Jordan Peterson x Nelk Boys | Ep. 136

Summary

Full Send Podcast Episode 136: Jordan Peterson x Nelk Boys

Hosted by Shots Podcast Network, released on September 26, 2024.

---

Introduction

In Episode 136 of the Full Send Podcast, the Nelk Boys—Kyle Forgeard and Bob Menery—sit down with renowned psychologist and author Jordan Peterson. The conversation delves deep into topics ranging from education reform and personal development to the implications of emerging technologies and societal shifts.

---

Peterson Academy and Education Reform

[03:25] Jordan Peterson: "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."

Jordan Peterson introduces Peterson Academy, an innovative educational platform aiming to revolutionize traditional education by offering high-quality, affordable courses accessible globally. He emphasizes the platform's goal to provide a bachelor's level education for about $2,000, representing a 95% cost reduction compared to conventional universities.

[04:37] Peterson: "We'll do something approximating a great books approach, but that won't be all of it. And we have great professors."

Peterson highlights the academy's comprehensive curriculum, inspired by the great books tradition, and underscores the high production quality and excellence of its instructors. He envisions the platform expanding into multiple languages and reaching the developing world, promoting free market economics and countering leftist perspectives prevalent in Western business schools.

---

Critique of Traditional Universities

[16:18] Bob Menery: "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. How is that going to work as opposed to like old school?"

[16:48] Peterson: "If we become formally accredited, then the university courses will transfer and the degree will be equivalent to a degree from a typical university."

Peterson criticizes the current state of large universities, focusing on their prioritization of research over teaching quality. He argues that many professors lack effective teaching skills, leading to subpar undergraduate education. Peterson Academy aims to fill this gap by ensuring all courses are of superb quality, with plans to seek formal accreditation without compromising educational integrity.

[19:48] Peterson: "The administration costs have just ratcheted themselves up to a point where it's ridiculous. It's become, I would say, an indentured servitude scam."

He further condemns the inflated administrative costs of traditional institutions, labeling them as exploitative. Peterson asserts that Peterson Academy avoids these pitfalls by maintaining low operational costs and focusing solely on delivering exceptional education.

---

Purpose, Meaning, and Personal Development

[44:14] Bob Menery: "Sounds like you're saying you got to continue to pursue new things and continue to change as a human as you get older."

[44:20] Peterson: "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."

The discussion transitions to the importance of purpose and meaning in life. Peterson emphasizes that continual personal growth and striving towards meaningful goals are essential for a fulfilling life. He introduces the Future Authoring Program, a tool designed to help individuals articulate and plan their future, thereby enhancing motivation and reducing anxiety.

[50:20] Peterson: "So, you know, it's a kind of game. And you can solve it."

He elaborates on practical strategies for overcoming feelings of being stuck, such as setting clear goals and understanding one's strengths and interests. By writing down your goals, individuals can better navigate their paths and achieve personal growth.

---

Technological Transformation and Societal Impacts

[73:35] Peterson: "We're headed towards a competition between those two things (dystopian and utopian) at a rate that we have never before made itself manifest."

Peterson addresses the rapid advancement of technology, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its dual potential to create either a utopian or dystopian future. He warns of the dangers of totalitarianism augmented by AI, citing China's implementation of extensive surveillance systems as a cautionary example.

[78:47] Peterson: "This is happening with the World Economic Forum and these... there's a real danger in gigantism."

He critiques the consolidation of power within large corporations and international organizations, arguing that gigantism leads to regulatory capture and the erosion of individual freedoms. Peterson advocates for increased political responsibility among individuals to counteract these trends and preserve democratic values.

---

Personal Struggles and Resilience

[90:57] Peterson: "I had it. Some sort of unspecified immunological illness that really became acute in 2016."

Peterson shares his personal battle with addiction to benzodiazepines and a severe immunological illness that led to a coma. He discusses the challenges of overcoming addiction and the importance of support systems and opportunities in his recovery journey.

