Jordan Peterson Exposes the Entire Education System and Reveals the Truth Behind the Human Mind!

All right boys there's a lot of crazy going on in the world right now the border is wide open gas prices are through the roof you can't even buy egg anymore it costs like price of a house going crazy that's why I think this election is probably one of the most important elections ever and you guys all need to get out and vote if you are not registered to vote you guys need to go to send theote Docomo about this you can't be just complaining or talking to your boys or posting on X you got

to actually get up off your and vote all right don't be lazy if you guys don't know how to vote or you're not registered or just for some reason you're don't you're not ready to vote go to send the vote.com it has everything you need to make sure that you're registered to vote and it's also going to make sure that your vote is counted we need everybody's vote to Count send the vote.com is not a right-wing or left-wing website it's just about making sure that everybody votes and everybody's vote is counted so guys seriously like

talk to your boys around you like if one of your boys is not registered to vote chirp is you can't be lazy like I've been talking to people and they're like oh I'm not registered to vote yet they have like a specific side they're choosing like I don't know what you guys are thinking But everybody needs to vote like it's going to be a close one so get up off don't be lazy go to send thot.com if you do not know how to vote it has everything you need to register let's get into the podcast

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we W football's back we're going into week four now if you guys haven't tried Out prize picks you guys got to download it they have a crazy deal right now too if you just put in five bucks you get 50 bucks free it's that simple no strings attach all you got to do is use code nek so take advantage of that code that's for you boys also they got another crazy deal Caleb Williams right now is only 0.5 more so it's basically free it's obviously a lock every time just put Caleb

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everyone's been Blowing me up about it I love prize picks so download the prize picks app use code no take advantage of that boys let's go on a heater all season long hot and we're staying hot let's get on the pot do you watch sports no not generally no hockey hockey sometimes who is your team growing up Montreal Canadians Montreal mhm why Montreal you're from Alberta right I know well when I grew up there wasn't an Alberta team really not when I was kid no Oilers No no I'm old it was a pretty small League

when I was a kid so was this original six yep okay Y and you and so you know it couldn't be Toronto so no I'm Leafs fan huh yeah that's a sad State of Affairs I know it is I know it's the land of Perpetual disappointment tough it's tough I told my son when he was a kid he he was a Leafs fan I said you you don't want to do that you're you're going to be disappointed your whole life it's rough Where where do you spend most of your time like these days traveling traveling

yeah all over the US and Canada and Europe and Australia New Zealand yeah no we're oh South America Mexico yeah we were in 60 cities from February to May so it's pretty much non-stop which actually like it's a privilege like I get to travel all over the world and meet people and talk to people and I know you got some big stuff coming up you have a book coming out you have Peterson Academy yeah what's what what are you doing with Peterson Academy we're hoping that we can bring Elite level general education and then more

specialized education to everyone everywhere in multiple languages for virtually no money that's the plan and and it's well underway we have 30,000 students we launched with approximately 20 lectures we have 30 more already filmed we have 2-year production schedule already mapped out we'll do Something approximating a great books approach but that won't be all of it and uh we have great professors and not only do we have great professors the production quality is extremely high and the tenor of the community and we're going to work to maintain this is extremely positive and so and we

have um Advanced Ambitions I can't see any reason at all that we can't provide a bachelor's level education to people for About $2,000 and so that's a 95% cost reduction and I think our lectures are second to none in terms of quality and and certainly in terms of production value so and it also appears that we hit the price point right it's about $500 a year and from what we've been able to understand from our audience people regard that as a bargain and I think it is you get access right away to 20 courses I

just can't see why that's not A great deal and it's extremely exciting the opportunity cuz I'm connected and this is partly a consequence of having done the podcast but I'm in a privileged position because I can find interesting people everywhere and they'll usually come on my podcast now and then someone refuses for contractual reasons sometimes for ideological reasons but not very often you it's only happened two or three times and usually it's because they're Afraid you know that their reputation will be Savaged if they dare come on my podcast which I think I think is

not a necessary fear anymore um but I can find people who are very interesting and and knowledgeable compelling and decent and ask them to lecture and they're they almost invariably do and then when they do they have we treat our professors extremely well because we're happy to have them you know we'd like them to come back and so they're likely to come Back so yeah we we ran a pre-enrollment over the last 3 weeks we launched formally on September 9th and uh so far the platform can tolerate the load and that's cool yeah it's so

fun and we're we're negotiating with a couple of different jurisdictions with regard to formal accreditation now I don't know if that'll happen because our approach is different than a typical University not least because it's online but I think We'll be able to manage it and uh then the guy the limit you know we hope we can translate all our courses into multiple languages and and really expand out in the developing world we teach people free market economics which would be extremely useful and not done because even Business Schools in the west tend to have a

leftist perspective when it comes to capitalism so to speak and that's so counterproductive now I just went to is Beckan and I lectured at a university there called Central Asian University which is pretty new and it's it was founded by an entrepreneur there who has repurposed 400,000 square meters of posts Soviet industrial space and they're manufacturing everything you can possibly imagine and when the Soviets ran usbekistan the only thing they were allowed to the only occupation they were allowed to engage in was Raising of cotton they Drained lake Bal which is one of the world's

biggest lakes right to nothing to irrigate the fields absolute ecological disaster and now the Communists have their foot off the neck of these bistan people and they're becoming wealthy at an unbelievably rapid rate yeah know and it's definitely the case around the world that if you can shake the shackles of vengeful communism that people everywhere can raise their standard of living Incredibly quickly and we'd like to help people learn how to do that so I have a question about the the online like Academy cuz courses like that programs are becoming more and more popular yeah

but so let's say a student goes through your program and he goes to an employer and on his resume he has your Academy yeah how is that going to work as opposed to like old school well um if we become formally accreditated accredited then the university courses will Transfer and the degree will be equivalent to a degree from an typical University if that doesn't happen because there's various reasons why it might not including ideological capture by the accreditation agencies and we're not going to compromise what we're doing for accreditation we'll just Reach Out directly to

employers we're going to offer our students relatively soon in the future an an appendix for their CV so they can Detail out the courses they've taken and we can provide a description of what that means and we hope that we'll be able to offer employers the certainty that they're hiring someone who of their own accord went out and got educated and we want to teach people to write and think as well I have a another company called essay. apppp and it's based on work I did at the University of Toronto primarily taking apart the process

of Writing which is very very similar to the process of thinking breaking it up into its constituent elements and teaching people how to do that it's it's a word processing program but it has an an editor and an editing technology built into it and will use that as well to teach people to write and to think and to discover what they're interested in and and compelled by and so we should be able to offer employers who we'll bring on board and I think that's highly Probable the certainty that if they hire our graduates especially if

they're of a certain caliber they can at least be assured that they haven't been indor indoctrinated into a mess of woke nonsense that would make them dangerous as employees that's that's something yeah and they'll also be literate and and have a broad general education is it all virtual well it is at the moment but we've got plans to rectify that too because if our student population grows Large enough and we have a reasonable number of people in any given urban center we're going to host conventions and conferences so you could imagine bringing people together for

3 days at an Arena or a large theater where they could have 10 lecturers come and they could be educated you know non-stop for 3 days and meet all the people around them who are doing the same thing we want to we want to what would you say Facilitate social interaction because part of the reason that you go to university is to find a new group of peers yeah social aspect is huge yes of course of course and and you know lots of many people who are interested in ideas which is kind of a prerequisite

for pursuing higher education don't necessarily find their proper social group at in high school let's say but and it it it it's delayed until they go to college or university to find people That they can engage with say at the intellectual level that interests them and I think that's already happening on Peterson Academy because the social media part of it which is quite carefully uh designed and regulated allows people to find their peers and we're hoping that we can facilitate meetups I can imagine scenarios where you know groups of 20 people might get together and

watch the lectures together we're going to have chat rooms for all Of the different courses and but that technology is already ready to be implemented so we want to crack this on the flip side it might be a good thing because then students are going to be more focused on their future at an earlier age yeah be more set up for like financial success or jobs well the other thing too is that we won't limit our our students won't be limited one of the strange things about modern universities is they still suffer from the delusion

