the more forward-looking you are the more mature you are the more your actions in the present are bound by the future you might say well I just want to be happy and first question is what the hell do you mean by happy do you mean extroverted do you mean full of positive emotion do you mean you're not suffering like what the hell do you mean happy there is a much more profound way of evaluating life's utility than the honic evaluation because many difficult things cause suffering but are worth doing so do you think people are
less happy today than they were 20 30 years ago yes what do you think is the biggest cause of that universities lies really lies you have to have an orientation towards the truth and it has to be a kind of terrified orientation what would you say is your biggest insecurity [Music] we really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show like seriously it means a lot the fact that we've been looking forward to this for a very long time years we've been hoping that this would happen so it really does mean a lot
I know you're very busy you have obviously the YouTube channel the podcast you just closed out the tour and then of course Peterson Academy which I looked at the trailers it looks amazing they're nice e yeah yes the production quality it's like I look at that and I'm inspired I'm like I need production quality like that for our show up your game man so during our research we found a video of you where someone asked you about IQ and you said you were previously tested quite a while ago and you said it was in excess
of 150 granted it does decline as you age and you also said having a high IQ like that means that you have high volatility or variance in other areas of intelligence as intelligence increases the variability and intelligence increases so psychometrically there's sort of one way to be not very bright and a variety of ways to be very bright so there's differentiation at the upper end right and so my I would say I'm not particularly gifted mathematically so I struggled with Statistics I eventually figured it out but it certainly didn't come to me easily I don't
tend to think mathematically I've certainly had students who were like immeasurably more intelligent than me on the mathematical front I had a student at Harvard she went from zero statistics to winning teaching awards for teaching it in about 6 months she was a little autistic she was also a very good writer that's a rare combination to have that extreme spatial mathematical intelligence and extreme verbal intelligence you get person like that now and then it's pretty rare and she was just coded that way to be able to do that that wasn't anything that she did to
be able to learn quickly IQ is very biologically determined very and it's very uh it's very rough it's no wonder my student and I Daniel Higgins who was a partner mining business still we uh at Harvard in the 1990s we did a lot of work investigating the world of psychometric measurement so that would be the assessment of cognitive ability and personality and we delve very deeply into the literature on neuros pychological function and so that would be that's from a field that basically derived its information from animal experimental studies as well as human beings study
of human beings with various forms of brain damage there was a a net effort I don't know if that's still ongoing to develop tests that would be Associated where people would show decrements that were associated with known areas of brain damage they developed a lot of specialized tests my student and I on my old supervisor we computerized a battery of so-called neuropsychological tests and then we used M and IQ tests and personality to predict academic performance and managerial performance and uh like line worker performance trying to figure out well two things what exactly is it
that makes someone productive depending on their positioning and then also how could that be measured effectively so that if you wanted to hire or place or promote you could do that in the most effective possible Manner and so that meant that we had to thoroughly familiarize ourselves with the neuros psychological literature which I already kind of new with the IQ literature which was quite new to me and then with the personality literature and so the basic claim of the psychometricians on the IQ side is that all for all intents and purposes IQ is relatively unitary
so intelligence General cognitive ability personality is multi-dimensional but cognitive ability although it differentiates at the upper end is a pretty solid unit and so and no one like that idea and no wonder it's no wonder so why would people not like it well it seems very unfair and anti-egalitarian to note that there's wide variation in the trait that is the best predictor of long-term success in complex occupations it's not like the cards are dealt out equally they're not dealt out equally how much of that is genetic most of it so if you have Smart parents
you're probably going to be smart parents you're going to be slightly less smart than the average of your parents because imagine that your intelligence isn't determined only by your parents it's determined in a way by the whole stream of your ancestry now if you have two smart parents on average their ancestors are going to be slightly less smart than they are so you get the best way to predict your IQ if we didn't know anything else would be to take the IQ of your mother and father and average them and then reduce it somewhat because
that's called regression towards the mean so there's a tendenc for biological forms to default back to their standard configuration or increase it if the average was lower than yeah that's right so if you had two parents who were impaired in their cognitive ability or far below average on average you'd be smarter than they were would that then suggest that with enough time we're all going to be about even if everyone's kind of average is IQ the average is 100 MH so hasn't it been going up over time though there's debate about that um it's gone
up overtime in some ways for sure so although it's difficult to increase IQ you you get companies now and then who pop up and claim that they can increase your cognitive function there's zero evidence for that there's no what happens if you if you practice a complex task you tend to get much better at the complex task say a video game but it doesn't transfer over and make you generally smarter no one's figured out how to increase IQ with with cognitive exercises you can maintain or increase your IQ with exercise cardiovascular and and weightlifting because
your brain is a very demanding organ so if you're cardiovascular system is healthy especially as you age that's a huge deal there's nothing that you can do that's more important than staying in physical shape to maintain your cognitive ability so but um nobody knows how to increase it I mean that would be a a discovery of infinite value but no one's figured it out you can suppress IQ quite easily uh um by say not stimulating young children to the degree that their intelligence has room to play let's say or by not breastfeeding them that that's
a good way to have stupider children if that's what you're after breastfeeding confers I think something like a three to four point increment per year breastfed it's something like why is that is it just a nutrition the brain's a very demanding organ and so it uses a tremendous amount of your metabolic resources and so nutrition and exercise make a huge difference um so if you take you asked about biological determinism with regards to IQ so imagine that you take twins identical twins who were separated at Birth and then you track their IQ as they age
well by the time they're 60 their IQs are so similar regardless of their background that it's as if you're testing the same person twice so strangely enough if if I was environmentally determined you'd expect twins separated and birth to diverge as they age they don't they converge so I can see that why that uh makes people very upset there's a whole bunch of reasons to be upset by I mean the when when Daniel and I sorted this out in the 90s we thought that this might be the sh upon which Western culture demolishes itself because
IQ is a vicious predictor of long-term success it's by far far the best predictor it's five times as powerful as conscientiousness which is the next best predictor so conscientiousness is associated with industriousness and orderliness it's associated with political conservatism It's associated with traditionalism outgroup let's say skepticism towards outgroups to some degree that's conservatism more but um and we probably can't measure conscientiousness as accurately as we can measure IQ we have to rely on personality and self self-report and reports from other people that's the best we've been able to manage and no one has been able
to come up with a practical test of conscientiousness like I'm probably treding 50 things in my lab bringing conscientious people into the lab giving them different sorts of tests seeing if we could figure out what activity conscientious people would do better in the lab so we could use that as a measure we could never do it we did things like for example imagine you have rows of n's M's use which are visually quite difficult to distinguish imagine a variety of rows of those and then your job is to go through and circle all the ends
you'd think perhaps that would be associated with something like diligence or industriousness conscientiousness but it's just another IQ test it's very very hard to find a cognitive test that isn't just IQ and IQ is very easy to measure this is another thing that makes it Troublesome let's say apart from the fact of unbelievable variation between people like people with extreme iq's are so much more productive than people with on the lower end of the scale that they're not in the same universe in a sense and they're certainly in the same moral universe and they have
the same value intrinsically and and IQ is not associated with morality let's say just because you're smarter doesn't mean you're a better person and in fact I think there's a Temptation that comes along with intelligence that's luciferian and that's been warned about in mythology forever bitter intellect you know the person who has been gifted by God so to speak with a great intellect who believes that the world should bow at their feet in consequence or presumes that their rational what would you say their cogitations produce systems of value that should be imposed upon the world
that's the luciferian temptation but there's a massive difference between people at the upper end of the cognitive distribution and people at the lower end and and so and and it's easy to measure it's very robust so for example imagine you had a uh library of 10,000 questions M questions about anything they they require abstract cognition to solve that's the only criteria multiple choice questions vocabulary questions General Knowledge Questions mathematical questions spatial rotation questions anything that requires abstract cognition okay so you have 10,000 questions extract act out a random set of 100 questions give out to
100 people sum their scores rank order them that's IQ now the technical IQ test correct for age but you know that's irrelevant with regards to the measurement but before we get into that we got to do some quick math because the less money your business spends the more money you get to keep and with higher expenses on materials employees distribution and borrowing everything is costing more so to reduce costs and headaches smart businesses are upgrading to our sponsor netsuite by Oracle netsuite is the number one Cloud Financial system that brings in accounting HR financial management
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that way because Elon has said on a podcast before that his mind is like a storm and that most people probably well he's probably also a little on the manic side like so so there's a phenomena one of the phenomena that's associated with creativity is known as fluency and people who are fluent idea generators generate a lot of ideas now that can get out of control it gets out of control and people like musk probably people like me lot of creative people a lot of writers in particular have a manic Edge and so they're they're
being flooded with ideas constantly so like when I this isn't quite so much the case for me anymore maybe it's a consequence of being older might also be a consequence of having my nervous system in somewhat more stable configuration but when I was writing my first book maps of meaning like I was thinking about that book when I wasn't doing my research let's say which was kind of a break for me in many ways I was thinking about that like 16 hours a day nonstop like ideas a verbal stream of ideas Associated we running through
my head at high spe constantly constantly how musk is going to musk is going to have that aspect that that's fluency is the so you can do a fluency test fluency tests are actually pretty straightforward too so one of the things one of the ways of measuring ing for examples I would say well write down as many four-letter words that begin with the letter s in 3 minutes so or you can use words of any length beginning with any letter and you score that for Pure fluency you just score that for number of words generated
and if you do that with a typical group of 50 people some people generate like eight words and some people will generate 300 you know that's a big difference and then you can you can uh there's other fluency tests that associate that assess more creativity which is associated with IQ but creativity has an additional element which is captured by the personality tra openness to experience creative people so imagine that if you bring an idea to mind there's some probability that an Associated idea will come along for the ride one thing reminds you of another yes
okay now imagine that you assessed 100 people and you gave each of them a prompt and they wrote down what came came to mind a lot of the things that were written down would be similar right and that's partly how we can understand each other an idea means something similar to you that it means to me the more creative people though are going to have other ideas come to mind that are more distal and statistically unlikely so they make longer leaps right and that can degenerate into Insanity as well right because you can make leaps
that are unwarranted or that are incomprehensible to other people you see that fragmenting in schizophrenia for example can often where does confidence come in because I feel like you could be very smart but not take action on anything there's no technical definition of con confidence there's no psychometric definition but confidence and self-esteem which is also a very illd defined phrase um they're they mostly load on trait neuroticism so the first the two of the main personality traits are associated with emotion so people who experience more positive emotion or have a lower threshold for positive emotion