[93:15] Peterson: "What was that experience like? No, I was very ill... things spiraled out of control."

Reflecting on his lowest points, Peterson underscores the significance of purpose and meaning in overcoming adversity. He relates his experiences to the broader themes of his work, emphasizing that meaningful engagement with life can provide resilience against suffering and despair.

---

Masculinity and Societal Attacks

[106:41] Bob Menery: "Why do you think there's such an attack on masculinity overall?"

[106:50] Peterson: "It's a consequence of the breakdown of the family... they just attribute everything to power and dominance."

Peterson explores the societal backlash against traditional notions of masculinity, attributing it to the breakdown of the family unit and negative experiences young women have had with men. He argues that responsible heroism and the embracement of purpose and responsibility are being undermined, leading to nihilism and lack of direction among individuals.

---

Closing Remarks and Future Plans

[113:06] Bob Menery: "What about your personal struggles?... How did you get motivated again?"

[114:13] Peterson: "Download the Dutch Bros app to find your nearest shop. ... Start earning rewards."

In the closing segments, Peterson reiterates the importance of personal development tools like Future Authoring and Peterson Academy. He encourages listeners to engage actively with these resources to chart their paths towards a meaningful life.

[111:25] Peterson: "Future Authoring program launched September 9th."

He announces the launch of Peterson Academy on September 9th and teases the release of his next book set for mid-November, inviting listeners to participate in the Future Authoring Program to enhance their personal and professional lives.

---

Notable Quotes

• Jordan Peterson [00:45]: "We can't just be tweeting about this shit. You can't be just complaining or talking to your boys or posting on X. You got to actually get up off your ass and fucking vote."

• Jordan Peterson [03:25]: "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."

• Jordan Peterson [44:14]: "That's where you derive your deepest source of meaning from."

• Jordan Peterson [73:35]: "We're headed towards a competition between those two things at a rate that we have never before made itself manifest."

• Jordan Peterson [94:48]: "I was very ill when I went to Russia for treatment, strangely enough. And the diagnosis of the Russians when I got there was that someone was trying to kill me."

• Jordan Peterson [106:50]: "It's a consequence of the breakdown of the family."

---

Conclusion

Episode 136 of the Full Send Podcast offers listeners an in-depth exploration of Jordan Peterson's perspectives on education, personal growth, societal challenges, and the impact of technology. Through candid discussions and personal anecdotes, Peterson emphasizes the importance of purpose, responsibility, and continuous self-improvement as antidotes to modern societal issues.

---

For more information on Peterson Academy and the Future Authoring Program, visit PetersonAcademy.com and SelfAuthoring.com.

Transcript

[Kyle Forgeard]

Boys, Happy dad is now available in Oregon just in time for summer. We made the best tasting seltzer and tea that's low in sugar, gluten free and has no artificial flavors. Make sure to stock up at Winco, Walmart and US Market. Get it before it's gone. You have to be 21 plus to drink and buy Happy Dad. Alright boys, there's a lot of crazy shit going on in the world right now. The border is wide open, gas prices are fucking through the roof. You can't even buy fucking egg anymore. It costs like a price of a house. Shit's 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 the vote.com, all right? Because guys, we can't just be tweeting about this shit. You can't be just complaining or talking to your boys or posting on X. You got to actually get up off your ass and fucking 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 don't, you're not ready to vote. Go to sendthevote.com it has everything you need to make sure that you're registered to vote and it's also gonna make sure that your vote is counted. We need everybody's vote to count. Sendthevote.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 his ass. 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 gonna be a close one. So get up off your ass, don't be lazy. Go to sendthevote.com. if you do not know how to vote as everything you need to register. Let's get into the podcast. Football's back. We're going into week four now. If you guys haven't tried out prize picks, you guys gotta 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 attached. All you gotta do is use code nelk. 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 Williams on any of your picks. So if you got three picks, add in Caleb Williams. If you got four picks, adding Caleb Williams, it's just going to multiply your entire pick. That's good all the way till September. So boys, this is like a no brainer. Download the prize picks app, plug in code NELK, 5 bucks gets you $50 free. And then tack on fucking Caleb Williams to all your picks. Thank me later. We've been firing on prize picks. I can't watch football without firing on prize picks. It's just. It's way too fun. All my friends love it. 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. We're hot and we're staying hot. Let's get in the pod.