That University education is for people from 18 to 22 years of age right and there's just absolutely no reason why that should be the case I mean for example there's plenty of people who retire at a relatively early age there's absolutely no reason that they couldn't be using University level lectures to well to increase their interest in the world to V new ideas there's lots of people out there well who just can't get access to to real education anywhere Like broadly speaking around the world but there's plenty of people who didn't take the opportunity to

go or couldn't and we can serve them and then there's no reason at all that particularly bright high school and even Junior High School students can can be participating in the lectures especially for the price of like postsecondary education yeah especially in the states cuz I told you I'm from Canada too and I found out how much it cost cost for like schools in The states yeah yeah it's almost like unfathomable oh yeah it's just it's a complete scam as far as I'm concerned I mean it it's not like we can duplicate everything a university

does because one of the things you do generally when you go to college not everyone you move away from home right you establish your Independence and as I said you develop a new peer group and but we can certainly Foster that and it's not like we don't know that's important yeah we're looking Into all sorts of ways that we can foster social interaction and I think if we're very careful with it that we can do it as effectively as the universities manage it because they're not particularly good at it and at a much much lower

cost what in your opinion what are the biggest holes in like traditional education like what are the biggest holes that you're trying to fill that aren't currently being filled Quality look most large universities are not particularly concerned with the quality of their lectures in relationship to undergraduate teaching so that might come as a shock to people because you think well a university is primarily a teaching Enterprise but that isn't how the larger universities view it they view themselves at least uh at least as much A research Enterprise now you know the optimal Professor this is

a rare person has a certain entrepreneu IAL ability so maybe they're capable of generating some commercially viable products from their research they can do research they're good teachers and they can play a role in the administration now it's a rare person who can do all four of those but there's no shortage of professors who can't teach at all like the courses are Abysmal and I would say at the typical large state school 10% of the courses are excellent if that and 100% of our courses are excellent that's a big difference and we also deliver them

in a very efficient manner and a compelling Manner and so and you can speed up the rate at which you listen which is also not trivial and you know you might say well it's better to be in person and there are some situations where that's true I mean if if what you're Participating in is a seminar say of 10 to 15 people and it's discussion focused and Socratic in nature then well that's extremely advantageous but that's hyper expensive and it's increasingly rare like at the University of Toronto our smaller courses just got bigger and bigger

and once you're lecturing to a hundred people you might as well be lecturing to 10,000 right the the personal contact part of it is gone now we're also going to encourage our Professors to interact with students as much as possible on the platform you know we're aware that they the human interaction element of education is necessary but that doesn't mean it's already being being offered by the Legacy institutions I mean I think at the University of Toronto the if I remember correctly and it's approximately right the racio of Faculty to students was 1 to 300

well it at that point way before That point it might it might as well be virtual especially if the quality is higher and we're very careful in who we pick as professors and so far the reaction from the students with regards to lecture quality has been very very positive and we'll call too like if we find out that over the years that some of the courses are of lower quality than others which is inevitable you know we'll just keep replacing our course selection until all we have are superb Courses and one of the things that's

so cool about the technology that all you guys utilize and that you make your living with is that you can use video permanently now and so why the hell not have the best lecturers deliver the best information at the highest possible production quality if the universities would have been interested they could have done this 20 years ago why not well they're going to lose so much money money yeah Yeah yeah I I don't even know if it's why threat I mean for them it's a business so what they're not going to switch they I think

don't don't switch what's I think it's a matter of priority like if you look at where the universities have grown but also the cities with the universities are going to make a lot more money when you have students 40,000 you can't have a college football team right unless we get Peterson Academy I could play tennis for Peterson Academy yeah yeah that'd be fun ping that'd be fun you could play pingpong Peterson Acy frats and sorties too yeah yeah I mean what's really happened at at the universities over the last 25 years is that mostly they've

grown on the administration side like if you if you look at the charts it's ridiculous the administration costs have just ratcheted themselves up to a point where it's it's ridiculous it's become it's become I would say it's like an Indent Ed servitude scam so you could imagine that for a long time when you went to University essentially what you were doing was increasing the value of your future earnings well the universities basically figured out how to capture the future earnings of their students by it ramping up the tuition costs and then all the tuition costs

didn't even go to profit they went to administrative overhead and there's just no excuse for it like there's no reason That has to be the case and so well it isn't the case with Peterson Academy and so we can bring extremely high quality education to people at a very low cost I'm interested what you said earlier you said um you're not going to compromise for like creditation yes is there a lot of corruption with those crediting agencies there's got to be right well there's ideological corruption they're not just going to give a credit out and

kind of threaten the whole system that's Already going on well they there're they also the the universities are so captured ideologically that it's a scandal I mean there are no conservatives at all in universities I mean there's a couple of conservative universities Hillsdale College for example which is an outstanding educational institution where's that it's in Michigan and in a little town and so um it's not for everyone but but I went to Hillsdale a couple of times And I talked to a lot of the students and they told me that 90% of the professors were

excellent that's very rare they have a 1% firste dropout rate 1% the typical firstyear dropout rate is 40% which is well wow that's also an indication of the scandalist state of the universities but they're just too expensive and there's no excuse for it especially given the technology that we have at hand and so why do you think it's gotten there like you talked a Little bit earlier you mentioned about the the woke sort of mindset that's injected into like these institutions why do you think it's gotten to that point and also well I think I

think what's happened fundamentally and this happens to institutions in general is that imagine that you build up something that has reputational and brand value because it's actually being delivering a credible service I think you could make the case that for many years the Universities did a good job a of selecting students so that you could be reasonably certain so for example at Harvard most of the value of a Harvard degree was actually the fact that you were accepted at the University right because the criteria for acceptance were so high that a that a um an

employer could be reasonably certain this is true for MBA programs too that at minimum you were much smarter than average and that's definitely something that you Want when you're hiring someone especially for a complicated position and so and then the universities did a incredible job of educating people and so they built up a tremendous brand value like the Harvard brand value was through the roof although they've compromised it terribly in the last four or five years but what happens when you build up an institution that has tremendous brand value is that the parasites can swoop

in and take Advantage of it and certainly that's what's happened with the like woke grievance study mob of false disciplines that have invaded the university and they're almost all political actors and and you can you can start to turn the brand value to your own purposes which is what's happened with the multiplication of Administrators know you can you ramp up the value of the students they have a certain pool of future earnings you can turn those Future earnings to your own purposes by ramping up the tuition costs so on that right the ideological idea of

like people going okay we have this sort of structure and now I'm I'm taking what I can from it instead of like giving what I should be giving to it back to same things happen in companies like Disney how H how do you cuz is it an ideological thing or is it a human thing CU so for this instance right I'm not not saying you be the person that you Know let's say you get your Academy to the certain level and then you do the same thing I'm not saying you do that but so my

question is like is it a human thing or is an ideological thing because well that's a very good question actually I would say most fundamentally it's a it's a sociological phenomenon that's not immediately linked to ideology and so well one of the things we know for example is that the typical the typical family fortune lasts about Three generations and the typical Fortune 500 company about 30 years and it's because well because it's hard for a company to stay on The Cutting Edge and current I mean you know with your own Enterprise that if you're not

you have to be very aware of where the environment is Shifting so that you stay on The Cutting Edge of the communication technology you have to know the algorithms you have to know what's current and hot you have to stay on that Edge and it's hard to do that for a long period of time and then you also have here's another terrible problem it's very cool thing to understand although it's it's a dreadful fact so there's a law of creative production called the PTO Rule and the Paro rule sometimes you hear it uh characterized as

the 80/20 rule 20% of your customers will give you 80% of your business but it's or 20% of your employees do 80% of the work but it's way worse than that like that's Just a shorthand version of the law law the actual law is the square root of the number of people involved in an Enterprise do half the work okay so here's what that means if you have 10 people that work for you three of them do half the work now that seems pretty understandable right if you have 100 10 of them do half the

work and if you have 10,000 a hundred of them do half the work and so what that means is that as your Enterprise grows the number of People who are engaging in counterproductive activity scales much faster than the number of people who are being productive and so what that seems to mean that as a company as a company gets bigger and bigger its lifespan starts to shrink because it just can't be dynamic and mobile and you know could that happen to Peterson Academy if that's what happens to most Enterprises you know and that's also why

it's very exciting often to be in an Entrepreneurial activity in the growth phase you know because that's when everybody's Dynamic and they're staying on The Cutting Edge it's it's very common for any institution to become per petrified and sclerotic with time and that's such an old problem that it's coded into our religious mythologies so one of the deepest one of the most common religious stories mythological motifs is the evil brother of the Rightful King and what that reflects is the fact that any social organization tends towards what would you say becoming outdated and corrupt with

time and that has to be constantly battled against part of the way that the free market deals with that is that if you aren't profitable you die and so there's a death mechanism built in and what that does is it's harsh because your company can fail right but what it does is it Culls the dead Giants before they before everything rots and the biological metaphor is a good one so sure certainly it's something that could it could happen to any company once it grows beyond a certain point it happens to bureaucracies happens to societies it's

very difficult thing to to contend against now with regards to ideology is that there are ideologies that speed that process along so if your Society gets possessed by something like victim Mentality where you make the presumption that anybody who's attained any level of uh success is a Predator you know is an exploiter um that can speed the process of deterioration of your institutions and that's what's happened for example in communist countries where everybody who's successful is tired as a parasite or a predator and you mean just think about it for a minute is if you

run your Society on the principle that everyone's successful is a power mad Thief how is that going to work how can that possibly work because what happens this certainly happened in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution is anybody who's productive gets killed yeah well you know that's obviously not going to work very well if you don't want people to die go ahead yeah this this is just kind of off going back but one thing I realized too when because I I went to University and got a degree but I think one of the biggest

flaws is The University and all these people expect you to oh you should know your degree you should know what you want to do later in life when you're 19 years old yeah so I think that's one of the biggest flaws and I don't know how your Academy compares to that but I just remember looking around at my friends like well we are in the process of developing technology to help people specify what they're interested in right and so that's the problem that you're Describing now part of the advantage to University historically and this is

