Jordan Peterson: How to Spot Hidden Manipulators (Most People Miss These Signs) @JordanBPeterson

to be open to learning does mean at least to some degree always asking what am I doing wrong what do I have to give up what do I have to let go of what do I have to transform that could be very painful there isn't anything better that you can do with failure no matter how unjust than to learn from one of the most articulate men of our time clinical psychologist turned culture Warrior Dr Jordan Peterson The Man Who prefer short-term mating opportunities are Psychopathic narcissistic acuan and and sadistic so one of the unintended consequences

of the sexual Revolution is that the freed up women have been delivered to the psychopathic men most people who have post-traumatic stress disorder don't have it because they were hurt they have it because they encountered someone who wanted to hurt them people can go through all sorts of horrible things and not be traumatized you wait till you tangle with someone who's malevolent boy you will not be the same person afterward the dark tetrad males are differentially attractive to women mostly younger and naive women how does a woman even begin to detect or notice the difference

the number one Health and Wellness podcast Jett Jett the one the only Jett I feel so many people today I'm sure you hear this a lot as well they feel that the surrounded by toxicity whether it's at home whether it's at work whether it's online they feel like they're in a space where they can't become more they they at least from their perspective well I think some of that's actually a technical problem and I I think it's an extremely serious problem in our society so we've invented these new communication Technologies which we're utilizing now the

long form discussion seem to be pretty radically on the positive side of that I would say but the discourse on places like Twitter Facebook in comment sections and so forth is pretty degenerate and I think the reason for that is that the evolved mechanisms that we use in face-to-face real world discourse have been Stripped Away in the electronic domain and the problem with that is twofold the first problem is the exploitative sadistic Psychopaths have free reign because they're not held responsible for their utterances they're Anonymous they get rewarded for the propagation of their emotionally arousing

material the algorithms will capitalize on it um and that's that's a very toxic combination and then the anonymity as well like we know perfectly well from a vast array of psychological experiences that normal people anonymized are are much more likely to let the negative part of their character have free reign and so I really see this as a technical problem is that societies and psyches are always threatened by the what they call the dark tetrad personality proclivities narcissism melanism psychopathy that's parasitical predatory a parasitical Predator is a psychopath and ISM and you have those impulses

within you and there are people who are primarily characterized by those motivations we have evolved mechanisms for keeping that under control but they're all dispensed within social media and so what seems to be happening is the dark tetrad types are hijacking the political discourse on the right and the left polarizing and dividing and capitalizing on that and it's catastrophic socially and psychologically but they benefit from the ensuing chaos by attracting attention to themselves in a manner that's undeserved and counterproductive I think the danger in that is sufficient that it's civilization threatening I mean we can't

underestimate the power of these electronically mediated communication networks they're insanely powerful and they amplify people to a degree that's almost unimaginable and so the manipulators and the Bad actors have disproportionate influence on our Peterson acad website we have a social media Network and uh we're trying to incorporate all the features of social media networks that have made them attractive but our system differs from let's say Twitter why well there's a payment barrier and you might say well I would rather it was free it's like hm free eh if it's free you're the product and if

it's free there's zero barrier to your exploitation right so the Bad actors you could I think this is probably a rule in a social communication system that's free the Psychopaths come to dominate because they can take it's not free because you're devoting your attention and attention is valuable and the Bad actors can take advantage of your attention and pay zero price well if you set up a system where actors can take advantage of your attention for zero price the psychopaths are going to dominate so one of the things we might hypothesize I don't know if

it's true is that there should be a price barrier to all social media interactions if it's free the Bad actors will dominate and then the other thing we're trying to do is to well encourage and reward positive interactions but we're also going to have the take the responsibility of identifying the small number of people who will repetitively misbehave and just ask them to leave now you know that raises the Spectre of something approximating censorship let's say but I don't think it's reasonable to draw a direct line between censorship and not putting up with immature Psychopaths

like that's not the same thing it's not opinion-based I've been attacked by the psychopathic Types on the left and on the right it's it's politically agnostic and so because the psychopathic manipulator types they'll use whatever system of ideas is at hand to further their own machinations and I think you can distinguish the Psychopaths I mean I use some rules online when I'm dealing with comments if you're anonymous you're questionable if you're anonymous with a demonic name you're definitely questionable and a lot of anonymous accounts have names that are luciferian you know I guess that's part

of the edginess if you use lol lmfao if you use derisive names those are all indications of Bad actors like I think you could characterize the bad actor space quite clearly you do that with diagnostic criteria but we have this situation now where the social media spaces are overwhelmingly tilted in a negative Direction by the predatory Psychopaths do do you believe that things are as divided as they seem or I know they're not that's I was speaking with one of my friends today Greg herwitz who has been doing polling trying to identify statements of conception

that Americans radically agree on and he has a list of about 50 that 85% of Americans agree on they're very foundational things no I don't believe it at all I think that there's a a fringe of the dark tetrad types who are radically stirring the pot and that the algorithms and the anonymity and the Costless nature of the communication is facilit enabling them yeah and it's extremely dangerous how do we not let the average mind how do we not let ourselves become consumed by believing that is reality when that's all we're exposed to that I

don't know I don't know how you do that I mean I think part of that might be realizing that that is happening you know it it'd be use useful for people to familiarize themselves with the symptoms of what's called cluster B Psychopathology borderline personality disorder narcissism psychopathy antisocial personality hisonic personality to know who those people are and so and to start to become aware of that I think that's actually harder for people on the left and the reason for that I believe is that agreeableness tilts people towards the radical left because agreeable people are highly

empathic and they tend to think of anyone who's suffering as a victim the problem with that attitude is that it doesn't arm you very well with an understanding of evil because truly malevolent people camouflage themselves as victims and they take advantage of the empathic and so and that's a big problem because the last thing you want to do if you're truly empathic is enable the the sadists right and there's no shortage of that we know for example there's a developing psychological literature that shows that the active Anonymous troll types are much more likely to be

characterized by dark tetrad traits is is there a way that we can affect that at more of a root level so that those AR think one of the things that social media operators should do is they should separate the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts so for example I would like to see it on Twitter where the verified accounts you see their comments and then there's a hidden space underneath which is anonymous accounts and if you want to click on that and look through what the troll demons have to say you can it's a little

trip to hell you're not required to do it and they're separated from the people who will stake their reputation on their words which is what you do when you genuinely identify yourself you know now the anonymous types like to say well you know anonymity is necessary because in a tyrannical state only the anonymous can tell the truth and my experience with that is that for every one in 10,000 Brave Anonymous whistleblowers there's 99,999 sadistic macu alans and so you might think that you're a brave truth teller in the confines of your Anonymous de demonically named

account but probably you're just a sadistic Troublemaker so I think that would the and then the other issue probably is cost like free first of all free is an illusion because there is nothing that's free at least you're paying with your attention and your time it's not free your data yeah abs and your well that's the next thing you're also paying with your identity and all your behavioral data right and so none of that's free and so that's an illusion and I think one of the things we have observed with Peterson Academy because the social

interactions there are very positive and pretty much Universal so it hopefully we'll establish that as a what would you say a cultural convention right but I'm certain that a fair part of that is just that you can't produce a 100 troll accounts for nothing and do nothing but cause trouble because at minimum it's going to cost you some money so I think we can probably dispense with maybe 80% of the Bad actors just by not making it free so no one knows right this is why I have sympathy let's say for people like Mark Zuckerberg

and for Elon Musk sort of equally even though they're not necessarily on the same side of the political Spectrum it's like Zuckerberg gets hauled to Congress and raked over the coals but it isn't like as if we can assume that he knows how to solve this problem because the psychopathic parasite problem is really really old and those sorts of people are very good at manipulating communication networks and there's no reason to assume that some of them aren't equally good in the new technologies you know and musk is musk's approach is something like a radical Free