[Bob Menery]

Do you watch sports?

[Jordan Peterson]

No, not generally, no.

[Bob Menery]

Hockey?

[Jordan Peterson]

Hockey, sometimes.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Who is your team growing up?

[Jordan Peterson]

Montreal Canadiens.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Montreal. Why Montreal? You're from Alberta, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

I know. Well, when I grew up, there wasn't an Alberta team.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Really?

[Jordan Peterson]

Not when I was kid. No.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Oilers?

[Jordan Peterson]

No. No, I'm old. It was a pretty small league when I was right.

[Kyle Forgeard]

So is this original six?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yep.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And you stayed, so, you know, it couldn't be Toronto. So.

[Kyle Forgeard]

No, I'm Leafs fan.

[Jordan Peterson]

Huh?

[Kyle Forgeard]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's a sad state of affairs.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I know it is.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I know. It's the perpetual disappointment.

[Bob Menery]

It's tough.

[Jordan Peterson]

I told my son when he was a kid he was a Leafs fan. I said, you know, you don't want to do that. You're going to be disappointed. Your whole life, it's rough.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Where do you spend most of your time like these days?

[Jordan Peterson]

Traveling.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Traveling? Yeah, all over the US and Canada.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 I actually like. It's a privilege. Like I get to travel all over the world and meet people and talk.

[Kyle Forgeard]

To people and I know you got some big stuff coming up. You have a book coming out. You have Peterson Academy.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Kyle Forgeard]

What's. What. What are you doing with Peterson Academy?

[Jordan Peterson]

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 two year production schedule already mapped out. We'll do something approximating a great books approach, but that won't be all of it. And 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 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 certainly in terms of production value. 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, because 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. And 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 is not a necessary fear anymore. But I can find people who are very interesting and knowledgeable, compelling and decent and ask them to lecture. And 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 three weeks. We launched formally on September 9, and 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 then the sky's the limit. You know, we hope we can translate all our courses into multiple languages 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 Uzbekistan. 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 post Soviet industrial space. And they're manufacturing everything you can possibly imagine. And when the Soviets ran Uzbekistan, the only thing they were allowed to, the only occupation they were allowed to engage in was raising of cotton. They drained Lake Baikal, 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 Pakistan people and they're becoming wealthy at an unbelievably rapid rate. Yeah. No, 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.

[Bob Menery]

I have a question about the online, like academy, because.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bob Menery]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bob Menery]

How is that going to work as opposed to like old school?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, if we become formally accredited. Accredited, then the university courses will transfer and the degree will be equivalent to a degree from a 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 App 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 we'll 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 indoctrinated into a mess of woke nonsense that them dangerous as employees and that's, that's something.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And they'll also be literate and, and have a broad general education.

[Bob Menery]

Is it all virtual?

[Jordan Peterson]

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 three 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 three 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.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah, social aspect is huge.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 designed and regulated, allows people to find their peers and we're hoping that we can facilitate meetups. I can imagine scenarios where groups of 20 people might get together and watch the lectures together. We're going to have boys.

[Kyle Forgeard]

This episode is sponsored by Shopify. Shopify is an all in one e commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run and grow your in person or e commerce business without the struggle. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the Launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage. All the way to the did we just hit a million order stage. Shopify is there to help you grow. So whether you're offering custom printed coffee mugs from Shopify's in person POS system, you are in good hands. By now it's clear you boys know that I love Shopify. We've literally used Shopify's ecommerce platform from the very beginning to offer full send gear and now happy die gear and board jerky gear on our websites. My favorite thing about Shopify is no matter how big you want to grow, it gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce in the US and Shopify is truly a global force, powering millions of entrepreneurs of every size across over 170 countries. Plus Shopify's award winning help is there to support your success every step of the way. This is a possibility powered by Shopify. So boys, you could sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com fullsend so go to shopify.com fullsend $1 per month trial and take your business to the next level today.