those are extroverts and people have a lower threshold for negative emotion that' be anxiety grief shame pain there's more but that's the basic cluster they're more likely to experience negative emotion on a regular basis plus their threshold for experiencing it is lower it takes less to activate it so confident people are lower in neuroticism now you could also add some extraversion to that right so the typical person that you would experience as hypercon would be low neuroticism so very free of anxiety for example and and somewhat high in extroversion because that makes them outgoing so
they're not anxious they're not inhibited anxiety freezes you right so and makes you wary and it'll inhibit speech for example extroverts are more fluent so a confident person would be someone who's high in extroversion and low in neuroticism now there's a there's variance of that too so you might experience a disagreeable person that's more confident because a disagreeable person that's another personality to mention It's associated with femininity as is neuroticism um a disagreeable person will tell you to go to hell so you could have a quiet disagreeable person who is pretty confident because they're going
to say no to you if they're inclined to and they'll tell you to go to hell when they feel it's necessary or or maybe just randomly what was your disagreeability wasn't item my disagreeability um it was very low I think I remember it really put low and agreeableness yes feminine is what he's saying no no no just makes you masculine yeah and you kind of look like that your face has got a I was agreeable Jack was okay well we don't need to go into agre the disagreeable one but feminity but that's why it worked
so well uh between us we get along very well well disagreeable people are skeptical a their default position is like yeah I [ __ ] doubt it yeah right so and an agreeable person is something like anything you want dear yeah now the I'm not that agre well the upside of being agreeableness as I said is a more feminine trait and the reason that agreeableness it's useful in um it's likely useful in Intimate family situations and so a good default stance towards infants is agreeableness right because an infant between the ages of zero and nine
months is always right like if an infant is in distress your job as a caregiver is to attend to the infant not to make value judgments not to be skeptical it's like and that's partly because human infants are so um we're born early because of our head size so a mammal of our size should have a gestation period of two years not nine months so human infants are born prematurely in a sense and so they're very helpless and so it's necessary to be very agreeable in their care because they're obviously especially before they can move
they're 100% dependent now the problem with that is that being agreeable isn't the best thing for dealing with children as they mature and it's certainly not the thing that you use to deal with let's say adult males or institutions I mean one of the things that's pathologizing the world at the moment is the proclivity of women to use agreeableness as their default rule of moral presumption in situations where it's completely inappropriate disagreeable managers are more successful than agreeable managers because they can't be taken advantage of that's the problem with being agreeable then also it generates
resentment because if you're agreeable and you are pouring yourself out in others care constantly then it's easy to feel that you're not being appreciated properly and perhaps you're not you're not necessarily that good at at bargaining on your own behalf now you know if you're dis agreeable you can also be a complete son of a it's like you know all all of the personality Dimensions have their pathologies at the especially at the extremes and you can't say one is better than the other if you're a sophisticated actor what you do with your personality over time
is you expand its range so that you can match your behavior to the demands of the current situation so disagreeable people you know they they are they tend to say no they're very skeptical so they can miss opportunities they're suspicious of people and you know that's real useful if the person you're suspicious of is a bad actor but it's not that helpful if the person isn't so you pay a price you pay a price for everything you have right it's it's in one way or another one of the most transformative messages that you put out
is the importance of taking personal responsibility in the biggest way possible and in fact on Rogan you asked yourself what is the meaning of life and you concluded that it's the meaning that reveals itself when you take maximal responsibility for your own life could you discuss the philosophical why did that strike you because I think the meaning of life is a question that everyone asks themselves all of the time and at different parts of time in your life you're always coming to different answers and I thought that that is the exactly different wrong answers you
sure different wrong would you say this WR I talked to a philosopher yesterday and we were discussing modern conceptualizations of divinity let's say conceptualizations of God and there is a line of philosophical thinking now that is philosophers who are debating whether existence itself and hypothetically the spirit that gave rise to existence could be characterized as evil or good because if you look at the world you could say well the amount of suffering outweighs the amount of pleasure and so therefore existence itself has questionable utility that that's what the antinatalists presume that's what girus mephistophiles pronounced
he was a great uh what would you say hero to Karl Marx the ultimate anti-natalist but it's it's it's a foolish way of conceptualizing the world because it presumes that the right Axis of evaluation is something like pleasure versus pain like it's a honic evaluation MH well I don't think that's true I don't think that's true at all I don't think it's true existentially partly well here's a re here's a reason you know you might say well I just want to be happy and first question is what the hell do you mean by happy do
you mean extroverted do you mean full of positive emotion do you mean you're not suffering do you do do you mean you're calm like what the hell do you mean happy you know so it's very IL defined term but but it's also not even obvious that is what you want so what might you want instead well here's a question it's like what Memories can you drawn that what would you say situate you most effectively in existential space so imagine that you're taking yourself apart with your conscience wondering whether or not you're a worthwhile person evaluating
yourself morally you don't look back in your past and ask yourself how often you were happy like that's just pointless what you do is you go over your biography let's say and you think about if you're trying to defend yourself from your own accusations even you think about those times where even under duress you push the boulder successfully up the bloody Hill and the funny thing is is that those situations without the difficulty wouldn't have the same impact and so there's there is a much more profound way of evaluating life's utility than the hedonic evaluation
which I think is very primitive and pointless because many difficult things cause suffering but are worth doing marriage does that children do that like any career that's worthy of its name any job that's worthy of its name it's not you can't evaluate its utility on the basis of its happiness that's that problem the fact that we do that by default is nothing but an index of how pathological our culture is we just assume axiomatically that the right evaluation even for the quality of life is the hedonic evaluation that means we're basically hedonists that's not a
helpful orientation in the world it's very immature it's very immature what I find interesting is you also mentioned on another podcast for conflict resolution in a relationship let's say you're being annoyed by your wife or your girlfriend or something you can open up that conversation with you're annoying me now maybe that's me maybe it's my fault maybe I shouldn't be annoyed and if it is me I'd like to fix that so please tell me it's me if you fix well you might want to even open it with the statement not so much you're annoying me
but the statement I'm annoyed so it's person well there's no accusation there it's statement of emotional fact let's say I'm annoyed okay well why well it couldn't be you you know and that's the simplest solution for me except that I have to live with you if you're my wife so it's not that simple a solution but at in the moment it would maximize my Hedonism to assume it was you you know that's the thing we we should emphasize that a bit more is that emotional orientation is by definition immature like a two-year-old is run by
emotion once you mature you can even think of this technically as you mature the control over your perception and behavior moves from Instinct based subcortical structures that govern motivation and emotion their instincts to the cortex which is Contex dependent future oriented and communitarian so you know my happiness isn't as important let's say My momentto Moment happiness isn't as important or as meaningful as the psychological and physiological health of my family so you make sacrifices for that and life is a sacrificial Enterprise I even put myself in the hypothetical situation of this let's just say you
know I got a girlfriend she was annoying me and I I imagined myself being the person saying I'm annoyed by you and it's probably my fault and if it is I want to fix that and it even made me like a little bitter like I was already like it had already hurt my it's very annoying but it it's good because it strips away the ego entirely and makes it completely solution oriented it removes the emotions that's assuming the other person's solution oriented too but if you if you're vulnerable it also assumes that the solution that
you're negotiating towards is one of peace and Harmony right so so you need a you need a v that's part of what constitutes a valid religious orientation in the technical sense it's like well what are what the notion of solution presumes an orientation towards some end well what's the end well that's the religious question what's the ultimate end that's the religious question it's like well why not if if it's your wife and she's annoying you like why not just beat her until she stops doing those things you know and you say well no reasonable person
would do that it's like well first of all you have a lot of what would you say you have a lot of unwarranted faith in reason that's for sure because it's not obvious at all that that's not a reasonable solution especially if it worked that's certainly what tyrants think it's not like they're unreasonable so let's say you're oriented towards something like long-term peace and mutual Aid and benefit right till death do us part in sickness and in health right and so you're viewing the relationship over the longest possible period of time and then you're presuming
that the other person is indistinguishable from you in that regard because they are if you're married it's like the person that you're married to is there with you all the time there's no separation between you and and her not if you're really thinking about because your the quality of your experiences dependent upon one another and so you make a unit now the Christian ideal this is an ideal that lurks underneath some but not all modes of sanctifying the Union between men and women the Christian concept is that you put the union of the two of
you at the Pinnacle and that that Union is the recreation of the original Adam because the original Adam before he was separated into male and female was both an amalgam of Bo a kind of hypothetical perfect being a hermaphroditic figure that anyways the idea is that you put this and that that's equivalent to Christ by the way weirdly enough the idea is that there's a union of purpose and perception and action that can be attained by the communication between a couple and you want to elevate that above both of your limited self-interest so you're always
negotiating towards that it's like how do we ideal I this Union so then if that's your orientation and and you're having you're engaged in some Strife You're The Logical question is okay Who the hell's got the problem here because maybe it's you and like I said I that'd be convenient for me in a way except I'm stuck with you but maybe it's me and then then there's another impediment that isn't merely egotistical no it's it would be lovely for you to presume that you're right and people love to do that but there's another reason for
that too that's sort of outlined in Dante's Inferno because what you see is if there's a recurring problem in your relationship even your relationship with yourself is that there's something underneath that that's driving it and unpacking that is a journey into hell that's why people don't do it you know like if if you have a problem in your marriage that's a real problem and you delve into it it's like surgery for an for an infection you'll get to the bottom of it it will not be fun and something seriously ugly is down there and so
that's down the rabbit hole in the Dante's Inferno now Dante put betrayers at the lowest level of hell and that's pretty damn accurate because often what you'll find is if there's a recurring problem in a relationship the reason that that problem is there is because let's say the person who's primarily responsible for that particular problem has been betrayed in some way that's either stopped their development at a certain age so they're immature or that's rendered them bitter and distrustful and so you see a lot of problems between men and women in that manner because like
there's a element of the female psyche that dis distrusts men as a category and the same is true for men they distrust women as a category and that's real problem in a particularized relationship like a marriage it's like well why don't you trust man well maybe you're a woman who never had a positive experience with a man in your whole goddamn life that's increasingly common right all the men you knew were absent you know sporadic relationships with your mother nothing Dependable right or you a series of sponges or Worse right exploiters how do you best
work on those issues to fix them which issues I would say anything that's under the surface like you're talking about finding an infection and going down and surgically remov it how do you even begin to Broach those topics with the significant other well in my marriage when when Tammy and I got together we'd known each other for a very long time by that point but I indicated to her that if we were going to be together we're going to tell each other the truth that's a hard thing and so it it's hard in a sense