Speech approach but like I just sat with one of my friends here actually this morning this Greg herwitz I was telling you about and he's done some forensic investigations first of all indicating how much of the troll activity on social media networks is funded by International actors Iran topping the list let's say which is you know unbelievably horrible and then how much of the path ological content is generated by a very small number of Bad actors with disproportionate influence you know 20 20 Bad actors on Twitter like seriously malevolent people who are working to cause

trouble fulltime they they can punch way above their weight way above their weight not good and there's no there's no saving them well the terrifying thing is and women should know this is like the guys that are just out for a good time they're not much fun and they're a lot worse than you think and the worst of them are so much worse than you think that if you ever got to look inside their mind you would never recover people who haven't found their calling is that they're not noticing it in its micro manifestations there's

going to be certain things that grip you and disturb you and those are the problems that you're destined to have to contend with the cluster B psychopathologies are notoriously resistant to psychotherapeutic inter vention I mean first of all this kind of goes back to the discussion of Pride they're very unlikely to come for counseling because and if they do they're the sort of people and I'm I'm dead serious about this they're likely to announce themselves as the sort of person that the therapist is very lucky to be interacting with right that there's no doubt that

this will be at least as advantageous for the therapist as for the client and that they're the sort of special person who has graced this office with their presence and that's that's not not a word of exaggeration I had some pretty pretty unpleasant child molesting Psychopaths for example in my clinical practice and the one that I remember most particularly was unbelievably good at putting himself forward as a pillar of the a a devoted misunderstood pillar of the community like it was just his constant refrain absolutely unteachable and antisocial personality is notorious resistant to psychotherapeutic intervention

it's the same with histrionic borderline narcissistic it's very it's unbelievably stable personality trait what's your aim and potential Target with an individual like that like where could your practice even takes well what I did try when I had those people and that was often Court mandated and I would never I think Court mandated Psychotherapy is a contradiction in terms because you have to come there voluntarily for it to work my Approach with people like that was to appeal to something like their more extended self-interest which would be well I I don't know if you noticed

there buddy but you know your constant interference with children has decimated your marriage and your family and you've been in prisoned for it and you know people are on to you and so a wise narcissistic psychopath might tone it down a bit but I wouldn't claim for a moment that that had any effect whatsoever you know the degree of cynicism that characterizes someone like that is almost it's almost it's very difficult to develop an appreciation for evil it's not a fun place to go and to do it properly you also have to start to recognize

it in yourself and that is not pleasant and as I said for example the naive empathic types they really do believe that most of the criminals are misunderstood victims and you know what's terrible about that is that some of the criminals are misunderstood victims you know there are people in prison who under duress of various sorts made one extremely stupid mistake and ended up seriously punished for it okay so let's just put those people off the table we can ignore them 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes okay so those are the people

that we're looking at recalcitrant repeat offenders with a proclivity for violence okay can you repair them no the the standard penological theory is that part of their problem is actually delayed maturation for whatever reason you just put them in prison till they're in their late 20s and then they're much less likely to reoffend why did they learn that's one way of thinking about it they're less impulsive and sensation seeking as a consequence of maturity and likely some of it is just delayed maturity but it has very little to do with Rehabilitation and a lot to

do with age you know the the male crime curve spikes at 15 and even among normal males let's say they're much more likely to misbehave as testosterone and maturation kick in and then you see a a return to something approximating normal behavior usually by the time of 24 25 when men take on more of the mature responsibilities of life and the criminal pattern is approximately equivalent to that although the lag to maturity is longer but no it's there's no evidence that I find credible that the cluster B psychopathologies are amenable to psychotherapeutic in intervention I

don't think so yeah and and they're they're also generally a very very very very you need a lot of varies to make that right very difficult population to work with yeah and you do that at your peril yeah I think listening to you the idea of false compassion can be used so against us and an immature level of the development of empathy and compassion is easily taken advantage of well we know this because one of the things we know for example is so the dark tetrad males are differentially attractive to women but mostly younger and

naive women okay so why well the typical dark tetrad type is very confident and not anxious okay so why would that be attractive to women because men who are competent in their domain are confident and not anxious what the predatory Psychopaths do is mimic that and naive women can't tell the difference and so they're they can be more attracted to the dark tetrad types especially when they're young and then there's the additional complication that the even more pathological dark tetrad types are very good at appealing to empathy by making claims of victimization it's a Nast

NY game and the people who are good at it they're better at it than you are at detecting it I knew Robert hair he Robert hair was the first clinical psychologist who really delved into psychopathy and non-clinical psychopathy and he recorded 200 conversations with like brutal criminal Psychopaths and he was quite an agreeable person Robert hair and he said invariably that while he was talking to them they had him convicted and it wasn't until afterwards when he was watching the videos that he could see the tricks and that's because these people are watching you more

than you're watching them and they're seeing which tricks work on you and that's the game of the that's the goal of the game like if I was doing that to you I'd be thinking okay well I'm going to get this guy to smile more right I'm I'm I'm going to see if I can I'm going to see which lies I can get him to swallow cuz be I'd be testing you let's say for your gullibility and so I'd start out with a little lie and watch you and then if you swallowed it I'd get a

good boost of superiority which is partly what I'm after and then I'd try a you know another lie and if you detected that well I'd move in another Direction sort of map you for your gullibility and then I'd find out how you could be exploited and that'd be the whole purpose of the conversation yeah and then well and then add to that the fact that I've practiced that for 30 years and that maybe I'm as smart as you are or possibly smarter right I mean depends on the situation but how does a woman even begin

to detect or notice the difference well part of the way that women have done that historically is by not going out with people they don't know right that aren't part of their social network you know and one of the things about the psychopathic Predators is that they're not very good at maintaining social connections and so wow that's huge yeah oh yeah well the like the dating apps and that sort of thing they're complete open play playing Ground for the psychopathic types there there's something even worse about this actually so the sexual Revolution was predicated on

the idea that we could alter female reproduction patterns so that they could act like men basically because men are more likely to take a short-term mating opportunity and the promise of reliable birth control was that that Avenue of possibility would be open to women okay and you might say well why not because you know sexuality is pleasurable and if you could reduce the cost why not do it all right so that's what we've been experimenting with for 60 years okay well one reason is that hormonal birth control Alters females perceptions so women on the pill

don't like masculine men as much and what that's done to us politically and sociologically no one knows it's a big deal and we don't know but the other thing that's happened is so imagine that there are you could imagine male reproductive strategies as being on a Continuum there are men who are more inclined towards long-term committed monogamous relationships and there are men who are more committed to short-term hedonistic pleasure seeking relationships all right so now imagine you took these men and you analyzed their personalities and you took these men and analyze their personalities well that's

been done The Men Who prefer short-term mating opportunities are Psychopathic narcissistic maavalan and sadistic right so one of the unintended consequences of the sexual Revolution is that the freed up women have been delivered to the psychopathic men right and what's the consequence of that we don't know we don't know we know that young people are less likely to have relationships we know that the birth rate is plummeted we know that people are much less likely to get married married how much that is a consequence of the destabilization of of the reproductive pattern by by hormonal

birth control no one knows it's not like it was a minor Revolution right it was a major technological Revolution but the terrifying thing is and women should know this is like the guys that are just out for a good time they're not much fun and they're a lot worse than you think and the worst of them are so much worse than you think that if you ever got to look inside your their mind you would never recover and I'm not saying that lightly it's not pleasant like the worst of terrible people are so bad I'm