[Jordan Peterson]

This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. With the Gemini app you can talk live and have a real time conversation with an AI assistant.

[Bob Menery]

It's great for all kinds of things.

[Jordan Peterson]

Like if you want to practice for.

[Bob Menery]

An upcoming interview, ask for advice on things to do in a new city.

[Jordan Peterson]

Or brainstorm creative ideas. And by the way, this script was.

[Bob Menery]

Actually read by Gemini. Download the Gemini app for iOS and.

[Jordan Peterson]

Android today must be 18 plus to use Gemini live chat rooms for all of the different courses. And that technology is already ready to be implemented, so we want to crack this.

[Bob Menery]

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, well, more set up for like financial success or jobs.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 develop new ideas. There's Lots of people out there, well, who just can't get access to it, to a 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.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Especially for the price of like post secondary education. Yeah, especially in the States, because I told you I'm from Canada too, and I found out how much it costs for like schools in the States.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kyle Forgeard]

It's almost like unfathomable.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh yeah, it's, 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.

[Unknown]

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?

[Jordan Peterson]

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, at least as much a research enterprise. Now, you know, the optimal professor, this is a rare person, has a certain entrepreneurial 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 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 ratio of faculty to students was 1 to 300. Well, 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.

[Unknown]

Why not?

[Kyle Forgeard]

Well, they're going to lose so much money.

[Bob Menery]

Money.

[Unknown]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

I, I don't even know if it's why threat.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I mean, for them it's a business. So what? They're not going to switch. They, I think, don't, don't switch.

[Jordan Peterson]

I think it's a matter of priority. Like if you look at where the universities have grown, but also the cities.

[Bob Menery]

With the universities are going to make a lot more money when you have students. Well, 40,000.

[Kyle Forgeard]

You can't have a college football team, right? Yeah, unless we get Peterson Academy.

[Bob Menery]

I could play tennis for Peterson Academy.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah, that'd Be fun or ping pong. That'd be fun.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You play ping pong?

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Peterson Academy frats and sororities too.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 indentured 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 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 while it isn't the case with Peterson Academy and so we can bring extremely high quality education to people at a very low cost.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I'm interested. What you said earlier, you said you're not going to compromise for like creditation.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Is there a lot of corruption with those crediting agencies? There's got to be, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, there's ideological corruption.

[Kyle Forgeard]

They're not just going to give a credit out and kind of threaten the whole system that's already going.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, they're, they're, they're 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.

[Bob Menery]

Where's that?

[Jordan Peterson]

It's in Michigan and in a little town. And so 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% first year dropout rate. 1%. The typical first year dropout rate is 40%, which is. Well, wow. That's also an indication of the scandalous 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.

[Unknown]

And so why do you think it's gotten there? Like you talked a little bit earlier, you mentioned about the WOKE sort of mindset that's Injected into like these institutions. Why do you think it's gotten to that point and also.

[Jordan Peterson]

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, 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 an 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. You 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.

[Unknown]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Same thing's happening. Companies like Disney.

[Unknown]

How, how do you. Because is it an ideological thing or is it a human thing? Because so for this instance, right, I'm not saying you'd be the person that, you know, let's say you get your academy to this 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?

[Jordan Peterson]

Because 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 while 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 a very cool thing to understand, although it's. It's a dreadful fact. So there's a law of creative production called the Prito rule and the Pareto rule. Sometimes you hear it characterized as the 8020 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. 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 110 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. And it's very common for any institution to become 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. And so sure, certainly it's something that could, it could happen to any company once it grows beyond a certain point, happens to bureaucracies, it 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 success is a predator, you know, is an exploiter, 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 tarred 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 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. Well, you know, that's obviously not going to work very well. If you don't want people to die, go ahead.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah, this is just kind of off going back. But one thing I realized too when, because 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. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 adulthood where you could be awarded a 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 humanities degree with a, with, with a leave in of science, let's say, 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 write about this also in my new book. 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. 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 differentiated, we're, 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 Riasec R I A S E 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.