partly why people were willing to pay a premium for it is that it was sort of a time out in your life in that transition time between adolescence and full independent adult Ood where you could be awarded the social identity student right so that gave you a role and it allowed people to presume that you weren't just a waste of time and that you had time to explore while you were Catalyzing your final choice and so and and the the reason that we're offering to begin with something like a general Humanity's degree with a with

with a leave of science let's say and is precisely allow that people that opportunity to explore but we're also developing technologies that will help people identify what they're interested in and so this is something to know and I I write about this also in my new book um you might say well how do you Discover the purpose of your life okay so there's a variety of ways to approach that you could say well you can look at what interests you okay so some things call to you you know you find them compelling and engaging you

have to watch yourself and see what those things are and you can pursue them and so that's that's positive emotion pulling you forward but then there's a regulatory mechanism that goes along with that Which is something like your conscience and so your conscience is like the voice of negative emotion and it tells you when you're wandering off the beaten path towards your destination and it what would you say it informs you with guilt and shame about the inadequacies of your behavior avior but you can also use that as a way of discovering your purpose or

your destiny because virtually everyone imagine there are things you're interested in but there Are also things that bother you there are things that show up to you like they're a problem and they bother you and you might say well I don't want to have any problems and that's not a very good way of looking at it what you should understand is that those things bother you because they happen to be your problems and so you could find your purpose in their solution and so and that's that's the call of conscience and in classic Religious writings

in the biblical narratives for example one of the conceptualizations of God that's very common is the interplay between calling and conscience and so one of the things we're going to do with Peterson Academy we're doing this with this essay program as well is help people discover their calling and help them establish a relationship with their conscience now we've differenti we're we we are and have differentiated that to some degree Too because what you're interested in and what bothers you is going to be dependent to some degree on your personality structure and we all so and

we know how to map that we know how to turn that into questions that you could write about or investigate and it's also going to be dependent to some degree on the structure of Interest per se so psychologists have broken the world of what you're interested in into its appropriate statistical domains so for Example Engineers have interests in the realistic domain it's more practical and there are people who are more interested in the aesthetic domain there's a model called rasac r i a c provides a six-dimensional overview of interest and so we're going to use

those Technologies to help people understand what they're interested in why that can help them pick topics to write about and to investigate but it also helps them chart a course let's say for their life I just I get DMS all the time and I hear of people just like they're at that 23 26 age like dude I don't know what the hell to do with my life I feel so lost and I I've kind of felt like that too and I felt the best thing to do is you got to leave your hometown for a

lot of people yeah and make yourself uncomfortable and that's the best thing you can do I don't know how you feel about that socially for sure like you said that definitely helps a lot well there's a story I read about this in this book we who wrestle with God so the story of Abraham was a foundational story right because Abraham founds the abrahamic religions which is a big contribution Abraham is really the first individual in the biblical stories and his story is you could think about it as the archetypal story of the individual so what

happens to Abraham at the beginning of the story is he's wealthy so he has everything he could want in life if you thought about Life as just a set of needs and wants so his parents are wealthy he spends 70 years in his dad's encampment in his tent being taken care of and the Divine comes to him as the voice of Adventure and it says to him you have to leave your zone of comfort and you have to go out into the world and have the difficult adventure of your life and that will be better

than just having everything thing handed to you on a silver platter which is it's an Interesting way of looking at it that life is for adventure rather than comfort and God who's the voice of Adventure makes Abraham an offer it's a very interesting offer it's very much worth thinking about so the voice of Adventure pulls Abraham into his quest let's say tells him that if you follow the spirit of Adventure here's what'll happen to you you'll become a blessing to yourself so you'll live a life that you find Worth living so that's that's a good

reward you'll do that in a way that will enhance your reputation among other people validly so that's a good thing because one of the basic drives let's say of anybody who's reasonably socialized is to do something that is useful and that other people regard as useful you know and so and then the next off is you'll do that in a way that will increase the probability that you'll establish something permanent so that's That's a good deal because people would like generally when they think about having a meaningful life they think about maybe doing something of

lasting significance and the fourth offer is and you'll do it in a way that'll be a benefit to everyone else and such a beautiful story because it's such a cool story because it makes this case that the same force that compels you out into the world even as a child if it's made fully manifest and you leave your Hometown you leave your zone of comfort and you allow yourself to develop is that you'll have the life that you want your name will grow among other people you'll establish something permanent and you'll do that in a

way that's of benefit to everyone else well that's a that's a great deal and it's very important to understand at least to allow for the possibility that that's actually true you know like you guys have all left your zones of comfort and Pursued your individual adventures and you know what's been the consequence of that I mean you you have a huge fan base you're obviously doing something that's useful for people you seem to be having a good Adventure that's what you want to find musk found that Elon Musk I found that out when I interviewed

him because he had a real existential crisis when he was about 13 and he's very smart so it was an intense crisis and know 13 13 yeah Jordan do you think anything could Be good forever a deep like and I mean it's in the idea of like that's a one because we constantly talk about like you know someone you know you're starting this new Academy and you have great intentions and we told the story about Abraham having like you could have this you learn this you want to do good for yourself and for others right

do you think that is just innately what all humans are trying to accomplish or is it like do people get to a point where they Have so much that it's never enough and then the change of hands to whoever comes next doesn't understand the values it took to get to that point and then it's just like now it's becoming oh what can I take from this rather than how could I give to this and give to people like all these institutions that we talk about that are like at a point where they've gotten to the

point so far that they start to become corrupt yeah is is that's what I'm like I'm trying to get At like is it just a human thing that is a cycle that's never going to end or do you think someone could actually make the first issue is you might ask yourself is do you want it to end so there's an idea again in the biblical stories there's a character Jacob who's really not a very good guy when he's a kid conspires with his mother to uh defraud his brother out of his rightful inheritance he lies

to his father he's kind of a mama's boy he's not a good guy But he leaves and when he leaves his home um partly because his brother wants to murder him and for good reason he makes a vow that he's going to change and then he has a dream and it's this famous dream of Jacob's Ladder and the dream is of a spiraling staircase essentially that ascends up into the infinite and has Angels descending and ascending that's Jacob's Ladder and when he wakes he builds an altar and swears that he's going to transform and so

you Asked you know is there something that's eternally good well in deep religious texts there's an idea that you can live in the light of Eternity right so you can live each moment as if it echoes in eternity and that's I suppose you get a sense of that whenever you're engaged in something that's particularly profound and meaningful maybe when you're deeply in love when you're taking care of your children there there's a notion that you Can bring eternity into each moment now you you asked a you put a complicated spin on that because you said

something like could that be permanent and the permanency is probably in the process of transformation rather than in any particular thing that you do along the way way so you could think that as you're moving up Jacob's Ladder towards something that's better and better and you'll never hit the top you could say well is there any given place along the Way that's sufficient and the answer is no but the utility of that upward journey is sufficient you know what I mean so it's it's like it's like engagement in a process it's engagement in the proper

process of upwards striving that's permanent even though it's permanent in that Dynamic way you know because you're a live thing you're not static and if that gets too constrained and becomes too static then it tends to get corrupt yeah so so in in The abrahamic story so what you see it's very cool because Abraham decides that he's going to leave his zone of comfort and aim up and then he has a series of Adventures and each Adventure changes his character he learns something like he he's at War at one point and he has to go

to a very corrupt city and try to redeem it and he has a variety of very difficult adventures and uh every time he has an adventure he marks it with the sacrifice and there's a reason for that And the reason is that as your character changes because you've had a new adventure you have to let go of things that characterized you in the past that are no longer suitable and so Abraham he changes so dramatically that he gets a new name in the text and that's a reflection of the fact that if you spiral upward

and you make the proper sacrifices you can change so dramatically that it's like you're a different person and then you might say Well you want to do that all the time you know you want to continue that process like I've watched this like I'm 62 now so I've lived quite a long time and I've watched a lot of people and I've seen this happen almost what would you say unavoidably people tend to stultify at some age you know the really unfortunate people peak in high school and so 16 was the top point of their life

and Everything after that's kind of an afterthought and some people Peak at 30 and some people Peak at 40 and at 50 and most people are pretty static by the time they're 40 but it isn't inevitable right I mean as you age it's harder and harder to be dynamic and continue to transform but it's still it's still what you want to aim at what defines static like just bettering yourself oh just being just being stuck in in repetitive Repetition I would say and and increasingly meaningless repetition loss of the sense of play loss of exploration

loss of hope you know that can go along with loss of Health too you know I mean being in a state of endless upward transformation requires a fair bit of energy and so you also have to be fortunate enough not to be visited by some catastrophic illness although even then you can use that to transform but it's very useful to know you know to Conceptualize your life that way and it is innate in a way you know I mean people will pursue well thirst is innate and hunger is innate lust is inate but the force

