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 it. One of the most articulate men of our time, clinical psychologist turned culture warrior Dr. Jordan Peterson, states, "The men who prefer short-term mating opportunities are psychopathic, narcissistic, 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, the one, the only, Jett—I feel so many people today, and I'm sure you hear this a lot as well, feel that they're surrounded by toxicity, whether it's at home, at work, or online. They feel like they're in a space where they can't become more, at least from their perspective. Well, I think some of that's actually a technical problem, and I think it's an extremely serious problem in our society. We've invented these new communication technologies, which we're utilizing now. The long-form discussions 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. I think the reason for that is that the evolved mechanisms we use in face-to-face, real-world discourse have been stripped away in the electronic domain. The problem with that is twofold. The first problem is that 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 capitalize on it, and that's a very toxic combination. Then there's

the anonymity as well. We know perfectly well from a vast array of psychological experiences that normal people, when anonymized, are much more likely to let the negative part of their character have free reign. So, I really see this as a technical problem: societies and psyches are always threatened by what they call the dark tetrad personality proclivities: narcissism, malevolence, psychopathy—parasitical, predatory. A parasitic predator is a psychopath, and you have those impulses within you. 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. What seems to be happening is that the dark tetrad types are hijacking the political discourse on the right and the left, polarizing, dividing, and capitalizing on that. 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. Thus, the manipulators and the bad actors have disproportionate

influence on our society. On Peterson Acad's website, we have a social media network, and we're trying to incorporate all the features of social media networks that have made them attractive. However, our system differs from, say, Twitter. Why? Well, there's a payment barrier. You might say, "Well, I would rather it was free." It's like, "Hm, free? If it's free, you're the product." If it's free, there's zero barrier to your exploitation. The bad actors can take advantage of your attention for 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. The other thing we're trying to do is encourage and reward positive interactions, but we're also going to have to 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 specter 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. 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 politically agnostic. The psychopathic manipulator types will use whatever system of ideas is at hand to further their own machinations. 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. A lot of anonymous accounts have names that are

luciferian. You know, I guess that's part... Of the edginess: if you use "lol," "lmao," or if you use derisive names, those are all indications of bad actors. I think you could characterize the bad actor space quite clearly; you do that with diagnostic criteria. However, we have this situation now where the social media spaces are overwhelmingly tilted in a negative direction by predatory psychopaths. Do you believe that things are as divided as they seem? I know they're not. I was speaking with one of my friends today, Greg Herwitz, who has been doing polling trying to identify

statements of consensus that Americans broadly 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 fringe of the dark tetrad types who are radically stirring the pot, and that the algorithms, the anonymity, and the costless nature of the communication are facilitating them. Yes, and it's extremely dangerous. How do we not let the average mind—how do we not let ourselves become consumed by believing that this is reality when that's all we're exposed to? 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 would be useful for people to familiarize themselves with the symptoms of what's called cluster B psychopathology: borderline personality disorder, narcissism, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder—to know who those people are 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. 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. That's a big problem because the last thing you want to do if you're truly empathic is enable 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 there a way that

we can affect that at more of a root level? One of the things that social media operators should do is separate the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts. For example, I would like to see on Twitter that the verified accounts have their comments visible, and then there's a hidden space underneath for anonymous accounts. 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 that you're not required to take, and they're separated from the people who will stake their reputation on their

words—what you do when you genuinely identify yourself. Now, the anonymous types like to say that anonymity is necessary because in a tyrannical state only the anonymous can tell the truth. My experience with that is that for every one in 10,000 brave anonymous whistleblowers, there are 99,999 sadistic malevolents. So you might think that you're a brave truth-teller in the confines of your anonymously demonically named account, but probably you're just a sadistic troublemaker. I think that’s the main issue. The other issue is probably cost. 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, and your—well, that’s the next thing—you're also paying with your identity and all your behavioral data. So none of that’s free, and that’s an illusion. I think one of the things we have observed with Peterson Academy is that the social interactions there are very positive and pretty much universal. Hopefully, we’ll establish that as a cultural convention, right? I’m certain that a fair part of that is just that you can’t produce 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. This is why I have sympathy, let’s say, for people like Mark Zuckerberg and 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 as if we can assume that he knows how to solve this problem. The psychopathic parasite problem is really, really old, and those sorts