I'm I'm not making this up most people who have post-traumatic stress disorder don't have it because they were hurt they have it because they encountered someone who wanted to hurt them right and so it was that glimpse of that malevolence that fractured them it wasn't people can go through all sorts of horrible things and not be traumatized you know a terrible illness terrible pain an accident you wait till you tangle with someone who's malevolent boy you're you will not be the same person afterward assuming you managed to put yourself back together at all so this

is not and it's it's many of those people too that have free reign online it's not a good thing you brought up identity and I feel that so much of our subscription to ideas of identity are somewhat subconscious and I'm not sure anyone's ever at least not that I know the the scale of people who are thinking about their life in a logical way to say let me think about what my identity is I think we join communities We join groups we leave communities we leave groups we sign up to this we unsubscribe from that

we don't even recognize that we're subconsciously crafting an idea identity by the people we spend time with and the people we listen to it often isn't as yeah it isn't as uh stories by the way that's that's a good observation I mean one of the things I've realized and one of the themes that is developed in this new book is the notion that so when when you're introduced to someone you'll tell them a story about who you are so you describe your identity a story is a description of that implicit identity that you described so

you see the world through a structure of identity that doesn't mean you know what that is as you pointed out when you tell a story about yourself what you're trying to do is to approximate you're trying to encapsulate that implicit identity into something that's communicable and then that something that also becomes explicitly understandable to you this is partly what dreams do so in the dream your implicit identity reveals itself but not entirely coherently and not entirely verbally if you take a dream and you you interpret it if you have the The Good Fortune to be

able to manage that and maybe some help you're moving the information that's part of your implicit identity upward into something that's more explicitly recognized like what you'd hope is that what you're actually pursuing preconsciously or unconsciously is mapped very well by your self- description right because then you're a person that has a certain degree of Integrity who you think you are and who you are the same thing that's an optimal situation that's the pursuit of something like Integrity say in moral development maybe in Psychotherapy in in a relationship that's positive and productive it's all moving

towards that end and it's very useful to understand that what stories do is stories are the manner in which implicit identity makes itself explicit and so the biblical story for example are part of the process the historical process by which the developing morality of individuals as they become more complexly civilized reveals itself to those cultures and to the participants it's a dynamic process and it's much better to understand the stories that way you know the atheist types tend to parody belief in God say is belief in something like the great Genie In The Sky the

sky Daddy I think the benevolent Sky Daddy which is the terminology that people like Richard Dawkins use but that's a very it's a dismissive parody of the phenomena it's not a reasonable approach because the the realm of religious conceptualization is far more sophisticated than that parody would indicate like I mean let's let's take the idea that the Divine reveals itself as the call of Adventure well this is a serious idea to contend with so what it implies is that there's a spirit so to speak a process a dynamic that reveals itself within us that captures

what interests us and compels US forward in consequence and that following that so when God comes to Abraham he makes Abraham an offer like a very explicit offer this is the Covenant of yahwah and it's a very interesting offer it's and I read it from a psychological perspective even from an evolutionary olical perspective God this is how God is defined by the way so God makes Abraham an offer so Abraham comes from Rich parents and there's no reason for him to do anything from the purely material perspective everything that he could want is is already

at hand and it actually takes Abraham 70 years to get moving right because he's an old man by modern standards when The Voice adventure comes to him and it says something very very specific to him it's not vague at all it says you need to leave the Comforts of your land and home and you need to Voyage out into the great unknown so it's like a quest story like like The Hobbit say away you go from Comfort well then the first question you might ask if you had that impulse is well why I have everything

that I would need assuming life is based on that kind of need right at hand so what's the benefit to me of moving beyond the zone of infantile dependence and comfort that's a question everybody faces always especially if they're provided for adequately or even excellently by their parents what should impel you out into the world and why bother well God tells Mo tells Abraham something very specific he says if you abide by the voice of Adventure you'll be a blessing to yourself okay that's a good deal because it's very frequently the case that people's people

don't have an existence that's a blessing to them they suffer a lot they're anxious they're grief stricken they're resentful they're angry they're they're self-c contemptuous um they're vicious there's all sorts of ways that their existence is not a blessing to them so the offer that the voice of God as Adventure makes to Abraham is that if you follow this pathway of Adventure your life will actually you'll start to experience your life as a blessing so that's a good deal just that alone if if that was true that might be good enough to motivate you right

think that's okay that's the pathway forward to self-acceptance let's say or something like a sophisticated self-esteem but that's not the whole offer the second offer is you'll become known among your peers and validly and that's very interesting because you know you can think about people as corrupt power Seekers who were clambering for status or you can be less cynical and you could say well we're wired such that we appreciate due consideration for our genuine efforts okay so if my reputation is established on valid basis that means that I'm appreciated by the people around me but

that there's a valid basis for that that's the offer that's part two so you're a blessing to yourself in a manner that enhances your reputation and you deserve it that's a good deal if you could have that then there's another offer which is you'll get those two things plus you'll establish something of lasting significance because Abraham is the father of Nations like he's the founder of a dynasty so not only will you have those first two things but it'll propagate across time you know and it's often the case when people are looking for something meaningful

that they think well I'd like to do something of lasting value right there seems to be something intrinsically motivating about that and so you think well that's a good deal and then the fourth thing is you'll do it in a way that'll be of benefit to everyone else so there's no nothing selfish or narcissistic about it so you think about what that means it implies that the Instinct of Adventure that compels you beyond your zone of comfort is Allied psychologically and socially so that if you follow it you'll be a blessing to yourself you're you'll

have a reputation that's esteemed and deserved you'll conduct yourself so that you produce things of lasting value and it will be good for everyone else well that's an excellent deal and it it speaks of a Harmony between the Advanced psychological motivation that pulls you forward and your emotional states plus productivity and integration into the broader social Community well I think that's right I I can't see how it can be otherwise because the counter hypothesis would be the force that motivates you forward acts at Cross purposes to say sociological stability and I can't see how we

could be genuinely social animals productively social animals which we are and there be some intrinsic conflict between the force that moves us forward and the force that brings people together right why not assume that they exist together in a kind of Harmony I mean we're adapted to the social world and that's one of the Avenues that I had explored in we who wrestle with God and there's more in the abrahamic story that's quite remarkable too because the other thing that Abraham decides to do this is so cool when you understand it is that so imagine

you know this in your own life a you move towards a new destination and that requires a kind of growth so you might ask well what does that growth consist of and in the abrahamic story it consists of sacrifice so every time Abraham makes a transformation in identity he makes a sacrifice well that is what happens when you make a transformation of identity because as you grow and mature you have to shed those traits people even situations material possessions Geographic local whatever you have to shed all of that if it's interfering with your progress forward