that integrates all of those and integrates that integration with other people that's also innate and that can make itself manifest as you spiral upward and that's I think the the feeling of meaningful engagement like that actual experience that embodied experience is actually an indication That you're walking that path of upward transformation that's how it's signaled to you instinctively sounds like you're saying you got to continue to pursue new things and continue to change as a human as you get older well I think that that's where you derive your deepest source of meaning from like it's

not the only place because you derive meaning for example from relationships but they transform too and a relationship a good relationship is something Dynamic like a Good relationship is a transformational game you know if you have a really good friend or a good marital partner you're challenging you're challenging each other constantly to continue to unfold and develop and the meaning of the relationship then is allied with that proclivity to strive upward and it and it is a challenge as well and it's interesting to think about this it's it's kind of obvious once you grasp it

so for example you know if you have two Teenagers and they want to play one-on-one basketball you might say well the reason they're playing the game is to win but if that was the case each player would pick a play partner that they could just defeat 100% of the time but no one does that like if you want have if you want to play a game that's fun and you have any sense you actually try to find someone who's a little bit better than you are so maybe you lose a little more Often than you

win and you might say well why would you do that if winning is the point and the answer is well winning is the proximal point of a single game but the point of a sequence of games is to get better at playing and so you're after The Challenge on that on that idea why do you think you said something earlier about um I think you said I don't know if it was the word attachment but being stuck in places like if we're talking about growing and you know Becoming better why do you think it's so

uh difficult for people to let go of the attachments that they have as far as like what their life should look like a lot of times like leading into sort of depression or anxiety like the idea that my life should be this way or my life was this way and I lost these things and they hold on to that that moment kind of sentimentality yeah within that cuz like let's say they're in this moment trying to come up trying to come up but then They're they're lat and they're holding on to things that are keeping

them kind of unpresented in the past yeah and then they're stuck with the feelings of anxiety in relationship to where they want to be not where they are and then depression holds on how do you think a person could best remove themselves from attachments that hold them into places that make them feel well I have a practical solution to that I I can talk about that theoretically and practically I mean we part of I developed a program 10 years ago partly because of working as a professor and partly because of working as a clinical psychologist

I mean and it was an attempt to address the issues that you just described you can get locked into place let's say by failure of imagination you don't have a vision for yourself you can get locked into place because you don't think that there's any actions that you can take that will change things so you have no Belief in your self as an active agent you can get locked into place this is a similar thing because you believe that you're a victim of of circumstances you can get locked into place because at any moment it's

easier to do nothing than to do something right so just inertia will keep you in place you can get locked into place because you're surrounded by people who aren't supporting you when you move forward because they punish you if you're good because it makes them Look bad and that's envy and jealousy and that can be a very powerful constraining force for people you know there there are families that are constituted so that anytime anyone in the family ever does anything positive everyone else punishes them and so that's an awful situation um we developed this future

authoring program to help people develop a vision for their life and it it uses some of the principles that we discussed earlier so You need a vision for the future to motivate you to change because it's easier to do nothing so you need a reason to act okay so now the question is well where might you discover a reason to act so one of the things I could say you're not going to be very good at that when you first try it so maybe you have to do some rather simple exercises to get yourself warmed

up so I could say all right here's the here's the game it's like it's what kids do When they pretend when their kids okay so here's the deal five years down the road you can have what you need and want okay but here are the rules you have to be treating yourself properly as if you're valuable and you have to specify what your goal goal is okay so those are the only rules okay so now we can translate that into initial action so let yourself fantasize and for 15 minutes write down what you would want

if you could have What you wanted 5 years down the road who you would be and let your you want to do this really like kids pretend who could you be if you could be who you wanted to be what would that look like you can think about people you admire and so forth and so write for 15 minutes and don't get picky about it and don't get self-critical just get it out okay next stage imagine that you let all your bad habits take up take the upper hand and control you and that brought you

to The worst place you could imagine in 5 years what would that look like now that's useful cuz to be motivated two things have to happen something has to be chasing you and you have to be chasing something and you can get somewhere just by ambition and you can get somewhere just by having fear push you but you can really get somewhere if you're chasing something and you have fear pushing you and so if you're trying to change the way you live and you think Well I'm going somewhere better but I'm also avoiding hell then

you're maximally motivated okay so now you have those two competing Visions where I could be if things went well and where I could be if I let the weakest and most useless parts of me take the upper hand do you write that one down too the part WR that one down too yeah so you know right and so most people know you know some people would well maybe you know a woman would drift into prostitution or You'd end up on the street or you'd be a wonderful cocaine addict or you'd be a terrible alcoholic or

you'd be a narcissist I mean who the hell know or you'd be depressed or anxious like people fall or hypochondrial people fall apart in their own ways but everybody kind of has a sense of you know where they drift if they let misery and nihilism take the upper hand it's really useful to know that cuz you need to know what you're trying to avoid and why and Then we ask people to make a more definitive Vision know what should I do with my life I don't know well what do other people do with their lives

do you have an intimate relationship what's the quality of your friendships do you have a vision for your career how are you going to educate yourself how do you take care of yourself mentally and physically what service do you offer other people how do you regulate your worst habits that's Like seven or eight domains you could have a vision for all of those your family how would you put your family together if you made that a goal my wife did an early version of this exercise 20 years ago and one of her goals when she

was meditating on them was to improve her relationships with her siblings and her father and so she made that a Target and it worked radically well like she rectified all the what would you call the kind of leftover Problems that she had with her family members and established really positive relationships with them but she'd made that a conscious goal my sense of people is that they're we're basically Visionaries that wrestle with possibility that's the best way of conceptualizing us that's what it means in some ways to be made in the image of God because God

in the Old Testament accounts for example is the force that wrestles with possibility and makes it Into the order that's good and that is what people do that's what our Consciousness does but you have to have a vision and our culture does a terrible job of helping people develop Visions like I think it's 40% of young people feel they have no agency in their life you know you say the culture does a bad job of that like what's pushing down on that to take well there's a well well so I used to have my students

at University do this exercise and then they would Share the results with other students and once I implement that I started thinking well this is so strange it's so obvious that you should have people how can it be that I have students that have gone through 15 years of education and no one ever sat them down even for an afternoon and said okay why don't you write an essay about who you could be if you got yourself together and so I started to investigate that it's like okay well that seems so obvious why Don't we

do it well then I found out the public education system was established in the late 1800s let's say in the US and it was based on the Prussian military model and it was instituted in the US by fascists now this is before musini this is before World War II so being a fascist in the late 1800s isn't quite the same thing as being a fascist say in 1940 but the prussians instituted a universal education system because they wanted to Train obediently unthinking soldiers that was their goal and then the industrialists imported that idea into the

us because the rural populations were flooding into the cities and they needed Factory workers and so the goal was well we'll educate the poor to be Factory workers and you know there was something to that because things were industrializing and people did have to learn to work in factories and that required a certain temporal Order but the reason there are rows of desks and Factory bells and obedience and one leader and a lot of uh following in schools was because that was the pressian model of universal education and so it was actually a goal of

that system to produce people who weren't entrepreneurial who weren't creative who didn't have their own ideas who were obedient and compliant and you know for whatever utility there might have been in that in a society that was Pro Primarily Factory based like well that's not a good model for right now so we're living in a system that was conceptualized you know 100 almost 200 years ago by a Prussian dictator who wanted nothing but the opportunity to produce mindless automaton soldiers right so it's so Preposterous all right boys you guys have seeing me in the gym

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quality beef jerky it's available right now on Amazon.com the reviews are going crazy everybody loves it it is fire beef jerky if you don't believe me try it for yourself go to amazon.com try out some board Jerky like I said my favorite flavor is peppered just cuz the macros are fire keep the Barrel in check protein up let's get back on the pot you're saying culture basically continues to to put into we'll say the youth's brains that you can't uh accomplish or get to where you think you Can well there's just there's no emphasis in

on that in the education system you know um the students that so before I launched the future authoring program as a commercial product I tested it I used it continually in my classes and students found it extremely useful you know many of them well here we did some experiments with this program so three we did three experiments one at McGill University the students who did this exercise their grade point average Went up 35% that's a lot for one intervention we we um implemented it in the Netherlands at roddam in a business school and we got

the same effect on grades and but bigger effect among low-achieving young men especially if they were ethnic minorities and I think that's because they they were the most aimless and so if you already have a plan making another plan is going to have some utility but if you've never had a plan In your life and you even make a bad plan that puts you far ahead and then the last experiment we did was at a like a vocational College in Canada and we dropped the dropout rate among young men by 50% in the first year