it's hard in the short term that's that's another one of these indications that the hedonistic orientation is wildly lacking like there's nothing the least bit entertaining about solving a serious psychological problem you know and I'm oddly constituted for that because I don't like conflict it really upsets me and so it's hard for me to delve into underlying problems but what I like even less is having those problems continue it's like no we're solving this right now and so what does that mean well it'll eventually mean tears on one person's part or the other might mean
some Screaming God only knows you know people have all sorts of ways of putting up resistances to that kind of inquiry too you know you're mean well and maybe you are you know leave me alone I'll stomp out I don't want to talk about this turn red get angry accuse you of all sorts of things you know and you have to be able to persevere through that and that also means that you have to have faith in your the motives for your inquiry maybe you are just being a cruel son of a [ __ ]
and you won't let the person alone going into their past and mucking about you know so then the question there is well how can you trust yourself well don't lie that's the bottom lines like you want to trust yourself in a difficult negotiation you better bloody well be sure that your orientation is upward and how do you be sure of that you evaluate yourself the same way you evaluate anyone else you know if you're in a relationship with someone they lie to you constantly you're not going going to trust them it's no different for you
you know so that's why you have to have an orientation towards the truth yeah and it has to be a kind of terrified orientation and that's easy for me because I know what happens to people when they don't solve their proximal relationship problems you know they end up in some sort of Hell divorce court hell that's fun especially if you have a few kids you can like be miserable for 20 years in divorce court see I tend to be conflict avoidant like you mentioned but I also tend to think in those situations in the big
picture most of what's going on is not that big of a deal so I rationalize that hey we have a great life a lot of things are going well this you know a month from now we're not even going to remember to me it's like a lot of those things just let it go well the the question is you know what's the rule don't make a mountain out of a mole hill so and that's a perfectly reasonable rule but another rule is you know don't don't be willfully blind okay so how do you distinguish between
those two things I might with my clients I would Implement have them Implement something like a rule of three so you bother me it's like once irrelevant why who knows what's up with you maybe you're hungry like I don't know what's or maybe it's me I the fact that we had some emotional upset between us once it might alert you but it contains virtually no information right so you just think well we'll just let that lie twice same thing it's like oh that's twice okay so now that's that's a bit more serious now I'm watching
you a little hard three times well then I tell you you did it this time you did it this time you did it this time it's the same thing I saw it and I'm not deluded so a rule of three is a good one it's a good one because it gives you you know and you could make it four or you could make it I don't care but once isn't good because then you fly off the handle at everything and so you do want to let go what can be let go well what is that
things that don't repeat it's it's the repetition that's the problem right because well and and people also don't construe their lives very intelligently in this regard because we tend to focus our lives on the exceptional vacations for example or special occasions it's like that's foolish your life is what you do every day the mundane things you do every day that's 95% of your life you want to get those right if there are things that interfere with those like maybe every time you put your kids to bed it's misum well that's not good because you probably
only spend 20 minutes of one-on-one time with any given kid on average every day so if bedtimes are miserable that's your relationship well that's no good you got to fix that or maybe you know there's unpleasantness when you come home after work or or at breakfast or lunch I don't know if it repeats it's a problem so that's what you're looking for is repeating patterns of of Discord and if they repeat the basic rule is if something repeats it's not going to stop until you fix it your wife or you might be acting out patterns
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you want to skip the entire weight list all you got to do is message # I to the inapp concierge thank you so much to the league for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast if you're a business owner you know there's no better sound than hearing and if you want to hear a bunch more then it's time to get started with our sponsor Shopify for those unaware Shopify is the global e-commerce platform that's already helped transform millions of businesses worldwide what I love about Shopify is they have thousands of Integrations thirdparty apps and
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leave that to my subjective you know random arbitrary decision- Mak machine that I have so if someone sets out to only ever tell the truth would that be setting themsel up for success or failure and is there ever a time to not be truthful for example we've asked guests on this podcast before Tom Bilu funny enough had a really interesting answer to this which is if your wife doesn't look good in a dress do you tell her you say don't ask me questions like that unless you want the answer my answer to that is yes
you tell her but like the thing is is questions like that aren't realistic in a way because they strip out the necessary context like you can't tell your wife how she looks in a given outfit unless you've negotiated how to do that thoroughly right so that would mean for example that both you and her are pleased if she looks attractive and you might say well of course a husband's going to be pleased if her life wife looks attract if his wife looks attractive it's like really how attractive and to who and when exactly and also
why and those are very complicated issues and so you see there's no shortage of men who punish their wives every single time they look attractive just like there are no shortage of wives who punish their husbands every time they do anything competent you might say well why would that happen well let's say you've had bad experiences with men and you can't distinguish between competence and tyranny so every time a man makes a decision to do something you see that as a manifestation of patriarchal power and you you quash it and then a year later your
husband's complet useless and you you wonder why you've been saddled with him but that's fine because you can play martyr to your friends and so that's a good deal for everybody and so the same thing applies to attractiveness on the part of your wife it's like do you trust her and how short should her skirt be when she goes to the bar with her friends exactly and when are you going to say something about it well there's a lot of preparation work that has to be done before you if my wife asks me of something
that looks good on her I tell her and lots of things look good on her so that's a good deal and I buy a lot of her clothes which I find extremely entertaining she also see the reason you want to be able to tell her is because she has to be able to trust you but she also has to not play stupid games because the stupid game is well I'm I'm asking you if you look if I look good in this dress but really I'm trying to figure out is do you love me that's not
a straight game it's like are you asking whether I love you or are you asking whether or not I look good in this dress and people are often very murky in their questions you don't know what the hell they're up to and neither do they and so it's very difficult to respond in a truthful manner when you're in a complex situation and five different things are going on I know it's the white Li conundrum right yeah if you ever have to tell a white lie you haven't set the situation up properly there are times when
the best you might be able to manage in that situation is a white lie but that doesn't make it good there are other situations that I can think of like for example let's say there's been a a long relationship these people have been married for like 10 years but then there's an ex of the guy and she reaches out to the guy for no reason and this was a girl that your current wife has always had a little bit of a h come on what's going on over there like they always were very insecure they
felt uneasy about that past Rel relationship right and you've tried your best to talk it through but you haven't uh done it I guess to make her comfortable enough and you don't know if you can well she text you do you tell your wife that she texted you knowing it's just going to devolve into this thing when you have no feelings for your ex at all whatsoever but you know it's going to create a catastrophe all these arguments and plates will be thrown whatever do you still tell her or do you just throw it to
the side because it means nothing to you well any secrets that you keep from your wife like you don't have to tell any one everything I mean first of all who wants that like and you have a right to privacy but keeping secrets from the person who's adjacent to you is not help it's just not helpful because it means there are areas of your shared life that are off limits and partly that's not good for you because then you don't have access let's say to her intelligence and perception in those situations no you know like
I would have to know the details because the details in in a situation like that matter but the optimal solution to that problem is to work it out so that that problem no longer exists so that you're not jealous of each other's exes and you know that's complicated because well are you fully committed to your wife like and why should she believe that what do you mean fully exactly and so those are very complicated issues and people check each other out with regard to such things all the time you know little kids will misbehave especially
if you bring them to a new situation and you might say why the hell are they misbehaving they know perfectly well what the consequences of that will be especially if you're you know a diligent disciplinarian and the rules are minimal but clear while you bring your kids to new situation and they act up well why well because they want to see what you'll do well why because what you do defines the new situation and they'll risk punishment for that they want to know so they'll bug you even if bug they're bugging you in a way
that has resulted in something unpleasant for them consistently in the past it's like no I want to know well a lot of that's relationship between a man and a woman it's like what are you up to well did you ask me straightforwardly well probably not because that's hard but that I could torture you into some Revelation and I want to know CU my life depends on it so people play pretty rough games it's better to get the game straight that's hard mhm you know like cuz the question how committed you are you to your wife
that's sort of indistinguishable from the question how committed are you to your own life how committed are you to the journey up Jacob's Ladder how interested are you in spending some time in hell just because it's entertaining and you don't have anything better to do these are hard things to sort out how much trouble do you want to cause exactly for that exactly for the Delight of having the problem a false Adventure so everyone needs be playing the same rules of the game that's the Bas that's the minimal Bas basic understanding yeah yeah yeah you
got to have a constitutional framework in your marriage let's say it it it's a bit more complex than that because you also have to agree on the rules of transformation so let's say you have a friend and you can play a game with the friend but now you have a little bit more sophisticated friend and you can play this game and that game and then an even more sophisticated friendship would involve a multitude of qualitatively different games well then you need to negotiate transition rules right how do we change the game we're playing so that's
a bit more complex than just the you know the Constitutional framework per se but yeah you have to well that's what that's what traditions do for people mostly it's like men and women in principle once had traditional roles well why well you want to negotiate every little thing with your wife just try you know who should do the dishes and win you can spend five years figuring that out all the what would you say resentment and irritation that come along with the kitchen God what a mess it's very difficult for people to negotiate a relationship
from scratch and so generally what human beings do is default to something approximating tradition because it solves the complex problem and then you know the radicals go in there and muck up the tradition and then people are just lost they have no idea what to do they have no idea how to negotiate they don't even know what they want like most many people when they're conversing it's it's like they they throw out an indication of their misery but it's IL defined and you have no idea what would satisfy it neither do they it's like an
endless mining Expedition so do you think people are less happy today than they were 20 30 years ago yes what do you think is the biggest cause of that do you think it's comparison do you feel like it's social Med universities lies really lies the way that I boiled down my University experience in the most simplest of forms was well I went to UCSB I'm I don't know if I'm going to even shout out the goutos should I even be doing that anymore I I had okay time there I had a fun time but I
feel like like even from when I was younger I noticed a change from the teachers teaching you how to think versus teaching you what to think it completely changed I feel like honestly in in high school which was like 2013 to 2017 it went from expanding your brain to solve problems for your yourself versus this is what you should think so I don't know if that's how college should be because obviously you do need to understand the curriculum they need to be teaching you mathematics and stuff like that so you know what it is that
you should actually be thinking about but I don't know have you noticed that change in Academia well Academia is saturated with propagandists they we've let the what resentful radicals in beginning in the 60s and they've essentially taking taken over the universities so is that helpful no not the least so it's hard to be a good University Professor it's hard to be a good researcher and it took a long time for the institutions of higher education to be reliable transmitters of both tradition and the spirit of inquiry it's easily disrupted and it's disrupted now when did