and so what you see in Abraham's life is a series of Adventures Each of which are marked by a sacrifice that move him upward towards a higher and higher and more integrated form of being right he's the Redeemer of cities at one point and there's nothing in that that doesn't seem accurate to me psychologically and so and it's an exciting thing to understand because it's the abrahamic story is the template for individual development that's a good way of thinking Abraham is the first real individual in the in the western Cannon and the story's very it's

very psychologically astute once you understand the basic reference once you understand for example that sacrifice at least in part means dispensing with something you once valued but has now say become an impediment and so well so that's a little bit more description of the domains of thought that I've been wandering in no I I deeply appreciate the way you're analyzing and observing a religious text that can often be seen as a story um a lesson a message and act looking at it as closely linked to human development and part of my training I did something

similar with the badita which is the text of the East and it's similar there's a conversation between the Divine Krishna or God with Arjun who's an Archer who has lost all self-belief and self-esteem because he's having to fight his family he's an Archer yes he's sin means to miss the target oh wow yeah it's a it's an archery term yeah and and and that notion of sin has that Archery Connection in multiple different languages and so it's the same theme that you're describing and the reason for that is an Archer hits the target right so

to hit the target accurately is to pursue the Divine most appropriately so there's a metaphysics of archery so that's definitely not a that's not that's a good example of how there's that's right there's no mistake in that right there's no mistake in that you want to hit the target dead center absolutely and in the beginning of the text his bow is slipping from his hands because his he's feeling sweaty he's feeling nervous he's feeling anxiety and therefore he turns to God for instruction and guidance okay so so okay so there's a there there's a meaning

there too so psychologists have demonstrated convincingly mostly statistically that there's no difference between being self-conscious and being miserable right they're so tightly Associated so for example in the Big Five in one of the classic big five uh personality descriptive processes tests self-consciousness is a facet of neuroticism so it's actually a subelement of suffering okay so what does that mean it means that if you're focused on your narrow self what you want now you're going to become both aimless and anxious and that's technically the case and so you might say well then what's the medication for

that and the medication isn't exact to stop thinking about yourself because well then what do you think about and and exactly how do you continue to maintain your care for yourself the medication to that is to aim higher for example in our conversation and you're obviously good at this because your podcast wouldn't work you can't sit in a conversation like this and do nothing but aim at the enhancement of your own status let's say in the of your audience or at the expense of your guest first of all if you do that you won't have

guests for long and their quality will disintegrate but also people will see through you eventually and see you as self-serving if by contrast you aim the conversation at the expansion let's say of your own understanding and wisdom then you're not it's not about you it's about the dynamic of the conversation and you can bring everybody along for the ride but one of the benefits of that is you won't be self-conscious so your hands won't sweat you won't you won't miss your grip on the bow you won't aim wrong there's almost no failure regardless of how

arbitrary that you can't learn from if you're a man and you're getting nowhere with women it's very easy for you to become extremely hostile to women which is not going to help you out much the depressed person will assume that they're very unhappy and that that's always there but if you get them to track it what you find is they may be comparatively unhappy but there is variation so there'll be times when they're much more miserable than usual but also times when they're less miserable I guess it comes back down to in the same way

that you talked about the Call to Adventure almost feeling like the first step at least from what I observed from what you were sharing maybe there are a lot of people listening today who may feel Jordan Jay I've never had the Call to Adventure like I've missed it I haven't seen it even if it's there I don't know where it is in my life and that's why my life feels meaningless I feel lost I feel stuck because I just don't see it that's well that's and C is the right metaphor there so the ancient Egyptians

one of their gods Horus was the god of the Open Eye and the Mesopotamian God Marduk who was a savior figure whom the emperor should model himself after was also he had eyes all the way around his head so he could see that's not the same as thinking so to have an open eye is to attend and so you might say well well if you've missed your adventure Carl Jung said modern man doesn't see God because he doesn't look low enough which is a very interesting way of conceptualizing it's like one of the things I

try to do in this new technology we're developing with essay but also as a theme in we who wrestle with God is to point out that you can learn to watch so for example when I was dealing with depressed people in my clinical practice and this is a pretty standard behavioral approach is one of the things you do with depressed people is you have them their mood say maybe every hour during the day cuz a depressed person will assume that they're very unhappy and that that's always there but if you get them to track it

what you find is they may be comparatively unhappy but there is variation so there'll be times when they're much more miserable than usual but also times when they're less miserable and they may not even really know when those times are without tracking it so one of the things typically is depressed people will isolate themselves because they think don't want to see anyone but if you have them track their emotions you find that when they're with other people they're almost invariably less depressed okay so imagine now I had you make a map of your emotions across

a week and we Associated the emotions with what you were doing what we'd find is some of the things you were doing were making you much more depressed and some of the things less and so then your goal so the first goal is see that attend to that as if you're ignorant even with regards to to your own nature and then the next thing would be well how about you do a little bit more of the things that are positive and a little bit less of the things that are negative right and then we will'll

remap that and see if you've moved your average mood you know up the up the distribution and so this is what they call The Beginner's mind at least in part in Buddhism you want to look at the situation which might be your own situation is if you don't know yourself it's like okay well what am I interested in people are often loathed to even ask that question because they may find for example that the thing that compels them forward isn't the thing their father or mother wanted them to do that's a very common familial story

you know you might be shocked at who you are it's highly probable just like you're shocked when you start to get to know someone else it's the same is going to apply to you and the rule there is something like watch don't assume right don't put your presuppositions before the realities of your experience all right so he had to watch and so and if you watch you see you can you can Rectify your aim right right and so that's the difference between attention and thought you know luciferian intelligences worship their own presuppositions someone who's active

and attentive watches they're alert meditation can foster that right because it teaches you to be present and awake and so I would say to people who haven't found their calling is that they're not noticing it in its microm manifestations you know it it's not going to necessarily announce itself like Gandalf announced himself to The Hobbit it's going to be subtle things bother you that's part of your adventure like there's going to be certain things that grip you and disturb you and those are the problems that you're destined to have to contend with and you might

be annoyed about that because you think I don't want to have any problems it's like no you actually probably want to have some serious problems that you can contend with that are going to occupy you some responsibilities and then there'll be the things that clearly motivate your movement forward and it's very good to start to understand what those are to to understand that that's how it works first but then also to understand them in more detail you can you can start to come to understand that by understanding your own temperament so for example if you're

high in neur I ISM you're going to be more concerned with Safety and Security if you're agreeable you're going to be relationship focused if you're disagreeable you're going to be competitive if you're conscientious you're going to be interested in order and productivity if you're open you're going to be interested in Aesthetics and ideas well right there you've got a bit of a map of the territory of calling and conscience that you're going to occupy and so you have a nature you know and it's it's it's given to you and it manifests itself in what interests

you and what bothers you and the biblical insistence at least in part and this is common I think to sophisticated religious systems of thought worldwide is that there's an autonomy in what calls you and what calls to your conscience right it's you have a relationship with your conscience you have a relationship with what interests you it's not exactly under your control it's something that can guide you and that you can follow and that's portrayed in these well in the story of Abraham for example as God is the Call to Adventure it's so an extremely interesting