50% wow they did the exercise in 90 minutes when they came for their orientation and and so and exactly zero universities have picked up this program which is another indication I like that exercise it's a great exercise man and you can and I Encourage people it's at selfauthoring.com is where the exercise is I encourage people to do a bad job of it you know because if you make a plan for the next 5 years that plan is going to change as you move ahead and so then you might say well why bother making a plan

and well part of the reason is cuz you motivate yourself with a goal and you constrain your anxiety like a plan does both of those if it's a good plan and then it also enables you to learn Along the way and so you don't want to be so perfectionistic that you criticize your plan to death you want to have kind of a loose guideline for how you're going to move forward and allow yourself to course correct along the way but the other thing is is that we weren't exactly sure why writing the plan worked so

we looked into that did what people write about matter and the answer to that seemed to be no what did matter was how many words they wrote and that was Probably a proxy for how much effort they put into it and so and then you might say well do the particulars of your plan matter and I would say they probably matter to some degree but what matters more is that you start to conceptualize yourself as the author of your own future and I think for many of these people especially for the lower achieving young men

they' never they' never once conceptualized themselves as the authors of their own Destiny you know because that's a very particular way of viewing yourself it's a lot easier to think of yourself as the passive recipient of external forces or as a victim and that also gives you an excuse well not to do anything particularly effortful but it's terrible it's terrible so advice for sure would be for people is to just start writing down your goals and you have to do that your plan to well you can also start by watching like you can watch Yourself

week to week dayto day let's say watch what you're interested in like watch notice when you're engaged you're engaged when you're not thinking about yourself you're concentrating on the task at hand and your sense of the sense of time disappears well if you watch yourself you can see when that's happening to you you know for extroverts it's going to often be when they're around friends for someone who's agreeable it's going to be when they're Interacting in a relatively intimate relationship if you're conscientious then it's likely going to be when you're bringing order to things or

being productive if you're open it's going to be when you're doing something creative you know so it's reflective of your temperament but you have to discover what that is then you can start to notice and then you can start to make a plan I'm going to do more of the things that deeply engage me right and and People should be explicitly taught that because it's a very good it's pretty straightforward yeah you know and it's kind of what you would do if you have a child or someone that you love and you're watching them wander

through their life and Orient themselves and you see them doing things that they're enthusiastic about and that they're expanding their skills you want to reward that that's what you do with a young child you say you know I Notice you're pretty excited and enthusiastic about that and that you're concentrating on it you know good job here's another book on the subject or or do you have some questions you know you want to Foster that and you do that with yourself would you agree then it's probably more beneficial for people to find what they're cuz people

always want to just chase money a lot of the time right so instead of doing that and focusing on maybe this job can make me The most money find out yo this is what I actually am focused on and like and there's a more if you want to make money to making money that way well even if you want to make money you should probably find out what you're interested in and compelled by and the other thing about money that people have to understand is that look I've met lots of people who are rich in

various ways right the best way to be rich is in opportunity and money can expand your Opportunities but if if the money you're pursuing is let's say locked to your status or to your H hedonistic self-gratification momentary self-gratification all it's going to do is bring you misery it's not helpful what you want is to expand the wealth of opportunity that's in front of you and money can do that I mean we we raised a reasonable amount of capital when we launched Peterson Academy and what we're most excited about is the fact that we Can take

that money and make the Enterprise grow there's all sorts of features that we want to in integrate into we want to see if we can solve those problems and also then bring it to people's attention and be of service and that's very deeply meaningful that's way different than say status for the stake of status or you know the hedonistic r ification that money can conceivably bring you and there is some of that and some security obviously but mostly Money's useful as a tool but as a end goal well it's it's likely better than no end

goal I would say you know so if it's better to be I think it's better to be greedy than useless but that doesn't mean that being greedy is the best form of motivation and it it doesn't fulfill its own desire you could say you know you do a study on a happiness with people that are worth hundreds of millions and other people that are just happy with their situation You probably don't want to judge the quality of your life exactly based on your emotional state you know happiness or lack thereof that's a contributing factor but

it's probably better to think about your happiness as a side effect of your proper Pursuits so if say you're pursuing something that's meaningful and engaging and productive the spin-off of that is going to be as much happiness as you're capable of But a lot of what's going to determine your happiness is your temperament you know so extroverted people have a lot of positive emotion and neurotic people have a lot of negative emotion and so if you're very introverted and very high neuroticism there's not going to be a lot of happiness and that's that's a biological

fact in some ways for you you don't want to be pursuing happiness you want to be pursuing something like meaning and that would be associated With that like upward oriented striving that we discussed before and then if happiness comes along well you know you're a fool if you don't welcome it and if you're not grateful for it but it's not a good aim you're saying happiness isn't a good aim it's not a good aim I thought it's the only aim no it's not a good aim it's a good side effect what so what if you

find something that is Meaningful that but you're still not happy oh That's GNA happen you you know that in your own life you've built an Enterprise well some of that took work you had to forego gratification like every second of the time you were working on building your Enterprise wasn't fun but but it's weird e because you know perfectly well that if you're making sacrifices because what you think you're doing is valuable then even the difficulty starts to become imbued with meaning and that's a that's A really good deal because you're going to have difficulties

in your life yeah what you want if you're fortunate you can have meaningful difficulties and that's actually I'd say just that itself is a better Pursuit than happiness because happiness is fleeting and it's it's it's it's also treacherous to some degree because happy people tend to be more impulsive for example you can make a lot of mistakes if you're well I can give you a clinical example so one of The most severe forms of mental disorder is Mania and Mania is excess of positive emotion and if you're in a manic State it's like yeehaw that's

pretty fun in fact often people who are manic won't take their medication because it's quite a trip but it's a complete catastrophe like manic people will spend every scent they have they're thinking of all sorts of wild ideas and it's very exciting and maybe even some of the ideas are good But positive emotion can really go off the rails and it does make people impulsive describing Bob yeah you know what I'm saying yeah I don't know if Bob's happy I guess he is he no but he has the manic right impulsive stuff you know yeah

well it can you know having a bit of a manic Edge gives you a lot of energy there's a lot of writers for example have a manic Edge but what my point is is that positive emotion per se can can lead you down pathological roads So is it safe to say that you think the most important thing in life for for any person is purpose yes yes well think about it this way you know there going to be times in your life where you're going to be suffering pretty intensely and you're going to need something

in those periods to keep your boat afloat let's say and the the the deeper purposes that you've established are going to provide you with that when the going gets rough you want to know that What you're doing you want to know that it's worth the sacrifices you want to know that it's worth the difficulty and then you can maintain yourself even when the road is rough you know look there's data showing for example that childless couples are happier than people with children now one conclusion you could derive from that is that you'd be a fool

to have children but you'd only believe that if you thought that those sorts of measures of Happiness were good Indicators of the quality of your life well if you have children part of the reason you're less happy let's say is because you have a hell of a lot more responsibility and you have these fragile creatures around you that can be hurt you have to take care of them but there's deep meaning in that and it's not something that you'd forego for momentary Happ happiness that's a kind of immaturity so it's a bad measure it's a

bad measure and purpose and meaning is A higher you could think of it as a higher form of Happiness that's another way of conceptualizing it there's a this is completely off topic I was thinking about this last night before we were uh doing this podcast but and then I'm sorry this is completely off topic but I think a study that needs to be done and it should be at some point is someone whose screen time is like 10 hours a day compared to someone who's an hour or 2 hours a day cuz I've noticed a

lot of People who scroll on their phones all day it's driving them NS oh those are those Studies have been done Jonathan height he's a social psychologist and his newest book details out exactly those studies and what do you know he found well height has made a very strong case that screen use and misery are tightly Associated especially among young people and so I mean there's a bunch of reasons for that and some of it is the content of what they're consuming So uh troll demon comments in pornography let's say but some of it also

is the fact that the screens interfere with other things that people might be doing like establishing actual relationships I think that's particularly devastating for young children because they need to be playing and so if they're on their screens they're not playing and if you don't play with people when you're young you don't learn how to be with other people And you're not going to learn that when you're older you think pornography should be banned yes I do think that now the devil's in the details right because at what you know you might ask yourself at

what point do aesthetically pleasing images of Attractive people shade into destructive pornography and that's a relatively complicated question but it's not an insoluble question no I think pornography is an absolute catastrophe we don't know what it's doing to young People but the evidence that's accumulating is that it's not good and it's not surprising because and it's going to get worse with AI by a lot because we'll have the technology for fully customizable virtual girlfriends and that's like months away there's already companies that offer that to some degree like trying to find that website I think

there already is I don't yeah there are there are there already are virtual Girlfriends you know you can unlock the more pornographic features with increased payment and those those are going to be very powerful because the AI systems are already at the point where for for a really lonely and isolated person the AI chatbot system will give them more attention and a better conversation than they've ever had with anyone in their whole life yeah I was we're already at that point but you're going to know it's AI right so it's like Look well you have

friends and people around you you know what I would say one in 20 people that's probably about right have no one no one's ever paid attention to them no one's ever listened to them and if they can find a substitute that's better than nothing or even radically better than nothing it's going to be in many ways irresistible so just like pornography is irresistible I mean pornographic images aren't real they're real enough and that's part of their Danger I mean we we put young men in a situation now young men are more susceptible to pornographic imagery

because men are much more visual in their sexual response than women women have their pornographic proclivities but they tend to use stories rather than images but the a given 12-year-old 13-year-old young man can see more beautiful women in one hour than the most powerful man in history ever saw in his entire life and we're asking young Men to be able to contend with that it's like why should they be able to contend with that what do you think is like the product of that what is it doing to society well we don't exactly know the