you make the commitment to truth and honesty in 1985 1984 1984 yeah perfect year for that 1984 and why did you do it because I understood at that point both personally and sociologically let's say that lies produce hell was there anything that made you realize that sure lots of things lots of things I'd been studying partly it was a consequence of the study of atrocity because I've been studying atrocity really from the time I was 13 onward motivation for serious misbehavior you might say like sadistic Mur murderousness and the enjoyment that can be derived from
that and so and the absolute cataclysmic hells that were produced by totalitarian states in the 20th century how do they come about through lies so and I became thoroughly convinced of that and if you're thoroughly convinced of that well to the point where that appears as a fact there's an obvious moral conclusion to derive from that it's like you want to contribute to Hell keep on LY what was the the final straw that broke the camels back for that was a certain book that you read a personal experience cuz it's very specific a combination of
both I mean my life in 1984 was still somewhat dissolute you know I like to drink and so that I had a hedonistic orientation to some degree and you know alcohol doesn't bring out the best in people's characters alcohol almost universally makes people less than they are it's fun because it eradicates your concern for future consequences it actually kind of does that physiologically you might say because it's alcohol is a potent anxiety reducing drug for some people it's also a psychomotor stimulant like cocaine and it was certainly that for me and for other PE for
people too it can have a heroin like effect which facilitates the sense of social belonging and I think I had all three of those effects from alcohol so I liked it quite a lot but the consequence for me was you know I would misbehave when I was drinking in ways that made me remorseful the next day or the next two days or the next week and I realized at that point that that that was a performative contradiction in a sense performative contradiction is when you act out something that's a lie that's runs contrary to your
moral beliefs right and so I was looking at the literature and atrocity trying to determine how the proclivity to bring those States about those hellish States about might be amiliar like what's the opposite of evil that's the question I suppose I was trying to solve and so when I saw patterns of behavior in my own life that were making things worse than they had to be then that was an indication that it was time to Star and I moved to Montreal after that to go to graduate school and that was a pretty dramatic transformation in
my social milu um and I started to drop a lot of the things that I was doing that were counterproductive took me another four years four years something like that to like just stop drinking all together stop smoking to exercise more to be more disciplined did you find that diff did you find that difficult to do oh yes of course of course yeah yeah I was very good at drinking good at it yeah well yeah I suppose you know I mean I was very social I had a large group of friends I had to blast
I had an interesting experience with alcohol which was I had made the personal decision to completely abstain from it I was disgusted by it for a really long time up until being about 21 and a half and I went to like a party school everyone claims it's a party school this one there was a lot of drinking obviously and then I finally made the decision after I had realized you know it's funny I just remember this right now I I wrestled with the decision to drink because I I just thought it made everything worse obviously
I thought you're like poisoning and polluting yourself I thought that it's hurting like your relationship with spirituality everything and I remember after all this debate I went and read your opinion on alcohol and it actually allowed me it gave myself permission to drink which I know sounds exactly the opposite of what you're saying um but you had said it was really only a sin or bad if you do it in excess so I finally allowed myself to drink I didn't like to do it except in excess so yeah well I you know I soon later
found out that you know that is pretty nice on occasion not a recommendation but I found your opinion on that and this was after about a year and a half of honestly I was suffering a lot so I was in my head I was anxious I couldn't be myself I felt like I was disassociating in environments but actually I took I I drank alcohol and it brought me into the present for the first time in a very long time and I think oddly enough that was a part of healing which sounds completely counterproductive and not
intuitive at all but it helped me oddly enough it's like training wheel experience you know like a social environment physically like you're actually there to experience happiness for the first time in a very long time I did it with a close friend of mine but I don't know what that if that means anything if there's any significance to that or you know I don't want to be recommending Al the significance fundamentally is that things are complicated like lots of teenagers now don't drink at all so you might say well that's a good thing because alcohol
All Things Considered is problematic but if you're not partying because you have no friends and you're in your basement miserable and depressed that's not an improvement no and so I suppose to some degree whether or not something is good depends on your starting point you know like I can understand for example why so many young men admire Andrew Tate at least Andrew Tate has all the positive aspects of a successful narcissist that beats the hell out of being depressed and anxious now is that a stellar goal no but it's an improvement over isolated misery you
know you see this in female mate choices there's a strong proclivity in women to be enamored of bad boys and there's a variety of reasons for that but one reason is well they're a hell of a lot more interesting than martyred miserable depressed anxious un self-conscious low self-esteem non-starters so now is that an optimal choice no but comparatively that's the attraction of the shadow figure fundamentally what did n say about morality most morality is cowardice what did he mean by that well he didn't mean that morality was cowardice he said most morality is cowardice and
what he meant by that was people find themselves too timid to do anything and so instead of admitting their lack of courage to themselves they put a moral gloss on it and say that the reason they're timorous is because they're good that's a form of moral hypocrisy you know there were kids in my high school for example who never drank you know they were good kids but they weren't good they're just cowards that wasn't help now my friends my delinquent friends in junior high and high school a lot of them became alcoholics so their lack
of cowardice on the exploration front also caused them a tremendous amount of misery look there's actually a literature on this so imagine you took adolescence on a distribution of rule breaking okay there's kids who never break any rules on one end and there's kids who break them all the time on the other end and then there's the kids in the middle who experiment with rule breaking in adolescence well the ones who never break rules are at much higher risk for depression anxiety and dependent personality disorder later in life they're too inhibited and the ones who
break rules all the time well they end up in prison so you want to you want to have that I I'm not saying that you should be in the middle exactly I'm saying that there's a optimal mode of being that allows you to explore even in ways that could potentially be destructive um and that that's the best Pathway to facilitate development it's like 12 rules it's the order in chaos it's walking the line between what's familiar and known versus exploring yeah because you don't want to make the error of presuming that a totalitarian order is
equivalent to morality it's funny what you said was actually exactly the conclusion that I had came to which was I was assigning a false sense of morality to myself because I was sober even though I actually I it just made me feel good about myself because I thought that I was you know holier than thou yeah right I wasn't drinking and I was denying myself that because other people would say that like people that cared about me but I I wouldn't actually accept it and it was out of cowardice it's interesting how alcohol affects everybody
differently because for me it puts me to sleep I'll have two drinks and instantly I'm just like all right I'm tired this isn't fun I'm not enjoying myself for some people acceler stimulant effect no yeah testing people in the lab in Montreal you give them three drinks in 20 minutes so a pretty decent ghost their heart rate would go up 40 beats per minute was just like a sh of cocaine those were often people who had a history of familiar alcoholism so they had a genetic predisposition to be alcoholic but they were getting a psychomotor
stimulant kick and it looks like that was opiate mediated so for some people when they drink they produce a lot of beta endorphin which is an opiate an opiate it's in the opiate family and so there's endless benefit to that I had a friend in in Montreal an old guy Frank Irvin he was a cool old guy he looked like Ernest way I liked Frank a lot he had a monkey Farm on St kits uh vervent monkeys and uh him and his wife Roberta Palmer who was also very cool they uh they they ran an
alcohol lab for years and they gave these fent monkeys free access to rum and coke and 5% of them would drink Tacoma on first exposure it was funny they had videos of that and it's like a frat party it's very funny to watch these drunk monkeys but 95% of them wouldn't drink Tacoma right they'd have a bit in Star but 5% of them would it was like where have you been all my life like Barney Gumble on this instance you know so alcohol is a great drug for some people it wasn't for you yeah it's
just a natural disposition to either being accelerated while you're taking alcohol or being I guess well if you're if you're very fortunate let's say and you really want to become an alcoholic it would be good to be susceptible to the anx xiety reduction element and the psycho stimulate element and the opiate element and then you know hooray it's a very good drug except it makes you stupid that's also the part of the problem with being humanistically oriented it's short-term gratification it's like that's fine but what do you pay for it yeah you know that was
one of the reasons too why I completely stopped drinking is because the more successful I got yeah the bigger the price I had to pay like taking half a day off became so valuable that I thought do I want that for two drinks I rather just have well that was another thing that also convinced me to stop drinking is when I was working on my first book I couldn't first of all it was too it was too emotionally demanding to work on when I was hung over like I just couldn't handle it it was just
too much because you know reading about sadistic owitz guards is rather disturbing at the best of times and if you're royally hung over it's much worse um and also I couldn't edit because I couldn't think clearly and you know one of the things so here's something to consider so um in the biblical stories of transformation Abraham the story of Abraham is a good example of that so Abraham leaves the confines of his family he's from a wealthy family he leaves the comfort in the confines of his family goes out into the world God comes to
him as the spirit of Adventure and then Abraham goes through a series of transformations of Personality his name is actually Abraham to begin with AB r a m he's renamed about two-thirds of the way through the story and the reason for that is that his identity transforms so radically that it's as if he's a new person okay so what does he do well he starts aiming up and then his personality transforms he has to make a sacrifice so he builds an altar he makes a sacrifice well what's the sacrifice well you just said what the
sacrifice is you jumped up a rung in terms of the field of opportunity and responsibility that was in front of you and you thought oh my time too value able to waste half a day well that also that also happened to me in graduate school it's like no I can't afford this anymore yeah and it's partly it's not even I couldn't afford it's like I have something better to do this is something that anybody who's watching and listening for example if you want to deal with an addiction what it's one thing to quit quitting doesn't
exactly work you have to replace it with something better and if alcohol is great or if cocaine's great for you it's like well what could be better well that's your problem fundamentally but you know you said well you discovered that your time was valued mhm yeah so it's better to I certainly came to that conclusion in graduate school it's like no what I'm working on is so interesting that I don't want to compromise it even a little bit you know and as so imagine that you move up these rungs that's Jacob's Ladder by the way
up these rungs of transformation with every major transition there's going to be a sacrifice yeah I think over time too that's why I became more disagreeable is just because your time is so valuable that you know what you need to focus on and you tend to down other things yes definitely that's a m sure sure that's one of the advantages actually to being disagreeable is that you can prioritize more stringently right and you know that as a virtue that's got a bad rap in our culture because you're supposed to be agreeable all the time you're
not supposed to discriminate you're not supposed to judge it's like really you're not supposed to discriminate so everything's the same is it that's how you're going to organize your life there's nothing there's nothing that distinguishes that from utter chaos you have to be unbel discriminating that's the logos right so when God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise or when they actually fall out of paradise because of their pride is more accurate way of representing it God installs a cherubim which is a kind of a monstrous angel and a sword that's on fire that turns
every which way and what does that mean well it means that a sword obviously cuts and a flaming sword Burns and so a flaming sword cuts and burns and if it turns every which way there's no escaping it well why well if you want to regain Paradise then everything that isn't appropriate has to be cut and burned away and that can be a lot so people are terrified of that like I've read metaphysical speculations that hell there's no difference between hell for the sinful and the sight of the sword that cuts and burns everything away
