How To Become Someone People Rely On

In this lecture from March 2024, Jordan Peterson explores the relationship between attention, value, and belief. He begins with the cognitive science problem that reality presents infinite facts but we attend to only a narrow set, revealing our implicit value hierarchies. Through a series of images and narratives — a villain on screen, a sleeping lion, Abraham leaving his father's tent — he builds toward the argument that everyone operates on faith in what is worth attending to, and that the object of ultimate attention functions as a de facto god.