causal the causal consequence but there are things we know the birth rate is plummeted in the west far fewer young people are having relationships the rate of virginity is skyrocketing I think in Japan it's 30% of people 30 and under are virgins and And the Curves in in the US and the rest of the West are like we're 15 years behind the Japanese the curves are the same and so it's radically disturbing relationships between men and women now how much of that is pornography well we don't know because it's hard to parse apart all the

different influences the pill likely has something to do with the tube because women on the pill like masculine men less and so we have no idea what how do you gauge that how is That how is that gauged that comment you just made how is it gaug women who take you talking about the birth control pill he's getting he's no I'm genuinely that's a great well here's here's why I kind of got personal there yeah that's so there are degrees of masculinity and facial configuration and jaw width has is one of the markers there's a

variety of markers okay so you can take women and you can show them a picture of the same man with the jaw Width varied and then you can see if the women who are on the pill like the men with narrow Jaws better than the women on the pill and the answer is the women on the pill like the men with narrow Jaws better and they're less masculine and so and you also see the same preference in women's rep reproductive cycle so and that's not we got to get our jawlines going pull game strong bro

bro I'm not worried about that that's not the only investigative technique but That's one of them so overall do you think like we're everything's headed based on what you know based on your whole life are we headed to dystopian or utopian society we're we're headed we're headed towards a competition between those two things at a rate that we that has never before made made itself manifest like there's more possibility in the positive and negative Direction in front of us now than there ever has been you know Per unit of time and that's partly just a

consequence of technological transformation everything's happening so fast and so things could be radically better than they are and there's many things moving in that direction we talked earlier about the amelioration of absolute poverty like the UN predicted 10 years ago that at least at the growth rates that were in place then that we could eradicate absolute poverty by the year 2030 2035 and that's despite the fact that there's we'll probably Peak out at about 9 billion people it's clearly the case that there are enough resources to provide every one of 9 billion people with what

they need and want and opportunity we could do that why does that not happen it it is happening it is happening I mean there's twice as many people in the world as there was when I was young the doomsaying prognostications in the 1960s were that We'd have mass starvation by the year 2000 that just simply hasn't happened everyone's much richer than they were and you know there's local deviations in that and there is concentration of wealth in and at the hands of a tiny number of people that's in some ways inevitable but that's radically positive

we're way more efficient at agricultural production than we once were we're way better at making more with less and we're getting better and better at that All the time so there there are lots of reasons to be extremely positive you know by the same token you know you see developments in places like China 700 million closed circuit TVs they're watched all the time we could build a totalitarian state that made Orwell's worst nightmares look like a romp in the park that could easily happen and there's powerful forces pushing Us in that direction too it's already

the case in many ways in China so I mean we we Copied the Chinese during the covid lockdown right so we could certainly do the same in many many ways so this is also why as far as I'm concerned it's partly why I wrote this next book we who wrestle with God is that we have this incredible technological power that's accelerating extraordinarily rapidly is we better get our ethical act together because otherwise we'll turn we'll make the machines that turn against us and Everyone knows that you know so once you have bigger machines you better

be wiser when you're using them how do you see that playing out because we had we had a RFK on the Pod last week too and he was talking about the dangers of AI yeah that's just a scary what do you think is the biggest threat with AI right now I I don't know I don't know because it's changing so quickly that it's very difficult to tell I mean people are very afraid that jobs will be replaced for Example creative jobs and so forth I mean people have been afraid about that with technological transformation forever

and although that's happened locally to people the overall trend hasn't been that vast swaths of the population find themselves you know bereft of the opportunity to have to keep Body and Soul together so I don't think that will happen I suppose the biggest danger is to me is probably something like what We're seeing unfold in China is that the the different centers of power governmental communicative uh corporate will lock step together in a fascist Manner and that AI will augment that process of centralized control and so you know the fact that your cell phone spy

on you all the time is an example of that now you know so far mostly that's been confined to corporations who want to use your information to sell you things and you Know there's worse forms of totalitarianism than being plagued by people who want to offer you what you want but the Bad actors like the Chinese they've taken that same technology and turned it into a weapon of almost absolute control and that could easily happen an AI could easily could easily speed that process along you see in airports already that your photograph is being taken

all the Time whenever you move and you have to pass through these automated gateways and that's going to become more and more common we could make ourselves the phot is scary like even like that might be like everywhere you go one day right well it is already that in many ways cuz your phone pretty much knows where you are all the time now you know so far and your cars do too you know I mean you could easily imagine a situation where well this has already happened where Your car is reporting all your driving habits

to your insurance company that's already happening and that's a form of well you can see where that could go it's also like the simple things like my for you our for E Pages probably get us in trouble you know what I mean no mine it's like if you click you know if you like something that yeah more and more and more of that like I well yeah yeah well and and that's that's fine in a way Because it's not surprising that capitalist Enterprises are trying to push things that you might want to buy on you

and that's actually not entirely terrible because there are some things you want and advertisements are arguably might be targeted to you rather than random you know would you rather watch an ad that's offering you something you might want or 10 ads that have no bearing on anything you might want you know you can see how those things have Their utility but you can also see how they could be used well they were used during the covid lockdowns as agents of control so we're building these systems well the Chinese in particular have done that they call

their system Skynet for God's sake after the Terminator system they do this is literally true they call it Sky they call it Skynet and they said with the engineers who designed it said when they were pushed we're building the good skyn Net it's like well you know the people who built the Skynet in The Terminator series thought they were building the good Skynet too we got to answer for Skynet Arnold Arnold is our answer right we got to get Arnold out here old though you got to be the second coming bro dude give me a

shotgun give me a bike I'm there I'll pull up I'll save John Conor so you know should you be optimistic or pessimistic yeah that's what I want to know it's like where where do you you Should be awake man you should be awake and you should understand that as you become more technologically powerful you better Orient yourself properly because you'll become Your Own Worst Enemy otherwise do you think they want to do that here like it's done in China being in an airport lately airports are the entry point airports are the entry point of to

of the totalitarian proclivity into our society so do I think they they want that it's difficult to identify the They I mean there's a there's a tilt look if the technology exists for people to be surveyed surveilled it's going to be utilized in that manner can we keep up with that proclivity we'll see you know the the Chinese haven't and their society is you know if your social credit score Falls below a certain level in China you don't get to spend any of your money because everything's Centralized and so and what's your social credit score

depend on well is your yard clean are you too noisy as far as your neighbors are concerned do you give blood when you should do you uh volunteer for State services like a good citizen are you obedient compliant do you never jwalk if you jwalk in China the gate w recognition systems catch you they put your picture up on a screen showing everybody that you're a Transgressor and they pull the fine money out of your bank account that's like happening yes yes that's happening that's crazy well it's not much different than being administered a fine

by an automated system that catches you speeding on the road in the United States right I mean these things happen one little slip at a time you know and those automated speed traps well they have those L ulz systems in London too that the that the uh what Do you call those characters can't remember what they call themselves they keep cutting them down with electric saws but the ulz cameras you know take a picture of your license plate and if you're not supposed to be driving in that area at a certain time then you get

a fine and so we could easily degenerate into a situation where absolutely everything we do all the time is being monitored we we're already there to some deg I think that's inevitable technology Well how how could it like not go that way like it it would take everyone would have to decide that that's a very bad idea it would take every human just Banning together and just completely rebelling yeah well you Americans you're pretty good at scrapping for freedom and so and people people you know and and in the UK they've been trying to put

up these uh monitoring systems with closed circuit TV cameras and there are groups of Vigilantes who were cutting them down As fast as they're put up and so you know people are always struggling against the total Arian proclivity always it's it's as old as man you know and but you have you have to be awake what do they say the price of freedom is eternal vigilance and now that things are happening faster that probably implies that you need to be a little more awake how about what's going on in Canada what's your opinion on what's

going on there well is there any hope For Canada cuz sometimes I just feel like people are so far gone and it's just it's changed so much even when it's pretty clear that the bloom has gone off trudos Rose and if there was an election tomorrow his party would be decimated and likely the Socialists the NDP as well POV the conservative leader would end up with a super majority and he's he's a tough character and he would staunch the flow so you know I've watched countries Reinvent themselves multiple times over the course of my life