because if your 95% lies then any that fixes you would look like death or worse and so the the terrifying ideal that destroys everything about you that's not worthy that's rough well you know you experienced that at least to some degree with regards to your conclusions about drinking and this is the case like as you so I never drink now so what happened to me is I quit when I was about 27 it took me a while and uh then I quit till I was about 50 and part of the I quit too was cuz
I was having kids and there was no way I was going to be drunk around my kids like no that wasn't going to happen and uh then my kids left and I was 50 and I thought well maybe I could have a drink or two and see because it's kind of the pain to in a way socially to never have a glass of whne I now I don't care but then you know there was still some awkwardness about that and I don't know some curiosity so I drank a bit when I was around 50 and
I found I was just stupid at 50 as I was when I was 27 you know I'd have two or three drinks and then it was all right man We're Off to the Races you know and so so I just stopped again now and well now there's just no question about because I can't afford ever to make a mistake yeah so one thing I'm always curious about is I feel like everyone experiences life in terms of colors and some people's colors just happen to be more vibrant than others so for example if I think I'm
happy if I think I'm as happy as I can possibly be I'm a 10 out of 10 or I would say like I have 10 out of 10 Joy what if that someone else is just six out of 10 and what if I well you do see that with temperamental variation I mean you know positive emotion can keep spiring upward till it hits Mania like there's an upper limit because at at at the it's complicated but if we just talk about positive emotion per se not about meaning say just positive emotion As you move up
the scale of positive emotion it gets more and more intense but at the like it limits out with into pathology so manics are very happy but meaning produces positive emotion meaning is that's complicated no not exactly it's it's it's complicated because sometimes meaning can produce misery especially in the short term that happens with kids all the time look there's a huge psychological literature that purports to show that couples without children are happier than couples with children so then you think well children are a burden it's no your definition of quality in life is stupid it's
like of course you're not happy if you have children it's like you're worried about them why because they might die so or be Hur so that's on your mind but that doesn't mean that it's not meaningful right and so in in a very profound way you have to snap the connection between henis either on the positive or negative emotion scale and meaning like the relationship is by no means one toone so so let me give you an example so in Notes from Underground dovi put forward a very trenchant criticism of utopian socialism and purposefully so
because that was one of dov's prime focuses of contemplation and he said that if you provided people with all of the hedonic Delights that they would want mhm and you put them in a situation where that was provided to them continually all they would do is smash that up so that something strange and mysterious and unpredictable would happen because we have this requirement for for what suffering maybe how about the suffering that forces you to develop is that a instinctual demand probably you know people will pick false Adventure over no Adventure like we're wired for
trouble for sure to seek it out people are caused trouble all the time especially when they don't have anything vital to do in fact that is what they'll do is cause trouble because that's a false Adventure it's hard to imagine that the highest quality of life does not produce the the highest average positive emotion I'm not sure I'm not sure about that I'm not sure about that that's I don't know if that's optimal like if you're listening to music the happiest music is elevator music it's just happy like it's trivial but that's the thing like
there's a there's a there's a lack of depth to unadulterated happiness but the depth provides positive emotion right but the depth also is associated with suffering this is see you you you've you've apprehended this to some degree because you said that the notion of a call to responsibility was attractive to you well that's a burden responsibility is a burden there's a weight to it now you might say what it me you say he who has a why can bear any how you could say well if the purpose is sufficiently Noble the weight is irrelevant that's
a better way of conceptualizing it I think and I think that's right so you want to have a orientation towards your life in the world that makes that makes even the suffering not it's not just justifiable welcome well couldn't that just be meaning feeling like you have what do you mean just uh oh uh oh Grant just meaning it's it's having meaning it's having purpose it's it's feeling uh important and needing to be somewhere for something that I think is greater than yourself yes well that's also part of the sacrificial element of maturity so one
of the things I've got in trouble for saying which is true anyways is that you don't grow up till you have kids and people who don't have kids who think they're growing up take exception to that and I can understand why but I don't really care because you're not mature until someone matters more than you do and that unless there's something wrong with you like seriously wrong and that happens to people if you have kids that will happen to you you know you might say you could be committed to something else with equal intensity it's
like yeah maybe I doubt it but maybe you know there might be one person in the Thousand who's capable of taking on a burden that's equivalent let's say to care for a child in some other form care for an aliling relative for example or a sibling or maybe even sacrificial love for a husband or a wife very rare very rare what maturity does that give you to have children he got married recently so he's you know thinking about the idea it well you're responsible they're obviously fragile in a very fundamental way and that's your problem
so you better have your eyes open and there's lots of ways you can foul up and the thing about kids they're perfect and you can really muck that up now you can also encourage their development and and facilitate the maintenance of that sort of paradisal quality of being you want to do that within the conf pars up your house and that's great like my experience with ch with children was they certainly I mean I like children I used to work in daycares when I was like 18 I really liked little kids and so I never
felt my kids to be a burden when I was working as a professor at Harvard you know I basically stripped my life down to work and my family that was it there was nothing else and that was fine I mean I loved my work and so that was fine but my family was a very good break from my work and very rewarding I mean most of the time if I had my choice I'd rather hang around with my kids that's always that's been the case my whole life it's still the case now they're unbelievably rewarding
so the thing about kids this is something that's very useful to know the relationship you have with your child will be the only relationship you ever have in your life that starts with The Following on the following presumption there's nothing that child wants more than to have the best possible relationship with you they 100% want that that's right on the table for you you know now people find that daunting and they're afraid of it and no wonder but it's an unbelievably high quality relationship how does it bring in maturity though because you're contending with their
fragility you there's errors that your errors are the consequence of your errors are radically multiplied okay right and it's not just you that's on the hook for your stupidity it's your kids and they're not responsible for your stupidity you might be but you know so if you conduct yourself in a manner that makes them suffer well then you're contributing to the suffering of the innocent that's for sure and so you know you become aware of that and that I mean part of your question your question has to be answered in part by discussing what it
means to be mature the more forward looking you are the more mature you are the more your actions in the present are bound by the future that's one definition of maturity so even in relationship to yourself you know well why not drink and have fun well how about because there's tomorrow right right or your career right you know or the you're at a fairly high level of attainment and you do something foolish when you're drunk it might even just be a word that's spoken improperly or carelessly it's like it damages your reputation because people are
expecting more for from you than that and if you violate that then all sorts of doors that you didn't even know were there slam shot and so you're orienting yourself to a longer view of of life that's partly what Christ is referring to when he talks about life eternal you start to view your life not as the moment to moment happening but the entire pattern perhaps not only across the span of your life but like a multigenerational Spam and then the other element of maturity is that it's not about you like it's partly about you
but it's just as much about your wife and it's just about as much about it's just as much about your kids and then your community right so instead of you being focused on self-centered gratification in the immediate present you're looking more for something like Harmony on the social front so you and your wife are getting along right there's a har Harmony established then your kids and your wife and you are getting along and that's a Harmony that's a much better view also of me of mental health you know one of the disservices that the psychological
and psychiatric Community have done in the last 100 years is imbue people with the conviction that mental health is something that's in your head and that's yours that's complete bloody nonsense that isn't how it works at all like you can't be mentally healthy if your wife is miserable that's not in your head your stability is dependent on the harmony of your social surround and it's dependent on the integration of the present with the future and the more mature you are the better you are at taking all that into account at every moment so and there's
there's a strange thing that goes along with that so in The Sermon on the Mount for example which is a series of instructions by the way so Christ tells his followers first of all to aim up and so you could you could think of that ultimately and the ultimate expression of that would be something like your attempt to establish a relationship with the Transcendent or the Divine it's difficult thing to Define but you can think about it more prosaically as well which is well if you can think of something better that you could be doing
practically in any of the dimensions of life that you're exploring aim at that you know you might say well I don't know what the ultimate Pinnacle of goodness is it's like fair enough but there's some proximal Goods that you're probably aware of like one of the questions people can generally ask answer is well what stupid things are you doing to mock up your life that you know about that you could quit doing that you wouldn't quit doing it might be a short list but it's something it's like well there's an upward orientation there that upward
orientation can magnify as its practice and that's part of the establishment of a religious mode of being anyways you Orient yourself upwards right then you assume that other people have the same intrinsic value that you do and then you concentrate on the moment then you can have your cake and eat it too because you get the pleasure of being immersed in the moment and there isn't anything in some sense that's deep a deeper source of meaning than that but that's predicated on the proper distal orientation right so Christ says in The Sermon on the Mount
that you should be like the lies of the field right that they don't Toil and they don't spin they're not machia valan they're not machia valan in their orientation they're not always trying to twist the fabric of reality so they get what they want it's like no aim up then concentrate on the moment and that those two those things should inform each other you could imagine here here's an example of that so you could imagine appearing on a podcast with mackell intent to sell something for example or you could imagine following the thread of the
conversation wherever it goes assuming that the goal is to have the most engaging conversation possible those are very difficult different orientations if your orientation is towards engagement in the conversation and youve set that frame then you can concentrate on the moment and look for the opportunities that make themselves manifest in relationship to that goal and you can do that always in your life constantly that's what a religious practice is for so you're doing that in every moment technically that's what it's that's what it's for and that's way different than a hedonic motivation it's they're not
the same thing at all you mentioned that you cannot be healthy in the absence of a long-term stable relationship yeah you can't regulate your own behavior and eventually short-term relationships will turn you mellian sociopathic and potentially narcissist well it depends on why you're pursuing them like look look the data on this is Crystal Clear there's no debate about this among serious psychologists let's say so there are two patterns of successful mating let's say successful pursuit of sexual gratification there's the mosquito model and the human model the mosquito model is plenty of Offspring no investment the
human model is very small number of Offspring very high investment okay so now take the humans now there's a distribution of humans some of them are low investment maters and some of them are high investment ERS so low investment would be many offspring no investment okay now you say that's a strategy it's a biological strategy okay who are the people who who utilize that strategy they're nalian narcissistic Psychopathic and sadistic so you know if that's what you want that's the that's the and if you're naturally like that that will be your orientation but if you
practice that that's also what you'll become for a long-term healthy and stable relationship does that have to be with like a a a partner like a a husband or wife or a spouse or could it be say a brother or well that's nothing you know I mean there's all sorts of Rel something to contend with that will always keep you in check is essentially what you're saying well there something to care for over the long run that isn't you couldn't that also be let's say a sibling or a close friend have relationships but there isn't