conceptualization you know you you see that implicitly in quest stories like the Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit you know you have this ordinary guy who's protected that would be the Hobbit in in uh in the first book book of tolken series um or even Harry Potter who unbeknown to him is magical and has ordinary parents right so there's this call out of ordinariness and the voice of that call is associated with as definition with the Divine that's not a superstitious conceptualization and it's not something like an abdication of responsibility in favor of superstition

you know it's a terrifying idea it's also predicated to some degree on the idea that the the purpose of life isn't something like secure Comfort that's partly why people make so much trouble so we're not wired for infantile secure comfort and if we don't have a real Adventure we'll find a false one and we'll cause a lot of trouble in that false Adventure a lot alcoholism that's a false Adventure drug abuse that's a false Adventure you know sequential parasitical love affairs that's a false Adventure political activism of a destructive sort the false Adventure seems to

be so alluring and intoxicating in so many ways and naturally in in the case that you're sharing distracting as well how does one avoid the allurements of a false Adventure while they're still pursuing that's a very good that's a very good question well I think conscience is a big part of that you know because it's very frequent that that people will be visited by their conscience when they do something that's hedonistically valuable in the short term but then they think oh you know I shouldn't have done that it's like well why shouldn't have you done

that well I cheated on my girlfriend all right well you you got to cheat there's the benefit what's the downfall well I can't trust myself I'm a liar she can't trust me okay so what's the problem with that you want to be alone you want to be a parasitical psychopath like what's your goal here and so the problem part of the problem with just calling let's say is it can become short term and it can to entice you into false micro Adventures that don't propagate well across time and that disturb other people you know you

said something when we were talking just before the interview started about because I was asking you what you thought you might be doing right with regard to your podcast say that would account for its popularity and you said well you're in it for the long run well a fundamental part of cortical maturation from a biological perspective is that you start to see things in the long run and then you don't do things in the short term that are exciting and and even adventurous that violate what the propagation of the adventure across time you know and

you can you can Envision it this way socially if you and I have an honest conversation okay imagine that you have a guest who uses your podcast in a manipulative way okay they could gain some short-term Advantage putting you down let's say playing a power game uh using the podcast as a a means to enhance their economic standing or their social standing well what's the problem with that well they're not going to get invited back well you do that 20 times you're done right okay so one of the ways of thinking about this if you're

trying to understand what constitutes morality technically is that the moral pathway if I'm interacting with you morally assuming you're treating yourself properly our interactions are going to have to be of the kind that you want to voluntarily repeat that's what you have with a friend MH and there's a pattern to that obviously a pattern of reciprocity a pattern of mutual Aid unless it's a pathological friendship in which case it's likely to collapse anyways but that's a constraint repeatability voluntary repeatability across time is a real constraint and it's something like the future because it's across time

but it's also something like the constrainted on your actions by the necessity for you to be embedded in a voluntary social frame work right and that's a huge Advantage you know like one of the things you could think about for example there's this game that economists play behavioral Economist so this is how the game works you you pick two people and you say to one of them I'm going to give you $100 and you have to split it with this person if they accept the offer then you get the 100 and you pay them but

if they refuse the offer neither of you get anything so that's the game now if you play that across cultures what you find is that regardless of socioeconomic status people offer 50% okay now this violates the tenants of classical econom economics which views people as self- maximizers because if I'm only going to play a game with you once I should take $99 and give you one and you should take one because what do you want zero or do you want one but that isn't what people do they split it 50/50 now then you might ask

why well well you don't play one-off games with people so imagine you're doing this publicly M okay now everyone watches you and they see that you you're a fair player well then they're going to play with you if they get an opportunity you could even say I don't know if this has ever been tested but you could even say well maybe you do a 6040 split and you offer the person that's playing slightly more than you get well you lose in that game but if you get a reputation that's part of that abrahamic Adventure if

you get a reputation for bending over backwards to be reciprocal people are going to line up to play with you and so that's why you try to teach your children to be good sports because you know you say to them it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game and the kids thinks what the hell do you mean of course it matters if I win you know parents are usually not sophisticated enough to pursue that philosophically but the right answer is what good is their winning one game when you

never get invited to play again it's much better to be invited to play a 100 games and that means you're going to have to be the sort of person that other people are lining up to play with and that's That's the basis that's part of the basis of a genuine ethic and I think raised to a raised to the philosophical level you get something like a Transcendent ethic out of that it's bi logically predicated but it's a higher order it's a higher order and more mature ethic and it's real it's super real yeah it that

reminds me of the kind of Insidious traits that we also see present so if you look at the examples of the ones that you just gave of The Hobbit like froto baggin or you look at Harry Potter both of them also experience the Envy of their Call to Adventure so there are others who Envy their Call to Adventure and you find that again while we don't have our Call to Adventure we may Envy someone else's yeah well that's also a very uh Central observation I would say so the first story in the Genesis in the

in the Old Testament the first story about actual human beings that are in history is the story of Cain and Abel because Adam and Eve are well they're made directly by God so the first two humans in history are Cain and Abel it's a story of resentment and envy right and it's exactly it's exactly what you just laid out is that Abel aims up and makes the proper sacrifices right say in the abrahamic sense and because of that everything he does works and Cain makes second rate sacrifices and deceives himself and other people and God

and fails and instead of learning from his failure he becomes bitter he shakes his fist at God and complains about the structure of reality itself and then he becomes murderous and kills his own ideal and then his descendants become genocidal and then you have the flood it's like so that that's another of the consequences let's say of false of non-existent Adventure or false Adventure is the those who Took The Adventurous path become the targets of envy there's destruction that's then aimed at them and that can propagate so widely through a society that it does itself

in that's happened over and over in human history yeah it's really it's it's brutal and it's so terrifying that that's the you know you could argue that that Cain versus Abel narrative is in many ways the fundamental Narrative of what would you say it's the fundamental batt Battle of the most likely attitudes of each individ ual right you can maintain faith and courage you can make the proper sacrifices you can aim up you can be a benefit to yourself and others or you can hold back what's best you can try to manipulate the system you

can degenerate into bitterness and envy and then look the hell out right right and and this is one paragraph that story right it's like 12 lines long it's a stunning Miracle of of uh compression yeah how does how does one transform that if one is experiencing Envy of another's Call to Adventure or Envy of another one's path or success or reward from from God the universe wherever it's coming from how does one transform purify and rid themselves of that Envy what does one do en well there are part of what has historically constituted religious practice

is an answer to that question so the first would be uh you could practice gratitude you know and you could make the case that if you're not screaming in agony because you're on fire right now you have lots of things to be fortunate about you know and people who have pass through extremely harrowing experiences they often learn that it's like oh the sorts of things that I thought were terrible are are almost negligible and there's so many good things happening to me all the time around me that I that are invisible to me maybe because

of my arrogance that I'm just blind to them so the practice of gratitude that's a standard religious exercise I would say across the domains of valid religious systems what else humility so the thing about that one of the things that distinguishes Cain from Abel is that when Cain fails he thinks it's God's fault or Society or other people or it's externalized blame when Abel fails he learns and that's the proper sacrificial attitude because you might so for example if you're a man and you're getting nowhere with women it's it's very easy for you to become