of people are very good at manipulating communication networks. There’s no reason to assume that some of them aren’t equally good in the new technologies. Musk’s approach is something like a radical free speech approach, but I just sat with one of my friends here, actually this morning—Greg Herwitz, as 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 unbelievably horrible. Then, how much of the pathological content is generated by a

very small number of bad actors with disproportionate influence—20 bad actors on Twitter, like seriously malevolent people who are working to cause chaos. "Trouble full-time. They can punch way above their weight—not good—and there's no saving them. Well, the terrifying thing is, and women should know this, is that the guys who are just out for a good time are not much fun, and they're a lot worse than you think. 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 are not noticing it in its micro manifestations. There are 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 intervention. I mean, first of all, this kind of goes back to the discussion of pride. They're very unlikely to come for counseling because, if they do, they're the sort of people—and I'm dead serious about this—who are likely to announce themselves as the sort of person that the therapist is very lucky to be

interacting with. 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. That’s not a word of exaggeration. I had some 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 devoted, misunderstood pillar of the community; it was just his constant refrain. Absolutely unteachable, and antisocial personality is notoriously resistant to psychotherapeutic intervention. It's the same with histrionic,

borderline, and narcissistic disorders. It’s an unbelievably stable personality trait. What's your aim and potential target with an individual like that? Where could your practice even take you? Well, what I did try when I had those people—and that was often court-mandated—is that I would never claim that court-mandated psychotherapy is anything but 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 don't know if you noticed there, buddy, but your constant interference

with children has decimated your marriage and your family, and you've been imprisoned for it, and people are on to you.' 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. 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. As I said, for example, the naive empathic

types really do believe that most of the criminals are misunderstood victims. What's terrible about that is that some of the criminals are, indeed, misunderstood victims. 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. One percent of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes. Those are the people that we're looking at: recalcitrant repeat offenders with a proclivity for violence. Can you repair them? No. The standard penological theory is that

part of their problem is actually delayed maturation. For whatever reason, you just put them in prison until they're in their late twenties, 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. 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. Then you see a return to something approximating normal behavior usually by the time of 24 or 25, when men take on more of the mature responsibilities of life. The criminal pattern is approximately equivalent to that, although the lag to maturity is longer. But no, there's no evidence that I find credible that the Cluster B psychopathologies are amenable to psychotherapeutic intervention. I don’t think so. Yeah, and they're also generally a very, very, very, very difficult population to work with. You do that at your peril. Listening to you, the idea of false compassion can

be used against us, and an immature level of the development of empathy and compassion is easily taken advantage of. We know this because one of the things we know, for example, is that the dark tetrad males are differentially attractive to women, but mostly younger and naive women. Why? Well, the typical dark tetrad type is very confident and not anxious. 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. They can

be more attracted to the dark tetrad types, especially when they're young. 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." NY game, and the people who are good at it—they're better at it than you are at detecting it. I knew Robert Hare; he—Robert Hare—was the first clinical psychologist who really delved into psychopathy and non-clinical psychopathy. He recorded 200 conversations with brutal criminal psychopaths, and he was quite an agreeable person. Robert Hare said invariably that while he was talking to them,

they had him convinced, and it wasn't until afterwards, when he was watching the videos, that he could see the tricks. That's because these people are watching you more than you're watching them, and they're seeing which tricks work on you. That's the goal of the game. If I were doing that to you, I'd be thinking, "Okay, well, I'm going to get this guy to smile more. I'm going to see which lies I can get him to swallow, because I'd be testing you, let's say, for your gullibility." 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. Then I'd try 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 would be the whole purpose of the conversation. Yeah, and then, well, 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, it depends on the situation. But how does a

woman even begin to detect or notice the difference? 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. 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 dating apps and that sort of thing are a complete open playing ground for the psychopathic types. There's something even worse about this, actually. 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. 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, imagine that you could visualize male reproductive strategies as being on a continuum. There are men who are more inclined toward 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 analyzed their personalities. Well, that's been done. The men who prefer short-term mating opportunities are psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, 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 know that young people are less likely to have relationships; we know that the birth rate has plummeted; we know that people are much less likely to get married. How much of that is a consequence of the destabilization of the reproductive patterns 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 that the guys who are just out for a good time are not much fun, and they're a lot worse than you think. The worst of them are so much worse than you think that if you ever got to look inside their minds, you would never recover. And I'm not saying that lightly; it's not pleasant. The worst of terrible people are so bad. 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 that 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 will not be the same person afterward, assuming you managed to put yourself back together at all. So this is not—and 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