the the advantage to long-term heterosexual child centered coupling is that it provides all those other benefits you know there's there's a polarity between men and women that's important a fundamental orientation that's important if you can bring both of those viewpoints to any given situation in all likelihood that's more advantageous that provides a platform for children and grandchildren so the continuity of of humanity across the generations you know and the the core of that's obviously the relationship between men and women are there ways of approximating that well obviously but there are approximations you know and that
doesn't mean obviously there are some people who have better friendships than their marriage but that doesn't that's irrelevant with regards to the main point because we're talking about something that's an ideal no everybody falls short of the ideal but part of the reason can't maintain sanity isn't in your head like here's the definition of Sanity you're well enough socialized so other people can tell you when you're an idiot and you'll listen so why is that a good solution well there's a lot of other people and if they're giving you signals all the time all you
have to do is listen so that's a good deal for you now you might think well that's you know sanity's in my head it's like what makes you think you can regulate yourself you're pretty godamn complicated you know so we ulate ourselves socially that's why we talk to each other it's vital that's so interesting I I feel like once again what you're saying I feel like I'm like struck with my pride a little bit like I feel like I can regulate myself I can always aim up or try to do what is right and think
well I guess I'm still basing my decision- making because a lot a heris I use a lot of the time when I'm trying to decide what to do between like a moral conundrum is like what would the optimal person in this situation do and completely remove myself from the situation and then I do that but I guess that's also relating well that's right right what you've done to some that's a good observation what you've done to some degree is you've you've constructed an idealized representation of another or a human being for that matter that's like
the son of man in the Christian conception that's a good way of thinking about it so what you're doing when you do that is no different from what say Evangelical Christian do when ask themselves what would Jesus do it's exactly the same thing and it's pulled from real people it's just certain components about them so they're still technically pressing upon impressing upon me yeah yeah yeah yeah you're just you're essentially fabricating out of whole cloth something approximating a classic religious orientation you know what would what would someone who is ideal do in this situation well
see if you delved into that this is where the religious investigation would take place it's like okay who is this ideal that you're calling upon what's the characterization of that ideal you could write that all down you'd see what what your ideal is and then you'd see that it has that it approximates the figure of the hero in mythology and so far as it has any utility to you I I told my friend this and he said that is the start of religion or that is God to people which yeah well that's the intermediary figure
in some ways so there's the transcendent ultimate unity let's say but that's ineffable it's difficult to establish a relationship with there's some intermediary figure that's the role that Christ plays in Christianity right that's God brought down to earth why is Christ an ideal because he welcomes the catastrophe of Fate right and so there's no ideal person who doesn't do that I mean James Bond does that like well seriously like anybody that attracts your admiration is going to have that welcoming attitude towards even the difficulties of existence like that's going to be a stellar part of
their character otherwise you wouldn't admire them you admire people who can maintain themselves across a catastrophe right so the most admirable person is the person who can maintain themselves the best across the worst possible catastrophe right and so that'll be lurking at the back of the ideal so welcoming suffering and welcoming the catastrophe reminds me of man's search for meaning which for me was one of the most important books I've ever read and he also quoted he also quoted uh a man who has a y can bear almost any half right right which is what
you quoted earlier which is really interesting are there any other books or authors where if you were to tell the viewers right now if they started listening to them or reading them that would make one of the biggest impacts that they can Poss well that's a good one Modern Man search for a soul La yung's book that's very good book uh the gulag archipelago is like um the Frankl on steroids yeah but it you know it's a it's a it's a voyage that book frankl's book has the advantage of being pretty accessible it's accessible but
it's profound it's relatively short so that's a pretty good deal Notes from Underground anything dovi wrote uh Beyond Good and Evil although that's that's a rough one that's hard on people that book but Victor frankl's book is singular in some ways in the popular literature because of its combination of depth and accessibility so I read Crime and Punishment because of you and I had never this was the first book I've ever read of that type that was so deep and it's interesting because now it reminds me of the conversation we had earlier where the emotions
that they can bring out in the reader are so gut-wrenching and it's like pain but it's positive and negative at the exact same time that's right and just like classical music great classical music but it was it was a whole different set of emotions I feel like I hadn't experienced before and I found that interesting because I guess overall you know there was a lot of meaning in the book and it brought about you know a different experience of life I hadn't previous experienced but at the same time it was the contending of like the
positive and negative emotions and also I mean the way that dovi can write is so descriptive and like and accurate well it's it's also a great adventure story a great Thriller great crime novel it's amazing book what are your thoughts on eart tol I don't know enough about him really to to comment in depth I mean eart tol is part of that 1960s humanist movement essentially and like fundamentally the humanists were wrong so it so that would go along with say conceptions like self-actualization that would be Abraham masau and uh what did Carl Rogers describe
it as something like the fully functional person the person whose actions are commensurate with their utterances who's transparent to themselves and others who communicate in a manner that's striving to bring themselves and other people upward but it's all within the humanist framework and it's that that the in the final analysis that's um it's weak it can't withstand ideological assault with any degree of resistance I I found eer tol to be I mean his two books were also some of the most important books I've ever read a new Earth and the Power of Now both of
those made tremendous differences a lot of it has to do the fundamental idea of those books is very similar to what a lot of different philosophers say a lot of philosophers when you boil it down like I'm sure you're you know you know that the the fundamentals are pretty much the same it's just the abstractions from it differ I feel like if you've I'm sure you've observed that but I think those two books were some of the most important things for me at least to use as tools to alleviate I learned a lot from the
human when like Rogers and naaso for example when I read them when I was I don't know something approximately how old are you 25 25 so a little how old are you 34 34 I read them when I was a little younger than you and they had I learned a lot from Rogers and from maslo so you know the effect that a book has on you depends to some non-trivial degree on where you happen to be standing when you encounter the book and if the person who's writing the book knows much more than you do
about something at that moment well then the book can be very enlightening and lots of books like I learned a lot from Freud you know I I think Freud was fundamentally wrong in his insistence that it was the hedonic element that drove life itself he he used the sexual impulse as a standin for hedonic orientation I just don't think that's true but I still learned a lot from Reading Freud lots of thinkers can be wrong in some ways and right in others and you know a discriminating reader pulls out the wheat and leaves the chaff
behind I learned a lot from Ernest Becker's book the denial of death which is sort of the ultimate extension of the Freudian view it's brilliant book it's wrong but it's brilliant and there's much in it that's correct fundamentally it's wrong because Becker believed that the heroic orientation in life was also a form of defense against death anxiety it's just that's not it's a good theory it's an interesting Theory sometimes it's true but fundamentally it's real you wrote in your book about growing up and living a very poor life like at least like financially speaking and
that you were an assistant professor supporting a family and your wife Tammy had no green card so she couldn't work and you have a funny story about selling a neighbor a car and then the door fell off on the car after you sold it he had quck a rat rat trap of an old car that's for sure I think I spray painted it because it was so called the paint had had peeled off in the sun in saskat and it was well it was enough of a Rattle Trap to attract the attention of police I
spray painted it in the it works though well work it worked until we had enough Capital to get another car but yeah we pretty much drove that thing right into the ground but now it's like the worst car ever too 1975 Ford Granada everything about that car was bad you wouldn't recommend it if someone's looking for a new car it had a I think it had a 400 cubic inch inja and no power it's like I don't know how Ford managed to have a huge V8 in a twoo that had like no acceleration and no
high speed it had no room in it even though it was a huge car yeah yeah it had no room in the back seat even though it was a huge car it was it was really not a good car so how has acquiring wealth going from that to where you are today affected your family beliefs and the way you see life well for me mostly and I think for my family mostly like you know you have to Define wealth in a way and wealth is a plethora of opportunity and so yeah I have a plethora
of opportunity in every possible Direction so that's great um what is it made what difference has it made to my day-to-day life um why I have more houses it hasn't made much difference because I already pretty much had everything I wanted and I'm not particularly interested in the hedonistic end of what wealth might hypothetically bring to you you know I was pretty old when of this blew up around me and so but mostly it's just a wealth of opportunity that's wealth is a wealth of opportunity have you always been like that in terms of not
pursuing things or did that just occur with age well I pursue things to some degree I mean I have a big art collection but that's a form of exploration for me most of the art that I collected was propaganda from the Soviet Union and I was very interested in that historically and also aesthetically because propaganda art is a weird blend right it's a blend of falsehood and and Truth a very strange blend and so it was very interesting to see these paintings especially the ones that were done by people with great skill and you know
it was part of my investigation into the structure of totalitarianism per se so I bought a lot of paintings and that was very entertaining but I did that before everything blew up around me and so I did that on you know a normal level of income let's say yeah how are you able to keep your ego in check with with you know what's happened over the past decade just absolutely blowing up and becoming you know famous essentially acquiring I read a paper a long time ago called relations between the ego and the unconscious which is
written by Carl Yung and it's a great paper but you won't no one can understand unless they know what it's about it's about that problem so I talk about archetypal matters right and that has produced a focus of attention on my work well that's not me you have to make sure that you don't confuse yourself with the truth let's say like in in a in a personal manner so the fact that I can explain let's say the enish which is a Mesopotamian creation myth doesn't mean that I figured it out I didn't create the story
so you have to you have to distinguish yourself from the effect that the ideas have you you don't want to take credit for that partly because it's extreme first of all it won't work you will definitely crash and burn if you do that 100% that's the story of Icarus you don't want to do that you don't want to fly too close to the Sun and have the whack the Sun the heat melt all the wax in your wings that's a very bad idea and then I have people around me you know I I have good
counselors my wife very level-headed my son and my daughter are awake and they keep an eyee on things and I have friends too that play the same role so we're evaluating and watching all the time trying to be careful and I try to be careful and remember too you know to be grateful for all the opportunities that I have and for the fact that people aren't throwing stones at me which they easily could be I think gratitude is definitely something a formidable opponent for an ego definitely yeah and then obviously also having some people to
keep you grounded some people that you right well that's part of that distribution of Sanity it's like if you have a complex situation you're going to need a number of people around you to to evaluate and and and investigate and make their way forward and so know I'm fortunate too that I worked with my wife and we figured out how to work very closely together um and she has a cardinal role to play and I work with my kids and that works out very well and so we're constantly communicating about how to negotiate what's in
front of us what would you say is your biggest insecurity my biggest insecurity well it's probably related to the question that you asked like how do you keep your feet on the ground you know and and I'm constantly reminding myself how fortunate I am you know my wife almost died that was quite the catastrophe I was extremely ill for 3 years in an unbelievably unbelievable amount of pay that's gone um people you know I'm traveling all around the world and people are pleased to see me I don't take that for granted I'm very careful with