extremely hostile to women which is not going to help you out much generally speaking in the relationship market and you can certainly understand why that might be because if you've had 50 encounters with women you're attracted to and every single one of them resulted in maybe not only rejection but contemptuous rejection you can certainly understand why you might conclude from that that there something seriously wrong with women but you could flip that and you could presume that by definition if you're failing in that regard there's some changes that should be made you know and and

it really does depend on your initial stance with regard to the situation one of the things that comes very that comes through very clearly with regards to the upward aiming Israelites they're not all upward aiming but the upward aiming ones the Old Testament is whenever a cataclysm visits them they assume it's their fault and that's a hell of a thing to take on to yourself right it's if I'm failing it's my fault and you can certainly understand why that's difficult because a certain amount of misery seems to visit people arbitrarily but there's almost no failure

regardless of how arbitrary that you can't learn from and there isn't anything better that you can do with failure no matter how unjust than to learn from it and so as a general attitude how did I go wrong here is a hyper useful existential stance right and it it's also a bul workk against hopelessness because you know even if it was 95% situational and 5% you if you adjusted that 5% maybe that'd be enough so that the next time that situation arises you'd come out on the positive side of it you know and you're also

not a torment to other people then because your general question is how am I insufficient and that also gives you something to do because man trying to rectify your own insufficiency that's a that'll keep you busy for the rest of your life and that's a good thing right that's a meaningful Pursuit and you will experience it that way working on your own insufficiencies yeah well it's an inexhaustible source of possibility right because there's always could be better at something than you are no matter how good you are at something and no matter how many dimensions

you're doing that analysis in simultaneously right it's like a horizon of opportunity in some in some ways that's the flip side of it your insufficiencies the flip side of your insufficiencies are the opportunities that growth in those Dimensions would represent that's a good way of looking at the world what's the insufficiency that lets us down the most is there one that's stands above all Elders Pride that's that's the classical answer from the judeo-christian perspective anyways pride and arrogance you know that would be something like the presumption that that you're that you're right and that and

that you're above it all that you're on top and so and you could see that as a well first of all something very annoying to other people so that's a problem given that you have to put up with them and it's also an impediment to learning right because to be open to learning does mean at least to some degree always asking well what am I doing wrong what do I have to give up what do I have to let go of what do I have to transform that can be very painful but so Pride that's

one that's that's a major one um hen Hedonism that's a problem and that's a kind of immaturity so that's that desire for immediate gratification at the expense of other people at the expense of you in the long run right at so at the expense of the general future and so that's a very difficult thing to overcome I mean a lot of what you do when you're socializing children is you're trying to incourage them to become capable of integrating their various hedonistic desires so they don't conflict with one another so that they can be they can

find their gratification in the long long run in a manner that's commensurate with the needs and wants of other people and it takes 20 years to socialize a child to become a full-fledged adult and it's not like the process ends there it's very complicated process of integration and self-regulation and it is it it is upward and and why why is it better well even if the goal is gratification if one strategy allows 20 repetitions of gratification and the other strategy offers one gratification followed by regret and catastrophic failure it seems pretty obvious even by the

standards of gratification that the first strategy is better than the second absolutely yeah right right right right so the iteration element of it is crucial now is this a long-term playable game better is this the kind of long-term playable sustainable game that I would like to engage in voluntarily and maybe bring others aboard equally voluntarily that's a that's a good ethical question it's also extremely practically valuable you know we were talking before this began about the this about the utility that you found in putting together around you a very functional team well a functional team

is composed of people playing the same game and all doing it full-heartedly and voluntarily yeah well so that's a that's an optimal solution even if even if the goal is say the maximization of your success your success success that comes at the expense of other people that's not that means that your definition of success is Thoroughly flawed that's all it means that's especially true if the world isn't a zero sum game and I don't see any evidence that it is there's no reason that your Victory unless you're envious and spiteful sadistic even there's absolutely no

reason that your victory has to come at the expense of someone else I feel often going back to your point on Pride I feel often our views of how Pride shows its face are quite superficial in that we think of things like ego and pride as bravado and arrogance and showing off and and those are quite immature superficial they're true but they're you get what I'm saying they're incomplete aspects and I think today in the world we see far more subdued nuanced hidden ways of how Pride shows up in all of us and around us

one of which you pointed out earlier which was like I'm right you're wrong and this can show up on a daily basis whether it's a comment section a chat room or an an online Place whatever it may be that there's a feeling that ego rulle RS us not in the I'm the boss and you're lower down but in I'm right and you're wrong and my way is the best way and my political party my God my whatever it may be is better than yours well some of that is the attempt to obtain status and sometimes

that's predicated on the erroneous assumption that if you defeat someone let's say in an argument that you're right now there's a certain amount of Truth in that because you can evaluate ideas in the ideational space but you can be intelligent and unwise and defeat someone wise and less articulate in an argument and still be profoundly wrong what you should be trying to do and this is especially true in the confines let's say of a marital relationship is you should be trying to listen it's like and maybe you're trying to help your partner formulate their argument

more accurately so that you both can get to the root of the problem and oh I love the cheap it's very useful it's like well you might have a point you know I mean this is actually one of the things that can help men in their understanding of women so women on average are more sensitive to negative emotion so you could think of them as having a lower threshold for alarm okay now what that implies is that there'll be times when the alarm Bell goes off when it doesn't have to but there will be other

times when the alarm Bell is going off to signify something that is barely detectable but is is there okay so often what women finds frustrating in speaking to men is the men they'll start the women will start to lay out the problem and the men will offer a solution and the men think well don't you want a solution and the the women who often counter articulate this think well yeah but well neither of us know what the problem is yet and so the initial stages in much couped communication are the woman bringing up a problem

but not knowing what it is and so making all sorts of wandering attempts to specify the problem and hoping even implicitly that she'll have enough space enough scaffolding so that that investigative process can come to focus on the actual problem well once you've got the problem identified it's a lot simpler to put forward a solution and to implement it but that's that's the case for well that's the case of and for yourself if you're upset or any dialogue it's like you want to listen long enough so you actually understand what the problem is and that's

of great benefit to you because now the cost is if you're wrong you're going to have to give something up and that's annoying and difficult and complicated and can be humiliating and then you might say well why bother and the answer to that straightforward it's so you don't make the same stupid mistake again and that comes at a cost this is why there's this dawning insistence arising insistence in our culture that you shouldn't be able to be offensive in your speech which sort of means you shouldn't be allowed to upset anyone emotionally well if you're

speaking about something that's foundational and you're pointing out an error that's going to be upsetting to the person you're talking to because it means they're going to have to do a Fair bit of cognitive retooling they're going to have to undergo a partial death and rebirth well that's can be terribly painful but it's better than actually failing cataclysmically repeatedly in the world you know so we substitute death in argumentation for death in actuality that doesn't mean that death in argumentation is nothing and because there is an emotional burden and an effort that has to be

made people are resistant to that I'd show that I'm right so that you have to change fair enough but but you might be the one with the problem I mean that's a terrible thing to contemplate but I find that don't you think there's a need for both the delivery and the receptor to upgrade themselves because there's a sense that even the deliverer of a message no matter how true it may be if they're able to make it not more digestible in I don't mean in a watered down way I mean in a way that is