I mean the US for example since I've been alive as gone through a whole series of of ups and downs things were pretty rough in the UK and in the US in the early '70s with the oil shock and in in the UK with well was paralyzed by strikes and very economically unproductive and the the the the Brits put themselves back together and the Americans have reinvented themselves multiple times Over the course of my life and America's particularly good at that it's a diverse enough place so that even if a fair chunk of it has

gone insane in whatever the newest form of insanity is there's some people somewhere doing something useful and productive and that tends to spread quite quickly and I I don't see that I don't see that at the moment coming to an end in the US I mean I've traveled a lot in the US I I don't know how many cities I've traveled to the Last four years multiple times in the US I've seen virtually every reasonably sized major urban center and there's a lot of great things happening in the US you know all the time places

like Nashville Nashville's thriving some of the smaller cities in the US are are doing great so it's very unwise especially to count the Americans out because they're so good at Reinventing themselves you said you traveled that earlier you said you did uh 60 cities Was that worldwide no that was all in the US all in the US you said you go to Europe a lot too yeah is there any any other countries or cities where you you feel more sane or like wow this is really a good culture they're dressing in a way that's positive

the Eastern Europeans are doing pretty well so partly because they were under the thumb of this Communists for a long time and that wasn't fun and they remember and so they're pretty oriented Towards free exchange and freedom they're very pro-american and their societies are pretty stable so that's been really good to see and um well there are lots of European the Scandinavian countries are doing very well they're very sensible very wealthy um they have their problems a fair bit of their problems stem from extraordinarily foolish immigration policies especially in countries like Sweden but I wouldn't

put them out for The count like I said you know we have a very open field of possibility in front of us at the moment and and things are happening faster and faster it's it's very important for people to attend more carefully to their ethical conduct and so and things could go extremely well and hopefully that'll be the proclivity that wins out so earlier you said something about like hard to Def find out who they are but isn't they just kind of like the big Pharma big Tech indust military-industrial complex like that's that's the controlling

factors as far as in America goes I think I think you you you kind of put your finger on it appropriately with that analysis it's big is the problem right it doesn't matter whether it's big government or big corporations or big communication networks is that once Things become a certain size they pose a certain threat and part of that threat is that they aggregate together with Other big Enterprises that's actually how you get fascism fascist fascist means to bind and the fascist view is that there's collaboration at the highest levels among the biggest entities and

that's a catastrophe because it unites everything into sort of a totalitarian Overlord and you know a sorted dispersed surfs and that's not helpful do you think that's happening now or not happening oh definitely yeah definitely it's Happening it's how do you reverse and it's happening with the UN it's happening with the world economic forum and these you know and some of that's is it positive I mean to some degree there has to be International systems of cooperation but one of the dangers with the EU for example is that you move political power so far away

from the local people that they really have no say whatsoever in their Destiny I mean that's why the the Brits objected to That that's why they left the EU and I think they made the right choice for what it's worth now you know they went and elected a labor government and so they're going to have to contend with that for the next number of years but I don't like gigantic There's real danger in gigantism real danger you get what what they call regulatory capture you know is once an Enterprise gets big enough it can start

Jerry men ing the rules that Are supposed to be regulating its operation and that's happening all over but it is it's an inevitable it's an inevitable consequence of systems that have simply grown too large and it's a hard proclivity to fight it's people have been fighting it forever ever since there's been civilization that's been a problem you know how do you stop things from turning into mindless Giants and stomping all over everyone you know you saw that with Google I mean when Google first emerged as a corporation everyone was pretty happy with Google but 10

years ago they took a maybe they got too big they took a totalitarian woke turn and they've been a force for fascism since then and so collaborating with governments like Facebook did with the American government this is a real danger and there are you know there are ways to address it the fundamental way to address it is for individuals to take More political responsibility into their own hands you know I mean one of the things you need to think about as a citizen of a free state is that you should be doing something in the

communal and social political realm you know sitting on a board working for the school board volunteering for election like you should be playing some political role actively and if you're not so there's a rule any political responsibility that You refuse to shoulder will be taken up by tyrants and used against you it's as simple as that people get locadas when the systems are working well and they did in Canada for a very long time most of our institutions in Canada were highly functional up till 10 years ago and it's same in the states so you

could kind of sit back on your laurels and think well you know I can live my own isolated life and that's an understandable desire but you can't you Have to you have to shoulder some political responsibility and that's how you pull it back from the from the the tyrants changing subjects a little bit you personally struggled with uh a Xanax sort of addiction you were in a coma yeah for how for how many months two months kind of depends on how you count it but I it was complicated CU I had I had it some

sort of unspecified immunological illness that really it's probably plagued me my whole life but That really became acute in 2016 and I I was I got very ill and one of the side effects apart from very low blood pressure was uh insomnia and so I was prescribed these benzodiazapines and they stopped that from happening I could sleep again very low dose and uh I just kept taking them yeah I mean I I couldn't even feel them for they had no effect on me as far as I could tell apart from the fact that I could

sleep But it was a very stressful period of my life it's when my my university job came under assault and there was a lot of things happening around me and I I had taken anti-depressant before that and that was probably part of an immunological problem as well many years later um I I tried to stop taking them yeah and that did not go well so and then well it's be it's because that's of that often happens to people you shouldn't Take baz beines for more than a couple of weeks weeks so anyways things spiraled out

of control in consequence was was that it took about 3 years to so being in a I'm just so curious about the coma thing what what was that experience like I don't remember much of it zero of it not zero but it's pretty fragmented like you just just blacked out you just you just wake up one day and the time's gone and you is it like sort of yeah yeah it's there's no real difference Between that and being asleep so you were dreaming not that I can remember no so what that I was very ill

when I when I went to Russia for treatment strangely enough and um the the diagnosis of the Russians when I got there was that someone was trying to kill me so well I'd been prescribed a lot of different medications to deal with a variety of the problems I was experiencing acute pain being one of them and anyways you don't deal with any of that now I still Have a lot of pain but not compared to how much I I did have so that that that was probably you would agree I think you had multiple things

happening but that was probably the lowest point in your life yes and how did you get motivated again or battle to well I had a lot of support and a lot of opportunity you know and both of those were relevant like I was in an absurd amount of pain I mean at one point I was Walking 10 to 12 miles a day because I couldn't sit sit I couldn't rest I could only move and that made things somewhat bearable people my family they still wanted me around and I did have a wealth of opportunities and

so I tried a variety of different treatments and one of them finally likely worked and I started to recover slowly I guess in 2021 21 I think it was 21 Fall of 21 or fall Of 22 I woke up one day and the normal ceiling falling on me that happened in the morning didn't happen and then I started to be able to sit a bit and things gradually improved and they're pretty good now I mean I generally have about as much pain as you'd have if you were you know what it's like when you get

the flu yeah your Body aches yeah yeah so so that that's there all the time but compared to what it was like it's nothing it was ridiculous it was ridiculous know how to describe it you don't know what the actual diagnosis no actual diagnosis not really no no it was an immunological response of some sort so we're still trying to figure it out partly because I would like to get rid of the rest of the pain but yeah at least I'm functional and I've learned to manage it so I was Just curious because something I

struggled with for a really long time was just the idea of death not that you know being in a coma is like you're not dead but you're not here what's your opinion of death like what what do you think happens besides the fact that your physical body is gone obviously do you do you have some sort of idea of no not really I mean I like I've done a lot of Investigation into religious ideas let's say and you know part of that complex of Ideas involves conceptions of the infinite conceptions of the afterlife but I

got to say my concern with death has really taken the form of concern with using the time that I have in the most productive and meaningful possible way and that seems to me to be see I have okay I know how to answer that we have a series of documents about Socrates death and so Socrates was brought up on charges by his Athenian peers of corrupting the City's Youth and really and the penalty for that it was a form of religious heresy the penalty for that was death and the Athenian Aristocrats who didn't care for

Socrates told him essentially we're going to put you on Trial 6 months from now and we're going to find you guilty and we're going to kill you and you better get the hell out of town and Socrates went to think about this his friends started making plans for him to leave um and he went and cons Insulted his conscience he called that his Damon and he said his conscience told him not to run that he should see it through and so he said the thing Socrates believed that the things that distinguished him from all other

men was that he always did what his conscience told him no matter what it was and so he decided he was not going to change that and when he went on trial and when he explained his decision to his friends he made a case that this Isn't the whole case but it's part of it his case was that he had lived a really full life and had had and done everything that was in his power to do and that maybe the gods were offering him a graceful exit and maybe that that was okay and so

I kind of Wonder partly from contemplating that if if you lived your life completely that might be enough and here's proof of that maybe you know there's been difficult Things that you've done in your life and you've done them now it's an open question whether you would do them again it's is as if having done them once you've completed something right and like my wife and I for example talked about whether or not we would have children again and we really like to having children and we really like having grandchildren but it's not obvious that

we would do it now again well why well it's something like we did That well so maybe you're constituted so that if you took advantage of every opportunity that came your way you'd live your life completely and you wouldn't be concerned about death because you'd had your life I think I think I think that might be true and so I don't really ever think about the world after death I mean I'm I'm kind of content to leave that in a zone of ignorance I don't understand the relationship between you know finite Human beings and the

infinite Cosmos or the spirit behind it um is there more to reality than we can see or understand well obviously yeah but what particular form that takes in relationship to life after death it's not one of the questions that's really gripped me for me it's been more like I said Here we are now what do we have right in front of us to that we can maximize and that's that's a very entertaining way of contending with things you know I mean The the fundamental religious orientation I suppose would be something like the the attempt to

do the most possible good in the most efficient manner at every moment possible and that's a very interesting Challenge and I think that in that challenge there's a solution let's say to the terror of death that's what it looks like to me that the gospel stories you know the story of Christ's crucifixion the the moral of that story is something like if You were willing to shoulder the full responsibility of your life with all of its catastrophe and malevolence that you would find a purpose that was sufficient to what would you say en Noble you