people I don't presume that that's normal or ordinary ever because it's not I remind myself before I go on stage that I'm lucky to be there lucky to be alive luckily lucky that it's not a mad mob because it easily could be so gratitude is an antidote to resentment and arrogance what would you say your biggest weakness is talk too much maybe do you see any reason to fix that do you see well I don't know it's a strength with some potential Temptations you know when when the with in the podcasts I I still probably
don't have my podcasts optimized I I I still talk probably more than than I should in my podcasts but I've always talked more than I should ever since I was like two so it's it's a and there's obviously advantages in it because I'm very verbally fluent and that fact enables has enabled what I've done and so know everything can be carried to excess I try I'm good at listening when I remember to listen and I like to listen I'm very interested in people and so you know that makes it easy for podcasts but it's more
of a conscious effort because I I feel like I've observed so like a couple times in this podcast where you've noticed your string of conversation and then you like kind of think about it for a second and then you're like okay I should come to a resolve or something or would you say that's that that isn't what happened well when I'm speaking I'm paying attention to how the words are landing yeah which is something that people can learn to do it's very useful thing to learn to do you can watch and you you can see
if what you're saying makes you stronger or weaker and you can more or less feel that with every word and you can learn to put your foot down where the ground is solid and that's unbelievably useful that's what I'm doing in well all the time that I'm speaking it's like where's the next yeah bit of Solid Ground now you know I can get carried away with enthusiasm and then I remind myself to look more to look more Are You Afraid Of Death I'm afraid of other things more why because death to me just seems like
there there's nothing that we can confirm in terms of an afterlife so to me that seems terrifying like I'm I I would be more worried about that than other things I don't I don't think about that ever really about because it's it's beyond my capacity of comprehension so I just leave that lie fundamentally but if death is the thing you're most afraid of you're very fortunate so there are things that are far worse than death like far worse so and I would say I've experienced a fair number of those so what would you say is
worse unbearable pain that doesn't go away yeah um moral culpability you know like how much do you want to be responsible for the suffering that your stupidity has engendered so that's that's rough so that's why there's conceptualizations of the Soul let's say and classic religious writings you strive to protect not your life but your soul and that's right and it's hard for modern people to understand that because modern people think that there's no death no fear worse than the fear of death that's just because they lack imagination so if you have enough imagination this is
why the terror management theorists for example are wrong we construct our beliefs to protect us against death anxiety it's like if the thing you're most worried about is your own demise then you you have it delved very far down the rungs of Dante's Inferno because there's things that are much worse than death so that's why sometimes people regard death as a relief we had a discussion before this podcast about responsibility of having a voice that people listen to the responsibility of having a podcast do you ever worry because this is always a worry of ours
if we bring someone on our show and we can't contend with their points if they have something if they're a really good rhetorician yeah and and we just even if we have the facts we can't relay them in such a way that Trump's whatever rhetoric they can spew yeah is that a responsibility that we then owe to our viewer and the people around us to not bring that you responsibility to do the best you can to get your orientation right to do the best you can doesn't hurt people to see you you know put back
on your heels or struggling in the face of a particularly well-designed manipulative Onslaught that happens to everybody I'm concerned about that I have guests now and then very rarely because I pick my guests very carefully but I've had guests where that I regretted having for example because the conversation I couldn't stop the conversation from degenerating into an argument I'm not interested in the game of who's right it's such a dull game I quit playing that game like in 19 I don't 86 it's like who I you're right go have it your way you know so
I don't like conversations that degenerate into arguments and the the sort of situation that you're describing where you have a guest that's particularly good with rhetorical flourishes you know it can degenerate into an argument about who's right primate dominance maneuvering it's dull but you know you there's no reason that you have to do your podcast perfectly you know what I mean you you want to be on the edge think that we bear some sort of responsibility if we have someone on our channel that in essence whether or not we agree we are platforming them or
we are giving them I don't I don't agree well my sense of that my experience of that has been that if you do what you can to explore and investigate and you're trying to maintain an orientation towards truth that the audience will sort that out you have to you have to give you're not in the business of protecting your audience right you're in the business of conducting your investigation and letting them come along for the ride and you have to assume as a default that people when people see most of them when the evidence is
in front of them many people can see the ones that can't well if you're trying to educate people you're trying to deal with that problem too so you follow the golden thread you know and and you assume that if you lay out the truth that the best that could happen happens and you don't want to get the point where you're pulling your punches or confining yourself you can make some mistakes in your exploration you know otherwise if you're not making some mistakes you're probably not pushing hard enough you know there's there's an optimal level of
error too it is a relief to see what happens when you take not going to win the argument going for truth and Clarity to the nth degree because I see you which I assume to be you know someone in pursuit of that to be successful and loved granted not without its downfalls and shortcomings of of any real downfalls or shortcomings you know as far as I'm concerned I mean if you looked at my life in the virtual sense you'd think I was beset by enemies all the time but first of all it isn't obvious that
the number of people who should object to you is zero the optimal number you know like if I'm upsetting totalitarian fascists it's like okay you know that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned and and also the disconnect between that online let's say it in my real life is absolutely staggering like I I knock on wood and I don't take this for granted and I'm also careful about it but all the interactions I have with people in my actual life are ridiculously positive you know it's weird because wherever I go and it's literally wherever
I go I'm surrounded by friends and so that's a stunningly good deal and you know there's noisy radicals who think they object to things I say it's whatever it's a pain I mean I'm being persecuted by my college in Canada guess the Supreme Court decision for that comes down this week and I suspect they'll find against me and have me pay the court costs of the college that's my guess but you know how do I feel about that I don't know maybe it's an opportunity right dragons guard treasure right so if a dragon shows up
you might be thinking treasure around here somewhere if I was smart enough to see it and that that's a good thing to know that's a seriously good thing to know it might be invariably true it might even be true when it's really quite something quite monstrous and awful Fair staring you in the face you know so if they do find against me and the college moves me to re-education which is the next step you I have no idea what'll happen as a consequence of that you know and in some ways I don't care like in
a detached way it's like I'm not that thrilled about being a psychologist at the moment anyways because my colleagues by and large have proved themselves to be contemptibly weak in the face of adversity it's not really a club I'm that thrilled to be part of I don't depend on my clinical license for my income and they're not really going to be able to damage my reputation so they could cost me some money but whatever yeah I can figure out a way to generate more money from what they're doing than they'll cost me so what course
would you say you're most excited for well of the courses I've taught The Sermon on the Mount I would say yeah that's a deadly course so I did a course on H that was fun it's half of beyond evil I'll do the other half at a at a different time but The Sermon on the Mount will be released relatively soon and that was that was great fun because it's a very it's a it's a wonderful bit of literature to take apart so and it is an instruction manual and and it's an extremely useful instruction manual
so it was very fun to go through that you know if you're teaching and you're genuinely teaching you're learning when you teach and that's also the case with the lectures and I think all the people who are lecturing for Peterson Academy are doing that you know and this this I've been a I'm in a fortunate position because I can identify top level lecturers and thinkers everywhere and almost invariably when we reach out to them they say yes so that's a really good deal it's I'm sure you experienced that to some degree with your podcast as
your uccess is mounted the probability that people will say yes increases and there's a lot of disenchantment especially among the great professors with the current state of our educational institutions and so we offered the pretty good deal it's like okay here's the deal come to our studio we'll find an audience of people who actually want to hear what you have to say that's why they're there and so and then you can teach whatever you want at the highest level that you're capable of and will pay you better than you can you'll be paid by by
your University and it'll be better than a book deal and you'll be able to teach more people and will treat you extremely well while you're there well that's a good deal and so people come down there and they're they're very happy because they're treated well and they want to come back and so Larry Arn from Hillsdale taught a course on Churchill which I think is really funny because like are you already going to find a course on Churchill at the typical University I don't think so um we had one of the members of the houses
of Lord teach a course on great leaders in history like that's just not happening at the universities because nobody buys the great leader of History Theory anymore resentful bloody luciferian intellects it'll be interesting to see what professors will do exceptional professors when given free reign to talk about whatever they like to talk about well that is what you want to see that's what they're doing when they're teach bureaucracy and politics that comes with being in a you know University right abely yeah well one of the things that it's done for me is you know so
when I used to teach my personality course I would cover Freud in like an hour and a half well that's that's not helpful I mean I can understand why it's a survey course and all that but I I was going to do a course on PJ Jean p and the developmental psychologist and several other thinkers but the course just ended up being about P because I had eight hours and I could just talk about PHA so it's quite deep and I can just endlessly do that and so that's a great opportunity it's such fun and
if you're lecturing properly like a lecture isn't the Deliverance of knowledge to like the empty shells of the recipients what what you're doing properly if you're lecturing is learning so I'm with with the course on nche for example I did the same thing with the Sermon on the Mount you know I'd read a section and then actively think about it it wasn't like I I mean I was prepared because I've been preparing for for 40 years but I didn't have the notes at hand I wanted the revelations of the meaning to strike me in the
moment that that's part of that utility of that ability to concentrate on the moment if your orientation is right so what's the goal you walk on a stage for a lecture you think okay well I I'm I'm trying to answer an interesting question with The Sermon on the Mount would be well what's the essential message of The Sermon on the Mount that's a hard question it's a it's a central uh what would you say it's a foundational document of the West and so well what what is it what is it me well let's find out
then that's the expiration in the course and it's the same with Beyond Good and Evil you know I was taking pieces of it sentences because you can talk about any given sentence of nature for like a month because it's so unbelievably dense you know he was very ill very ill when he was writing and so he couldn't write for long and so he would think and think and think and think and and then write one sentence and all that thought was compacted into that sentence and then he make like a whole book many books out
of those sentences it's just incredibly dense and entertaining to unpack so I'm excited about the course on N I'm excited about the course on oh and I did I redid my maps of meaning lecture series and I managed to condense it to8 hours which is the best congratulations took about 30 32 hours gosh so I think that was the most effective exposition of those ideas that I've managed um Samuel Andrea's course on music has got rave reviews Jonathan Paso's lecture Jonathan pageo is a remarkable person everything he says is worth listening to it's like every
word every time I listen to him I learn something new and profound and that's very rare you know I'm at the point in my life where if I read a book it's it's somewhat rare for the book to have an idea that I don't know but then I talk to pasio it's like everything he says is something new got to find out what he's reading you got to find out what he's reading well he's reading like Orthodox literature from the from the Middle Ages most so it's Arcane you know which is partly why he and
he also has a tremendous background knowledge of the world of art so he can bring those two things together but that is what he's reading and so um John vereni is lecturing James or um Brian keing on cosmology we have a great lineup and it's such fun it's it's such a fun project we're quite excited at the moment because we put a lot of money into this project multiple millions of dollars of personal money and we have no idea if it was going to be financially successful if it would work like is there a market