[Bob Menery]

I just, I get DMS all the time. I hear 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bob Menery]

And make yourself uncomfortable and that's the best thing you can do. I don't know how you feel about.

[Kyle Forgeard]

That socially for sure. Like you said, that definitely helps a lot.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 handed to you on a silver platter, which is 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 will 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 offer 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 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. 13. And he's very smart. So it was an intense crisis. And 13. 13. Yeah.

[Unknown]

Jordan, do you think anything could be good forever? It's a deep, like. And I mean, it's in the idea.

[Bob Menery]

Of, like, that's a deep one, because.

[Unknown]

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 could 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?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

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 something?

[Jordan Peterson]

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, he conspires with his mother to 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, 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's a notion that you can bring eternity into each moment. Now, you asked, 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. 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, its engagement in the proper process of upward 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.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

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. 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 every time he has an adventure, he marks it with a 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, and so I've lived quite a long time and I've watched a lot of people and I've seen this happen almost. This episode is brought to you by Dutch Bros. Get stoked for all the.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Holly jolly vibes this season at Dutch Bros. Stay cozy with returning winter faves. Hazelnut truffle mocha and candy cane mocha.

[Jordan Peterson]

Plus the new winter Shimmer Rebel energy.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Drink blends up sweet cream and blue razz flavor with soft top and shimmer sprinkles to keep those spirits energized all winter long.

[Jordan Peterson]

Download the Dutch Bros app to find your nearest shop. Order ahead and start earning rewards. 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 after thought. 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, so still what you want to aim at.

[Kyle Forgeard]

What defines static? Like just bettering yourself?

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, just being, just being stuck in, in repetitive content 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 and lust is innate, 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.

[Bob Menery]

Sounds like you're saying you got to continue to pursue new things and continue to change as a human as you get older.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 to 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.

[Unknown]

That, on that idea. Why do you think you said something earlier about. 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 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 of 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

That kind of sentimentality.

[Unknown]

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 latching and they're holding on to things that are keeping them kind of unpresent, like sort of in the past.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 yourself as an active agent. You can get locked into place. This is a similar thing because you believe that you're a victim 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 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. We developed this future authoring program to help people develop a vision for their life. And 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 they're 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 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. Five 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 could 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 five years. What would that look like? Now that's useful because 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.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Do you write that one down, too?

[Jordan Peterson]

Write 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? No. Or you'd be depressed or anxious, like people follow or hypochondriacal. 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, because you need to know what you're trying to avoid and why. And then we ask people to make a more definitive vision. No. 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 their. 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, why do you say the.

[Bob Menery]

Culture does a bad job of that? Well, what's pushing down on that to take?

[Jordan Peterson]

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 implemented 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, 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 Mussolini. 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 following in schools is because that was the Prussian 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 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, a hundred and almost 200 years ago by a Prussian dictator who wanted nothing but the opportunity to produce mindless automaton soldiers. Right, so you're saying so preposterous.

[Kyle Forgeard]

All right, boys, you guys have seen me in the gym. I'M always looking for healthy snacks and I want to let you guys know about bored jerky. This is one of my favorite healthy snacks. Straight up. I eat this all the time. We got a bunch of different flavors. Teriyaki, spicy, spire. My favorite is peppered. This is my go to snack. I keep it in my backpack when I travel. Always on airplanes, I'm snacking on this. What I love about it is the macros are pretty fire. It's only got 2 grams of carbs per serving, 3 grams of fat, and then the whole bag has 32 grams of protein. You guys have seen me recently, I'm trying to stay in the gym, trying to stay in shape. And when I'm always traveling in the airports and stuff like that, there's a bunch of garbage snacks with shitty macros. So this is reliable for me. I know that it doesn't up the barrel too much and it's high in protein. I've always loved beef jerky too. And this is literally the best beef jerky I've tried. If you don't believe me, try it for yourself. Thank me later. Everyone that tries it loves it. It is amazing 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 because the macros are fire. Keep the barrel in check, protein up. Let's get back in the pot.

