illegal doesn't look like a good solution.

It's better, I think, to put your life together than to go worry about parading around and being a social activist. I think most of that's fraudulent, and I think it's appalling that people learn to do that mostly at universities. Fix up your own life.

If you go deep enough into the psyche, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate what you discover from reality.

Outside of what you know is everything you don't know—and there are untold riches to be gathered from the domain of everything you don't know.

If you don't have the courage to commit a crime, it doesn't mean you're moral for not doing it; it just means you're afraid.

I have a friend; I won't name him because I don't know if he would want this public ... He said, 'Well, at some point you have to either find God or have kids, and having kids easier, so I had kids.