not agitating but truly impactful definitely I mean you don't want to wield the truth as a weapon more than necessary you know when people might say well I hurt your feelings but I was only telling you the truth it's like you might have been telling the truth at one level of analysis and lying like mad at another because maybe your motivation was to hurt and you figured out how to use something that was nominally true as your weapon and so at the very narrow level of analysis semantically what you said was true but in the

broader context now you're just the sadist and so there are technical approaches that to some degree that are coded in the law so for example if you're defending yourself you're entitled to use something approximating minimal necessary force and that's a good Maxim for communication you know you you want to deliver a corrective message in the most constrained possible there's there's ways of doing this so for example if you if you have an employee and they've made a mistake you want to bring up the mistake primarily so it's not repeated and so one of the ways

of buffering that is to bring the person in and to say look here's a bunch of things you're doing right and we don't have a global problem but in this specific case here's what you did this was the consequence and this is what you could have done to do it differently and then you close it by reiterating the fact that you know having said that I have confidence for example that you'll Rectify this error and people make mistakes and it the real issue here is whether you take responsibility for it and rectify it and then

the person can learn without being demolished without being demoralized and that's also a very good thing to do to yourself like if you see that you've made a mistake and you're guilty as hell and tearing yourself apart you want to approach it with the presumption of in innocence it's like don't assume you're any more terrible than you have to assume okay then do the analysis and figure out what's the minimal transformation you can make that will suffice this is also a good principle when you're arguing with maybe you're upset with your partner your wife or

your husband it's incumbent on you to figure out what you want like what would satisfy you okay so you have a problem with me I didn't I wasn't properly appreciative for the efforts you made when you were preparing dinner I was dismissive of it it's like okay what is it that you wish I would have said the person might say well if you loved me you'd know that it's like yeah but I'm stupid so I need to know what word should have I used that would have encouraged your efforts in that regard and then the

person can tell you and then you can say the words and you have to understand that there's going to be a certain falseness about that the first time time that it happens but it's something you can get good at over time you may have to teach your partner how to reward you properly and there maybe be pretty bad at it the first 10 times and that might be annoying to you and them and even false but you can practice it and it's worth practicing yes yeah I read I read something similar to what you're saying

in terms of how to give proper feedback and it was in a book called the culture code by Daniel coil and he talks about a three-step method that the first thing you do is you share that we have high standards here because you don't want to live in a world of low standards you don't want to drop your company standards so you remind the person you're speaking to we have high standards here we have high goals and the second thing you do is you say to that person and I believe you can get there yeah

I believe it I see it for you because of course they're still at the company throwing some evidence in their Cor in their direction would be useful in that here's some things you know that I remember that you really did well correct that show me you can get there and then the third is here are that what you were saying here's that area here are the steps that you can take here was the consequence here's a rectification and I love that because we allow people to rise to high standards as opposed to hold them to

them and I think there's a difference between that in how Society is functioning right now where we want to hold people to certain standards but we're not willing to help them rise towards them and it seems like God and this convers with Abraham is like encouraging Abraham to rise not just pointing at a standard that should well this this is one of the things that you see repeated in the biblical stories is that this is why there's insistence in those stories that whatever the Divine is is something that you actually enter into a relationship with

because there is this element of let's say tolerance for failure combined with encouragement right it's not merely that what constitutes the divine is this unattainable infinite standard against which you're always going to fall short that's sort of that's what a tyrant does falsely it's more like the spirit of encouragement that a good father would put into play with his kids you know you want to set a standard that pulls the child upward towards further development but you want to put it within the range of their grasp and so and you know is does that characterize

your interaction with the world well I think it's fair to say that it is because you know we can fail without dying and we can improve and so the notion that ideals can exist in concert with encouragement isn't an unreasonable proposition and it is I mean I think part of the reason that God is represented let's say in the biblical text as a wise father is because that element of the Divine that's discriminating but encouraging is Paramount and that is what you want in a father for sure you want someone who says I think you're

capable of being great I really think that and here's some evidence that you've provided that that might be the case but given that I believe that you're capable of that I'm not going to let you get away with any deviation from that that would be finally counterproductive that's not care right that's the devouring mother who says whatever you do is fine dear it's like that's not love right that's actually the desire on the part of the person who's delivering that message to keep the person being communicated with in a continually infantile and dependent state right

so it's a weird thing because you need that discriminating judgment which can be quite harsh it's like no that wasn't up to standards there buddy but that failure isn't emblematic of your core self right the part of you that I really want to communicate is the with is the part that's aiming up that was sort of the agreement I had with my clients in my clinical practice like I'm on the side of you that's aiming up and that's an interesting basis for a relationship it's like I'm not going to accept everything you do now that

doesn't mean I'm going to arbitrary arbitrarily judge it or dispense with you in the case of failure but our deal has got to be something like we're trying to make things better and so I'm going to be on the side of you that's trying to make things better and help you you discriminate that part within you from the part that might be envious and aiming down and and being destructive what's still gives you hope Jordan in all of this that we're discussing today is there anything that makes you feel up oh well there's lots of

things to be hopeful for I mean we're feeding twice as many people regularly as even the most wild optimists imagined in the late 1960s absolute poverty is being restricted around the world at a rate that's miraculously inconceivable I mean before things destabilized to some degree Over The Last 5 Years the UN projections was were that we could eradicate absolute poverty by 2035 that's I mean that's a huge Improvement I mean these Comm communication Technologies they enable well with Peterson Academy for example we figure we can offer people a high quality University level education for under

$2,000 and everywhere so like that's a major Improvement I think that things are actually somewhat less polarized on the political side than they were two years ago I mean there's tendencies in both directions but I see I was just in usbekistan that was extremely interesting I met a man there who's an industrialist his Enterprises comprise 15% of uzbekistan's GDP he refurbished 400,000 square met of post Soviet Factory uh floor space and they're manufacturing everything you can possibly imagine marble tiles building materials fridges microwaves air conditioners golf carts hospitals hotels highrises usbekistan under the Soviets was

a was barely functional everyone was Raising cotton they drained lake beel to to irrigate the cotton fields that was the only Industrial Development they got themselves out of the out from underneath the boot of the Soviet totalitarians and the society is becoming wealthy and opportunity Rich at an insane level and that's happening all over the world I mean endless numbers of reasons to assume that everybody could Thrive that's what people like musk are trying to aim at you know however imperfectly I see no reason at all that the future couldn't be one of unlimited abundance

there's going to have to be a transformation and ethical orientation to go along with that because there's no difference between the ability to generate genuine wealth and ethical conduct those are the same thing that's the life more abundant that's promised by the Divine in the in the Old Testament stories for example m you have to conduct yourself honorably so that you can trust each other so that you can cooperate to be productive right right so yeah I'm optimistic fundamentally do you believe that that is that going to be something you're teaching at the Peterson Academy

that primary thing that you defitely definitely because to me I I agree with you that that I always wondered how uh Business Schools across the world how at colleges how at universities there was no class on proper character it just amuses me at that well and there's no classes even on the relationship between character and and economic progress I read a great book once called the wealth and poverty of Nations and it was a study of um really it's a study of the role that honesty and trust plays in the generation of wealth Japan's a