[Bob Menery]

You're saying culture basically continues to put into, we'll say the youth sprains that you can't accomplish or get to where you think you can.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, there's just, there's no emphasis in on that in the education system. You know, 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 the 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 implemented it in the Netherlands at Rotterdam in a business school. And we got the same effect on grades and, but a 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 so. And exactly zero universities have picked up this program, which is another indication.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I like that exercise.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's a great exercise, man. And you can. And I encourage people, it's@self Authoring.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 five 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 because 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, eh. 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. And I think for many of these people, especially for the lower achieving young men, they'd never, they'd 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 to, well, not to do anything particularly effortful. But it's terrible. It's terrible.

[Bob Menery]

That's very advice for sure would be for people is to just start writing down your goals and you have to do that. Your plan.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, you can also start by watching like you can watch yourself week to week, day to 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.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 you're concentrating on it. You know, good job. Here's another book on this subject. Or do you have some questions? You know, you want to foster that and you do that with yourself.

[Bob Menery]

Would you agree then that it's probably more beneficial for people to find what they're. Because 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, if you want to make more.

[Bob Menery]

Money making money that way.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 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 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 gratification 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 doesn't fulfill its own desire. You could say, you know, you do.

[Bob Menery]

A study on happiness with people that are worth hundreds of millions and other people that are just happy with their situation.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 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.

[Bob Menery]

You're saying happiness isn't a good aim.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's not a good aim.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I thought it's the only aim.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, it's not a good aim. It's a good sign.

[Bob Menery]

So what if you find something that is meaningful, that. But you're still not happy?

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, that's going to 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, eh? 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.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

What you want, if you're fortunate, you can have meaningful difficulties. And that's actually, I'd say just that in 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, yee haw. 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 cent 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.

[Bob Menery]

Describing Bob.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Bob Menery]

You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I don't know if Bob's happy. I guess he is.

[Jordan Peterson]

He probably is.

[Bob Menery]

No, but he has the manic.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Right.

[Bob Menery]

Impulsive stuff, you know.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Unknown]

So is it safe to say that you think the most important thing in life for, for any person is purpose?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes. Yes. Well, think about it this way. You know, there are 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 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 difficulties. 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 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.

[Bob Menery]

There's a. This is completely off topic. I was thinking about this last night before we were doing this podcast, but. And 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 two hours a day. Because I've noticed a lot of people who scroll on their phones all day. It's driving them nuts.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, those are. Those studies have been done. Jonathan Haidt, he's a social psychologist, and his newest book details out exactly those studies.

[Bob Menery]

And what do you know what he found?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, Haidt 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 troll demon comments and 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 particular 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.

[Bob Menery]

You think pornography should be banned?

[Jordan Peterson]

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 us to.

[Unknown]

Some degree, like I'm trying to find that website.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I think there already is.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 chat bot system will give them more attention and a better conversation than they've ever had with anyone in their whole life. Yeah, we're already at that.

[Kyle Forgeard]

But you're going to know it's AI, right, so it's like, look, well, you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Have friends and people around you, you know, I would say 1 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 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?

[Kyle Forgeard]

What do you think is like, the product of that? What is it doing to society?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, we don't exactly know the causal, the causal consequence, but there are things we know. The birth rate has 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 two, because women on the pill like masculine men less. And so we have no idea what.

[Unknown]

How do you gauge that? How is that, how is that gauged, that comment you just made? How is it women who take. You talking about the birth control pill?

[Bob Menery]

He's getting, He's.

[Unknown]

No, no, I'm genuinely.

[Bob Menery]

That's a great personal shape. Well, here's, here's one I kind of got personal there.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 reproductive cycle. Why so. And that's not.