is somewhat subconscious. I'm not sure anyone's ever—at least not that I know—thought about the scale of people who are thinking about their lives 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 for this, we unsubscribe from that. We don't even recognize that we're subconsciously crafting an 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 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, 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. 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 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. In the dream, your implicit identity reveals itself, but not entirely coherently and not entirely verbally. If you take a dream and you interpret it, if you have 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. 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 being the same thing. That's an optimal situation; that's the pursuit of something like integrity, say, in moral development, maybe in psychotherapy, in a relationship that's positive and productive. It's all moving towards that end. It's very useful to understand that what stories do is—stories are the manner in which implicit identity makes itself explicit. The biblical story, for example, is 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, as 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 dismissive parody of the phenomena. It's not a reasonable approach because the realm of religious conceptualization is far more sophisticated than that parody would indicate. I mean, let's take the idea that the

divine reveals itself as the call of adventure. Well, this is a serious idea to contend with. 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. Following that—so when God comes to Abraham, he makes Abraham an offer, like a very explicit offer. This is the covenant of Yahweh, and it's a very interesting offer. I read it from a psychological perspective, even from an evolutionary perspective. God—this is how God is defined, by the way—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 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 of 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 The Hobbit—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 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 existence isn't a blessing to them. They suffer a lot; they're anxious, they're grief-stricken, they're resentful, they're angry, they're self-contemptuous, um, they're vicious. There are 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 that was true, that might be good enough to motivate you, right? You 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 are 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 a 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; 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, 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." 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 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'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; 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 can't see how it can be otherwise because the counterhypothesis would be that 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." 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: you move towards a new destination, and that requires a kind of growth. So you might ask, "Well, what does that growth consist of?" 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 locales; 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 moves 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 the Abrahamic story is the template for individual development. That's a good way of thinking. Abraham is the first real individual in the Western canon, and the story'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, that's a little bit more description of the domains of thought that I've been wandering in. No, I deeply appreciate the way you're analyzing and observing a religious text that can often be seen as a story, a lesson, a message, and looking at it as closely linked to human development. And part of my training, I did something similar with the "Bhagavad Gita," 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, his sin means to miss the target. Oh, wow! Yeah, it's an archery term. 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 mistake in that; 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 he's feeling sweaty, he's feeling nervous, he's feeling anxiety, and therefore, he turns to God for instruction and guidance. Okay, so 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 personality descriptive process 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 exactly to stop thinking about yourself, because, well, then what do you think about? 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 eyes 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 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 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. 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, also 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, 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. It’s like one of the things I try to do in this new technology we’re developing with SA, 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, one of the things you do with depressed people is have them track their mood, say maybe every hour during the day. Because 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, "I 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, the first goal, is to see

that—attend to that as if you're ignorant, even with regard to your own nature. Then the next thing would be, "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 remap that and see if you've moved your average mood, you know, 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—as 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; 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 you had to watch, and if you watch, you see you can rectify your aim. Right? And so that's the difference between attention and thought. You know, Luciferian intelligences worship their own presuppositions—someone who's actively... And attentive watches; they're alert. Meditation can foster that right because it teaches you to be present and awake. So, I would say to people who haven't found their calling that they're not noticing it in its micromanifestations. You know, 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. There are 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. 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. Then there will be the things that clearly motivate your movement forward, and it's very good to start to understand what those are. First, to understand that that's how

it works, but then also to understand them in more detail. You can start to come to understand that by understanding your own temperament. So, for example, if you're high in neuroticism, 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. You have a nature, you know, and it's given to you; it manifests itself in what interests you and what bothers you. 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. 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 an extremely interesting conceptualization. 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 the first book of Tolkien's series—or even Harry Potter, who, unbeknownst to him, is magical and has ordinary parents. So, there's this call out of ordinariness, and the voice of that call is associated with, as definition, 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 purpose of life isn't something like secure comfort. That's partly why people make so much trouble: 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 of alcoholism—that's a false adventure. Drug abuse—that's a false adventure. Sequential parasitical love affairs—that's a false adventure. Political activism of a destructive sort—that's a false adventure. The false adventure seems to

be so alluring and intoxicating in so many ways, and naturally, 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 question. Well, I think conscience is a big part of that, you know, because it's very frequent 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 you have done that?" "Well, I cheated on my