for it who the hell knows did we get the price right it's $450 a year which is dirt cheap by University standards we have 10,000 students already in the first week just for pre-enrollment and it's very likely that we'll be accredited so I think we'll have the best of both worlds because we'll buil to offer people I think the best courses that have ever been filmed both in terms of content but also in terms of production quality I'm very happy with my daughter Michaela and her husband Jordan Fuller they built this studio which is a
hard thing to do and they brought in a production team and they hired editors and and it's really good it's it was the trailers were they exceeded my expectations which were high I wanted to be sure that he had the best courses ever but they're like by far the best courses ever if it's anything like the trailers it is they are like the trailers that's the thing is the trailers are actually they're not puffery for something that's basically D the trailers look like the courses they're very tightly edited they're full of illustrations you know we
got lucky because when we filmed the courses we filled all of our professors against a white wall with no edges and and at the same time these AI systems emerged that could do custommade illustrations for if you know how to do use them every course has its own stylesheet like it's integrated so that offerings have a cohesion but they all have their own stylesheet they're beautifully Illustrated we can fill the background behind the professor with commentary and images and words and that technology only emerged like six months ago so that was perfect timing and the
universities themselves are doing everything they can to burn themselves to the ground as rapidly as possible we hardly even have to Market because every day some University does something cataclysmically stupid and expensive you know what are our hopes maybe we can educate a million people maybe we can educate 100 million people who knows right because there's an unlimited Market the price is very low it's universally accessible we're going to be able to translate all the courses into the world's major languages that's already at hand there's some expense in it but if we generate enough Capital
that's irrelevant and we probably will by the looks of things I mean who knows but 10,000 pre- enrollments in the first week is quite promising and people have actually been positive about the price so it's I mean it's very inexpensive people are happy about the price which means that maybe we undershot it slightly but well because maybe if you get it right some people balance the price on that versus getting more Revenue to people it's very hard pricing is very very hard I mean there's a lot of things to take into account right because you
might say free well that's a free is a stupid price free means your platform will be invaded with parasites and bonds right because there's no success rate is going to be very low well it's just it's just not a good price first of all people are skeptical of anything that's free second people don't want something for nothing if they have a moral compass third if the price is reasonable and not too low then no one who isn't committed will participate and we have a social media platform that's part of it and wouldn't it be nice
to have a social media platform that had all the benefits of social media but that only contained people that were actually committed to the ideal which would be the expansion of knowledge well so the price serves as a barrier that way right because you're not going to do it if you're just casual or you only want to cause trouble and so that's a good thing and then we well you want to you want to price it high enough so that you can expand rapidly and continue to develop and you want to price it so that
if you produce a profit you can use the profit to generate new Enterprises there's lots of we want to integrate my son's program essay which helps people write we want to integrate that with platform and we have all sorts of ideas for growth and that requires capital and so pricing decisions are very difficult the way you solve that is you you charge what the market can bear that's the rule and there isn't a better rule than that and why because every single person out there who's deciding whether to purchase something is making a very large
number of calculations with every purchasing decision and there's no way that you can second guess that like you can't replace that with some rationalization so what's this worth well we we sort of went for somewhere between 20 and $200 a month you know that was the initial parameters right and it took a long time to calibrate down to 450 why 450 well it's not nothing it's a it's more expensive than the typical Netflix offering for example so it distinguishes it us from them to some degree but also if it's successful it generates enough Capital so
that we should be able to expand our offerings very rapidly you know and capitalism gets a bad name because people are foolish in their conceptions of money it's like well who needs all that money well you know your typical capitalist your atypical capitalist Elon Musk he's not Scrooge McDuck like he's not swimming around in a money bin full of coins right all he's doing with his money is pursuing moral opportunities and if you generate profit then well you could leave live a life of parasitical Hedonism but you know if you have something that's halfways better
to do why the hell would you do that we have the opportunity in front of us we have the opportunity in front of us to hypothetically bring the best higher education has to offer to like 100 million people well how could you possibly imagine anything more interesting and rewarding than that like that's what the profit is for it's like do I want a Ferrari not really they're too low I'm old you know like I have some nice things I have some nice houses and that's good but you have to put your money somewhere mostly we
put it into more Enterprises and and then it's fun to see if you can make those work right because we bid off very complex problems can we bring higher education to many many people at the highest possible quality at the lowest possible cost that's a very interesting set of problems and at the moment it looks like the answer that is yes we have a number of jurisdictions who are interested in accrediting us and as long as we can negotiate the bureaucratic hurdles then we should have a full-fledged University including accreditation in six months and even
if accreditation doesn't work out because the bureaucratic impediments are too great we'll just negotiate with Corporation to accept the credentialing because the credentialing will be real that's where I think education is going anyway it's online like I learn a lot from just watching YouTube videos and I feel like that that is the most in-depth that you could get sometimes in way more detail and of jobs aren't requiring official like college degrees these well it's partly because the college degrees don't signify what they did yeah and will ours signify that yes oh well also just for
for the sake of full disclosure let's say there's two pathway Pathways you could walk down if you enroll in Peterson Academy you could just take courses like you were listening to YouTube videos let's say or you can take the the exams and and walk through the accreditation process you don't have to do that and we actually don't know what the market comparative market is a lot of people have asked whether they could take the courses without the exams now so we don't know if the exams are like will it be 25% of the people who
actually want to work towards accreditation or 10% or 60% we have no idea it could be quite low because I it could be quite a low number don't know depends on how many people just want to learn for the sake of learning I am curious about this do people retain information better in person no I don't think there's any evidence for that um I don't think we know enough about the situational determinance of retention to decide I suspect there are factors other than inperson versus remote that determine retention probably distraction is my guess sure and
level of Engagement with material something like that so but no I don't think that's a problem well the other thing too is that most University lectures are very low quality so at the typical University especially the bigger universities the research oriented universities you can get along quite fine and be a terrible teacher and so I would say at the typical large State School 5% of the courses are high quality you know and then 40% are okay and then you know there's half that you know it's just death to sit through and there's no excuse for
that that's another thing that we can do at a minimum is raise the bar for the universities you know there were universities that I least they could have done this 20 years ago it's like who are the best lecturers cuz if the other thing about in person if you're lectur to a thousand people it's not impers you know what I mean at some point there's so many people there that it's impersonal it might as well be replaced by video as far as I could tell in fact you can listen to video at twice as fast
that's a big deal or four times as fast you can review it our our exams are set up in a very interesting way so multiple choice exams but each question will be timestamped with the lecture so if you get the question wrong you can just go to the lecture and you can find out so you to use the exams to teach you right and so yeah it's very exciting we've got another 50 courses lined up we're going to produce at least three a month and we we might be able to ramp up past that um
and we have some wild plans in place too for lectures that I can't discuss yet but we have some truly revolutionary ideas and I don't say that lightly and they're very likely to occur assuming that you know the enrollment rate continues and so I'm very happy about it um it's it's it's gone better than I could have hoped as I was quite stunned by the trailers the trailers yeah yeah I mean come on you can't those trailers were something yeah they're deadly and they're all like that like every single one of them it's like they're
Punchy they're cool they're they've got this like with Greg hertz's course it's on on narrative construction because he's a novelist it's got this film Noir look Pulp Fiction look from the 1950s that's cool the music is well timed the editing is really tight the trailers are coherent and the professors are we have great professors and I think that well we're going to set up a system where we find the best professors in the world and give them cart Blan to teach what they want that's such a good deal so have you considered having a financial
literacy course oh definitely because I think that is very definitely well I also want bring on to the platform um economists from the Austrian School mises and Hayak and teach people the basis the basics of free market exchange and oh yeah that's definitely but also modern day literacy is everyday personal finan well well not only personal finances but like an orientation towards financial management and success you know like people think for example that profit is a dirty word it's like well that's insane profit is what enables you to grow like that's just if you have
that attitude towards profit basically what you're doing is punishing yourself morally and ideologically for doing your job well well that's not that's going to demoralize you so that's not good it's no it's like pick a harm Target figure out how to solve it offer the best Services you possibly can and if you can generate money that indicates you're doing it efficiently and you can take the capital and go do something else interesting with it and so and there's no end to that like there's no end to the number of courses we can offer and the
number of professors we can bring onto the platform and obviously as it's successful you know it's going to be even easier for us now to attract high quality lectures because we can say well this is what your course will look like and this is how many students you'll have Who the hell's going to say no to that if they actually want to teach it's such a good deal you know if you write an academic book you're lucky if ,000 people buy it like really that's a major success and maybe half of those read it well
with a good course maybe you'll have an audience of a million it's a thousand times more successful so yeah we're very excited about it and and it looks like it might be working so you know and soon we're going to have monthly payment structures and I'm going to negotiate with corporations to offer scholarships and so you know one of the things we'd like to do is find the 10,000 smartest young people in the world right because there's all these developing countries where there are geniuses lying latent here and there they're not their cognitive resources aren't
being utilized you know there's some Elon Musk in India in some poor family maybe he'll never have the opportunity to move ahead and to offer the world what he could offer we are in a position where we could be able to find people like that I'm going to go to corporations and say like buy a thousand scholarships will screen people will bring bright people in from all over the developing world and educate I love that then we'll be able to hook them up with potential employers I mean we'll we'll set up a platform where we
shouldn't be able to identify the smartest and hardest working people in the world it shouldn't be that hard to hook them up with employers it's like look they're Stellar they work hard they're committed they're all in they're educated they're not ideologically outled it's like you want to hire them would you pay for the privilege of hiring them that that would be incredible to utilize your tests with employment that you could basically just select hey these are the people that we believe are the most qualified based on our rankings just have them there right well that's
in such anicient Society where it's like yep you just pick and choose like that person right that would be incredible definitely yeah well that's been a dream for since 1992 I talked to my partner Daniel about building a online psychometric battery that would enable us to find the smartest people in the world who don't have any opportunities like we don't want to wait let that kind of Genius go to waste that's foolish deadly foolish you know what's one person like Elon musor what's he worth 150 billion maybe there's a thousand people out there like that
yeah because there could be yeah all right cool Jordan thank you so much for coming on the show it really means a lot really appreciate it thank you guys for watching check out Peterson Academy it'll be linked down below thank you till next time thank you guys