really good example of that Japan has like no natural resources and it's an extremely wealthy country why well it's a high trust Society no one steals and envy is looked down upon right ambition is fostered and so is conscientious hard work and maybe even to a fault in Japan but it's a high trust Society in high trust societies everybody can become rich but it means that everybody has to conduct themselves ethically and that is a precondition for anything approximating a I hate to use the word sustainable but an iterable capitalism right because people the leftist

critics in particular like to think of capitalism as a rapacious ENT Enterprise but that's a well first of all compared to what you know dynastic poverty because that's generally the alternative and it's not like that's not rapacious and most Enterprises that Orient themselves too much to the short term fail so it's important to teach people we do this so badly you know I mean even the word capitalism isn't one that should be used because really what we're talking about is free exchange of goods and services I mean who's opposed to that you want to be

able to have a different job you want to have some Choice do you want to actually be able to own the things you purchase do you want to be able to purchase things do you want to have a choice like who says no to that no one and but no one but young people in particular aren't taught that well that's the capitalism that you're criticizing the fact you get to own something and move your labor voluntarily from one place to another you're going to oppose that are you in favor what of top- down authoritarian planning

where everyone starves miserably so and you know a lot of that's been removed from the world since the since the wall fell and people are much richer than they've ever been and and and and not in an entirely pathological manner so yeah there's lots of reason to be optimistic I actually think we're on the cusp of something like an ethical Revolution ution because and I tried to outline in this in this new book is that I think that we're at the point where our scientific discoveries in fields like cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology can be

seen to dovetail with our traditional understanding of high order ethics that's partly the case I tried to make in this book and it's certainly the ethos that saturates the course offerings in Peterson Academy you know we're we're trying to encourage people to take maximal responsibility to have an adventurous life to pursue an ethical Pathway to tell the truth and to educate themselves broadly and aesthetically and so far it seems to be working you know people are pleased with the I'm so excited about this I mean I got to hand it to my daughter and her

husband um they've done a bang up job of of putting this together the courses are really beautiful they're very they're they're comp they're very well produced and uh the technology works like a charm and the social media Network so far is behaving exactly how we hoped it would behave when we were feeling particularly optimistic and so and we had now have the capital to put all the things that we wanted to build into the system into place so translation into multiple languages that'll be on the table very soon a radical expansion of the curriculum we're

going to predicate it on I think something appr approximating the Chicago great books tradition so we're imagining something like the selection of great books that would characterize a high quality education in the humanities one course something like a minimum of one course per great book that's beautiful I can't see any reason we can't do that we have an excellent stable of professors all of them want to continue working with us um I think that's true without exception so far and I'm able to make contact with great lecturers all the time and to keep discovering them

that's beautiful congratulations fantastic I've been tweeting out funny ads about being the most Progressive University in the world because well the progressives hope for Universal education at something approximating zero cost well that's what we've got it's open to anyone and it's no one comes out with debt so that seems pretty Progressive to me absolutely so and I'm very excited about the translation possibilities cuz AI systems are getting pretty good at that so we'll have our lectures be able to lecture in other languages using their own voice and modify the vide so that it appears that

they're speaking that language so God only knows how many languages we'll be able to translate our material into you know as the AI systems develop and it gets cheaper and cheaper so yeah exciting it's exciting and the essay app you know that teaches people to write it works helps people figure out what they want to write about it runs them through the process of generating their ideas and then it teaches them how to edit and so and there's no difference between doing that and teaching people to think absolutely so hopefully we can provide people with

content and we can teach them the mechanics of thinking and writing it's fantastic yeah that's fun it's fun and I think we'll be able to do it I I mean you're already doing it so we've got 30,000 students and the system seems to be working so we've got a proof of we've got good proof of concept now absolutely yeah well congratulations Jordan it's bril honestly brilliant and uh can't wait to enroll myself I'll be doing that straight after this good and uh Jordan we end every on purpose episode with the final five and these questions

have to be answered in a one word to one sentence maximum so how long a sentence uh you you define it you're teaching everyone how to write and think of I'll go with your definition all right question one what is the best life advice you've ever heard or received tell the truth or at least don't lie number two what is the worst advice you ever heard or received it's all about you number three how would you define your current purpose I think I'm doing in my way the same thing the same thing that Elon Musk

said that he was doing when I interviewed him which is to continue exploring the limits of possibility that's an adventure right to explore the limits of possibility a lot of times possibility comes to you as tragedy that's a good thing to understand you know they say every treasure has a dragon right but you can reverse that and that's worth knowing too if something terrible comes your way it's like there's an opportunity there like it might be not the kind of opportunity you would have wished for but that doesn't mean it isn't there yeah so that's

a good thing to know have have you spent a significant of time with Elon musque or is it has it been more in I've met him four time so we've probably spent a total of about 7 hours together yeah and I would say I've walked away from each encounter more impressed with him as a character and in terms of his character I mean you have to be mouth open in amazement with regards to his technological and managerial entrepreneurial prowess I mean it's just it's ridiculous but I believe that he doing his best to aimim up

thank God and I think that's what the Mars Voyage is symbolize right he's it's a mythological adventure to aim up in that manner and he's it's part of his story right it's the mythological dimension of his story and it's not practical right except in so far as a great story is practical so I remember the Apollo voyages they were very motivating to people you know as an indication of what Humanity was capable of doing and certainly musk is playing that out on the technological side so beautiful okay question number four uh how do we scale

trust by attempting to practice honesty in your own life yeah and by rewarding it among the people that you interact with it's very useful to understand that you have the opportunity to point out to other people who you interact with regularly what they're doing that is positive and good and that that there's nothing in that that isn't productive yeah well said absolutely uh Fifth and final question we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be

don't follow stupid rules what what constitutes a stupid rule well that's the that's the hard part of the problem isn't it I think well I I had that conversation with my kids because it is something I told them when they went to school I said look there's going to be reasonable rules at your school and there are going to be unreasonable rules and I don't require you to follow the unreasonable rules but you have to be willing to bear the consequences right so you're morally obliged to object to to foolish restrictions but you have to

be willing to pay the price for that and there will be a price and it has to be you that pays it right and that's hard yes yes it's also the difference between activism let's say and Civil Disobedience because if it's Civil Disobedience you pay the price if it's activism someone else does powerful well I hope everyone subscribe to the podcast if you don't already check out Peterson Academy if you haven't already new book out in November we who wrestle with God we got glimpses into it today uh Dr Jordan B Peterson thank you so

much for your time and energy I hope we get to do this again uh extremely grateful for your time and energy and uh I learned a lot today and actually I feel I could have talked to you for another three hours about eastern and western religion and ideologies and the amount of stories that I had coming up in my mind to to share back and forth but we can just save that for another time that would be good that it' be it'd be it'd be we did a little bit of that we got we got

into the overlap between the The Narrative domains that would be real loveful I don't I don't know nearly as much about Hindu religious thought as I should I know a little bit about Buddhism and and a a moderate amount about dosm and that's been extremely useful to me but um I'm less conversant with with the Hindu tradition of thought and it would be very interesting to I mean I've never delved deeply almost without exception into a religious tradition without finding stories that were like of incalculable value absolutely yeah well I happy to serve wherever possible

yeah yeah well so yeah that would be a good thing to do thank you thank you so much good to talk to you fantastic such a pleasure honestly if you love this episode you'll love my interview with Dr gabo mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable so a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick does it it grows where it's soft and green and vulnerable