girlfriend." Alright, well, you had 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? Part of the problem with just calling, let's say, is that it can become short term, and it can 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 even adventurous that violate what the propagation of the adventure across time is. You know, and 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. They could gain some short-term advantage by putting you down, let's say, playing a power game, using the podcast as 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, and you're done. Right? 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 constraints on your actions by the necessity for you to be embedded in a voluntary social framework, 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 economists. So this is how the game works: 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 tenets of classical 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 $1, and you should take $1 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, 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'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 60/40 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 kid 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 hundred 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 the

basis—that's part of the basis of a genuine ethic. And I think, raised to a philosophical level, you get something like a transcendent ethic out of that. It's biologically 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, 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 Frodo Baggins, 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 central observation, I would say. So the first story in Genesis, 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 what you just laid out: Abel aims up and makes the proper sacrifices, right, say in the Abrahamic sense, and because of that, everything he does works. 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's another of the consequences, let's say, of false

or non-existent adventure or false adventure, is that 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 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 battle of the most likely attitudes of each individual. 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. Can degenerate into bitterness and envy, and then look the hell out—right? Right? And this is one paragraph of that story, right? It's like twelve lines long. It's a stunning miracle of, uh, compression. Yeah. How does one transform that? If one is experiencing envy of another's call to adventure, or envy of another one's path, success, or reward from God, the universe, wherever it's coming from, how does

one transform, purify, and rid themselves of that envy? What does one do? Well, part of what has historically constituted religious practice is an answer to that question. So the first would be—you could practice gratitude. You know, 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, people who have passed through extremely harrowing experiences often learn that it's like, "Oh, the sorts of things that I thought were terrible are almost negligible," and there are so many good things

happening to me all the time around me that are invisible to me—maybe because of my arrogance—that I'm just blind to them. So the practice of gratitude is 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's, or other people’s, or it's externalized blame. When Abel fails, he learns, and that's the proper sacrificial attitude. Because you might, for example, 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, generally speaking, in the relationship market. You can certainly understand why that might be, because if you've had fifty 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's 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 are

some changes that should be made. You know, and it really does depend on your initial stance with regard to the situation. One of the things that comes through very clearly with regard to the upward-aiming Israelites—they're not all upward-aiming, but the upward-aiming ones in 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 yourself, right? If I'm failing, it's my fault. 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. So as a general attitude, "How did I go wrong here?" is a hyper-useful existential stance, right? And it's also a bulwark 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’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 are always things you could be better at, 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 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 stands above all others? Pride. That's the classical answer from the Judeo-Christian perspective, anyways: pride and arrogance. You know, that would be something like the presumption that you're right and that you're above it all; that you're on top. And you could see that as, 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 pride—that's a major one. 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 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 encourage them to become capable of integrating their various hedonistic desires so they don't conflict with one another, so that they can... find their gratification in the long, long run in a manner that's commensurate with the needs and wants of other people. 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 a very complicated process of integration and self-regulation, and it is upward. And 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. 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 good ethical question. It's also extremely practically valuable. You know, we were talking before this began 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, that's an optimal solution. Even if the goal is, say, the maximization of your success, your success that comes at the expense of other people—that doesn't mean 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, should come at the expense of someone else. I feel, often, going back to your point on pride, that 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. Those are quite immature and superficial; they're true, but they're incomplete aspects. I think

today, in the world, we see far more subdued, nuanced, and hidden ways of how pride shows up in all of us and around us. One of which you pointed out earlier was like, "I'm right, you're wrong." This can show up on a daily basis, whether it's in a comment section, a chat room, or an online place, whatever it may be. There's a feeling that ego rules us—not in the "I'm the boss and you're lower down" sense, but in the "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 listen. It's like 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. 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; you could think of them as having a lower threshold for alarm. Okay? Now, what that implies is that there will 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 there. Okay, so often what women find frustrating in speaking to men is the men will start—the women will start to lay out the problem, and the men will offer a solution. The men think, "Well, don't you want a solution?" And the women, who often counter-articulate this, think, "Well, yeah, but neither of us knows what the problem is yet." So, the initial stages in much-coupled 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 the case for yourself. If you're upset in 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. Then you might say, "Well, why bother?" and the answer to that is 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 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 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, 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 want to deliver a corrective message in the most constrained possible way. There are ways of doing this. So, for example, if you have an employee and they've made a mistake, you want to bring up the mistake primarily so it's not repeated. 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. People make mistakes, and the real issue here is whether you take responsibility for it and rectify it. 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 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 of 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 I have used that would have encouraged your efforts in that regard." Then the person can tell you, and then you can say the words. You have to understand that there's going to be a certain

falseness about that the first time 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 they may be pretty bad at it the first ten times, and that might be annoying to you and them and even feel false, but you can practice it, and it's worth practicing. Yes, 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 Coyle. He talks about a three-step method:

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." 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 court in their direction would be useful, like, "Here

are some things I remember that you really did well," correcting that to show me you can get there. Then the third is, 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 and 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. It seems like God, and this conversation with

Abraham, is encouraging Abraham to rise, not just pointing at a standard. This is one of the things that you see repeated in the biblical stories. 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. 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 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, you know, does that characterize your interaction with the world? Well, I think it's fair to say that it is, because we can fail without dying, and we can improve. So the notion that ideals can exist in concert with encouragement isn't an unreasonable proposition. 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 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 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 discriminate that part within you from the part that might be envious and

aiming down and being destructive. What still gives you hope, Jordan, in all of this that we're discussing today? Is there anything that makes you feel hopeful? 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 five years, the UN projection was that we could eradicate absolute poverty by 2035. That's, I mean, that's

a huge improvement. I mean, these 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 Uzbekistan; 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 meters of post-Soviet factory floor space, and they're

manufacturing everything you can possibly imagine: marble tiles, building materials, fridges, microwaves, air conditioners, golf carts, hospitals, hotels, high-rises. Uzbekistan under the Soviets was barely functional; everyone was raising cotton. They drained Lake Beel to irrigate the cotton fields. That was the only industrial development. They got themselves out from underneath the boot of the Soviet totalitarians, and society is becoming wealthy and opportunity-rich at an insane level. And that's happening all over the world. I mean, there are 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 Old Testament stories, for example. 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 going to be something you're teaching at the Peterson Academy? that primary thing that you definitely, definitely need because, to me, I agree with you that I have 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 that, well, there are no classes even on the relationship between character 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 play 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 enterprise. But that's, 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. 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! 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 of what, top-down authoritarian planning where everyone starves miserably? So, you

know, a lot of that's been removed from the world since the wall fell, and people are much richer than they've ever been. 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 because, and I try to outline this in this new book, 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 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. 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—they've done a bang-up job of putting this together. The courses are really beautiful; they're very, they're very well-produced, and

the technology works like a charm. The social media network so far is behaving exactly how we hoped it would behave when we were feeling particularly optimistic. And now we 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 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 no one comes out with debt. So that seems pretty progressive to me! Absolutely. So, and I'm very excited about the translation possibilities because AI systems are getting pretty good at that. So we'll have our lecturers be able to lecture in other languages using their own voice and modify the video 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! It 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 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 mean, you're already doing it. So we've got 30,000 students,

and the system seems to be working; we've got good proof of concept now. Absolutely! Yeah, well, congratulations, Jordan. It's brilliantly brilliant, and I can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this. Good. And, Jordan, we end every On Purpose episode with the final five, and these questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. So how long a sentence? You define it; you're teaching everyone how to write and think. 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've 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 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. It might not be 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 you spent a significant amount of time with Elon Musk, or has it been more in...? I've met him four times, so we've probably spent a total of about seven hours together. Yeah, and I would say I've walked away from each encounter more impressed with him. As a

character—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 ridiculous. But I believe that he's doing his best to aim up. Thank God! And I think that's what the Mars Voyage symbolizes, right? It's a mythological adventure to aim up in that manner, and 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. Certainly, Musk is playing that out on the technological side. So, beautiful! Okay, question number four: 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 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 constitutes a stupid rule? Well, that's the hard part of the problem, isn't it? I think—well, I had that conversation with my kids because it is something I told them when they went to school. I said, "Look, there are 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 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 subscribes 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. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, thank you so much for your time and energy. I hope we get to do this again. I'm extremely grateful for your time and energy, and I learned a lot today. 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 share back and forth, but we can just save that for

another time. That would be good. It'd be... We did a little bit of that; we got into the overlap between the narrative domains. That would be real lovely! I don't know nearly as much about Hindu religious thought as I should. I know a little bit about Buddhism and a moderate amount about Taoism, and that's been extremely useful to me. But, um, I'm less conversant 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 of incalculable

value. Absolutely! Yeah, well, I'm 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. Gabor Maté 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. A tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it? It grows where it's soft, green, and vulnerable.