in the maximum possible Manner and also in a way that would be beneficial to everyone else and I think that's true I think it's right so about contending with death is just about living your life to the fullest yeah well I and I think in some ways those are the same Thing because I think when you're living your life to the fullest you're also contending with your vulnerability and like your susceptibility to death let's say unto evil you're contending with that as radically as you possibly can in every moment and I think you can do

that in a manner that makes you Victorious I think that makes itself manifest in something like that deep sense of purpose that we were discussing before I mean we know as clinicians we Know that if people are anxious and timid and inhibited that if you have them practice even in small increments voluntarily confronting the things that they're afraid of that that's radically Curative they get braver and stronger their anxiety decreases they develop more hope and purpose and there doesn't seem to be a limit to how much that can expand so it's not like you ignore

your fears precisely let's say of death definitely Not but I think it's more like you wrestle with that that's why I titled my book the way I did we we who wrestle with God is you're wrestling with your mortality and your vulnerability continually and I think if you do that properly you transcend it at the same time well you know you know that's the case you know it to some degree because you know that the people that you admire are people who are brave in the face of adversity They don't let things stop them then

you might ask well what's the ultimate expression of that the the passion story is a partial answer to that because the catastrophe that Christ walks through is the compilation of all potential catastrophes and so it's it's it's in a way you could think about it as the ultimate hero story is that if you're faced with the worst that life could throw at you even hypothetically could you maintain your moral compass and your Willingness to move forward and you have to think that there isn't anything more admirable than that I mean the heroes we watch on

movie screens are always people who are indomitable in the face of obstacles and I think there isn't a better description of the human Spirit than that and I also think that acting out that pattern is what provides you with the deepest source of purpose and meaning and and also that makes you you admirable to other people there's Something very real about that that's what you want to see in your kids it's certainly what you admire in in Your Heroes and in yourself for that matter if you you know if you can muster the determination two

two people that you would consider your heroes or that you admire the most in your life soulan niten Alexander soljan niton is one he was the Russian dissident who wrote the gulag archipelago and Took an Ax to the the foundation of of the totalitarians In the 1970s extremely effectively a remarkable person he wrote a 1300 page book that he basically memorized when he was in prison so he was one of these characters who didn't let anything stop him and it wasn't just he was on the Russian front when World War II started and then he

was in terrible Goole camps for very long period of time then he had cancer it's like pretty brutal yeah and yet he wouldn't allow himself to be silenced And he wrote this amazing book won a Nobel Prize for literature and brought down the Soviet Union it's like that's pretty impressive yeah and historically documented you know so that's I have other intellectual Heroes I suppose uh dovi for example who's a absolutely remarkable thinker and author and in the same vein as Sol niton also Russian interestingly enough what about Elon Musk hey man it's hard not to

admire Elon Musk I mean good God it's It's something to see someone do one impossible thing yeah I mean how many impossible things is he doing at the same time with with this hyper efficiency it's it's it's incredible it's incredible he might be the most impressive person in the world right it's hard to find a contender yeah it's it's amazing you know and he's a great model for I mean he's like a he's like a character in a work of fiction right you know so good for him and from what I've Been able to tell

I've met him four times and we had a pretty thorough discussion when I talked to him publicly I think he's doing what he can to be a good person you know I mean no one's without their flaws and Geniuses have their idiosyncratic flaws obviously just like everyone does but I think he's I think it's quite clear that he's a net force for good and he's very inspiring person you know can you do something difficult well what Does musk show you can do five impossible things at the same time and hyp in a hyper efficient manner

so good for him man it's I've been very fortunate you know I've met a lot of remarkable people very brave people Ian hery Ali God she's deadly Douglas Murray that guy's got a spine of Steel like bravery is rare it really is and people are generally timid and conventional and they'll go along with the Mad mob and some of that's positive because it's It's part of being social but there are people who you just can't move them and I've been unfortunate to meet a number of them it's it's very it's it's really something to see

it's been a privilege to meet them so speaking of like heroic figures obviously you know you have a love for that it's describing the people that you sort of like not necessarily look up to but you admire look up to is sure look up to look up to admire why do you think There's such an attack on masculinity overall because not that you know not that women can't be heroic but in general there's been such an attack on male sort of masculinity where some of it some of it is actually I think a consequence of

the breakdown of the family because there are many women who have never had a positive relationship with a man not a brother not a father not a lover not a friend all they see in masculinity is threat and they're also Unable to discriminate between competence and power so they just attribute everything to power and dominance power and Force and and and that's terribly indiscriminate because it's it's a crucial distinction between power mad andc competent but if you're a woman and all of your relationships with men have been fragmented then it's not surprising that a you're

going to not be able to distinguish between power and competence And B you're going to be skeptical and cynical about masculinity you know and then I would say it's it's not just the women driving it although the resentful feminists have have certainly played their role it's also tempting for men themselves to denigrate the idea of say responsible heroism because if you believe in it then you're shamed by the fact that you're not that and so people are often willing to Dispense with an ideal if it frees them from judgment now the problem with that is

then you don't have an ideal and then you don't have a purpose and that's that's a pretty high price to pay but the upside is well you know there are no Heroes means I can do whatever the hell I want whenever I want for whatever reason I want and who's to say different now you know the answer to that is well you're going to be nihilistic hopeless anxiety ridden miserable and unpleasant To be around and that's quite a price to pay for your irresponsibility but the payoff is not having to accept the responsibility yeah right

that's right yeah you know when you understand when you come to understand that there's no difference between taking responsibility and meaning when you start to understand that those are the same thing then all of those attempts to flee responsibility look like ultimately Counterproductive I mean one of the things I've noticed as I've gone around lecturing and it's many places now I mean I don't know how many public lectures I've done it's hundreds 600 maybe many one of the propositions that always brings audiences to silence is the what would you say the suggestion that there's no

difference between responsibility and meaning this is something conservatives have been very Bad at informing young people it's like you want a meaningful life pick up some responsibility it's the same thing the heavier the load that you voluntarily shoulder the more meaning there is in your life so that's a great thing to know it changes the way you look at everything even even ad ad adversity because you start to understand I mean my family and I have come under repeated public attacks and those attacks were often aimed At De devastating my career my reputation there were

serious attacks what we've learned is that there's an opportunity in every attack and it's part of that old hero myth idea you know that every treasure has a dress Dragon right that's a ancient story but the corollary of that is that every dragon has a treasure really really and that can really change the way you look at your life it's like something Dreadful comes along you think Okay unpleasant as this is if I could see properly I would be able to see what's in that I could see where the Pearl is you know and that's

really worth knowing I mean we do that I would say my family we've learned to do that technically even if if some Scandal erupts around me which happens with some degree of regularity one of the first things we do now is look for the opportunity yeah it's not cynical it's Like okay this is rough but well I can give you an example the journalists that have raped me over the coals most thoroughly and with most malevolent intent have clearly done me the biggest favor they're the most popular interviews I ever did they brought my work

and my Endeavors to the attention of many many people when's the book Dro no mid November mid November and how about Peterson Academy Peterson Academy launched September 9th so we'll put both Those links in the description we appreciate you coming on man this.a in there too if you want and the future authoring those are very useful programs for people really got to do the exercise yeah one of one of the things my wife discovered you know she's done this a couple of times everything she aimed at she accomplished every single thing and those some of

those things were very very complicated like sorting out the Relationship with her her siblings and her and her father and her father recently died you know and she had everything squared away she'd said everything she wanted to say to him their relationship was put in place that's a huge it's a huge accomplishment yeah so she had no regrets you know and you and I saw this as one of the things I loved about being clinici you know if you're treating yourself properly and you sort out your Ambitions you can attain them so then what you

want to do is you have to think you have it's a discussion with yourself what would it take to satisfy you with your life like actually if you could have what you needed what would that be you have to admit that to yourself which is a complicated thing but maybe you maybe there are conditions under which you would think all the trouble that constitutes life is more than Worthwhile you have to figure out what that is and then that's what you have to aim at and I think there's every reason to assume that if you're

willing to make the proper sacrifices that you can you can achieve your Visionary ends there we go that's what musk is doing I mean he's a remarkable person but people are remarkable so who knows what you could do yeah you guys have done well you know and you're very young sky the limit and that's a good thing to know you know It's you've got how old are you 30 right so you've got 60 more years right who knows what you could do if you got yourselves fully together you know you you're already a great position

you're very influential you could do a world of good that's a fun thing to figure out yeah so the plan you know one thing we could do you think about this okay do the future authoring program all three of you and let's review it public let's do it let's walk through it and I can Ask you cuz I learn learned what questions to ask people about their plans you know and to flesh them out because you want to have your plan tested right to see if there's well if there's something you could substitute that would

be better or if there's weaknesses in it you want to know that yeah so think about that and if you want to do that love that love yeah okay let's do it let's do it we could do that maybe we could do that around when the Book launches all right Jordan Peters you so much for your time hey man thanks for the invitation it's real good to to know you guys a bit [Music]