[Kyle Forgeard]

We got to get our jawlines going.

[Bob Menery]

Your pull out games strong, bro. Bro.

[Jordan Peterson]

I'm not worried about that. That's not the only investigative technique, but that's one of them.

[Unknown]

So overall, do you think, like, where everything's headed based on what you know, based on your whole life? Are we headed to dystopian or utopian society?

[Jordan Peterson]

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 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 will probably peak out at about 9 billion people. It's clearly the case that there are enough resources to provide every 1 of 9 billion people with what they need and want and opportunity. We could do that.

[Unknown]

Why does that not happen?

[Jordan Peterson]

It is happening. That is happening. I mean there's twice as many people in the world as there was when I was young. The doom saying 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 worse. 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 can 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 as 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 how do you see that playing out? Machines, you better be wiser when you're using them.

[Kyle Forgeard]

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 A.I. yeah, that's just.

[Bob Menery]

What do you think is the biggest threat with AI right now?

[Jordan Peterson]

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 are seeing unfold in China is that the, the different centers of power, governmental, communicative, 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 phones 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. And 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.

[Bob Menery]

The phone is scary, like even like.

[Kyle Forgeard]

It might be like everywhere you go one day, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, it is already that in many ways because 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.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah, it's also like the simple things like my for you page our 4U pages probably get us in trouble. You know what I mean? It's like if you click, you know, if you like something, just gym bros.

[Kyle Forgeard]

And chicks, that's it.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah, yeah, more and more and more of that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Like, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, well. 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 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 while 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.

[Unknown]

They do.

[Jordan Peterson]

This is literally true.

[Unknown]

They call it sky.

[Jordan Peterson]

Call it skynet. And they said. The engineers who designed it said when they were pushed, we're building the good skynet. It's like, well, you know, the people who built the skynet in the terminator series thought they were building the good skynet too.

[Bob Menery]

We got an answer for skynet. Arnold is our answer, right?

[Jordan Peterson]

We gotta get Arnold out here.

[Bob Menery]

You gotta be the second coming, bro.

[Unknown]

Dude, give me a shotgun. Give me a bike. I'm there. I'll pull up. I'll save John Connor.

[Jordan Peterson]

So, you know, should you be optimistic or pessimistic?

[Unknown]

Yeah, that's what I want to know. It's like, where. Where do you be?

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Unknown]

Do you think they want to do that here like it's done in China?

[Jordan Peterson]

Been in an airport lately? Airports are the entry point. Airports are the entry point of. Of the totalitarian proclivity into our society. So do I think that 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 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 volunteer for state services like a good citizen? Are you obedient, compliant? Do you never jaywalk? If you jaywalk in China, the gate 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.

[Kyle Forgeard]

That's like happening.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, yes, that's happening.

[Kyle Forgeard]

That's crazy.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 U L E Z systems in London too, that, the, that the, what do you call those characters? Can't remember what they call themselves. They keep cutting them down with electric saws. But the Ulez 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're already there to something.

[Kyle Forgeard]

I think that's inevitable with technology. Well, how could it, like, not go that way? Like, it would take.

[Jordan Peterson]

Everyone would have to decide that that's a very bad idea.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Take every human just banding together and just completely rebelling.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, you Americans are pretty good at scrapping for freedom. And so. And people, you know, and in the uk, they've been trying to put up these monitoring systems with closed circuit TV cameras and there are groups of vigilantes who are cutting them down as fast as they're put up. And so, you know, people are always struggling against the totalitarian proclivity. Always. It's, it's as old as man, you know, and. But yeah, 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.

[Kyle Forgeard]

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? Because sometimes I just feel like people are so far gone and it's just. Well, it's changed so much. Even when I.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's pretty clear that the bloom has gone off Trudeau's rose. And if there was an election tomorrow, his party would be decimated and likely the Socialists, the NDP as well. Poliev, 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 U.S. for example, since I've been alive, has gone through a whole series 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 while was paralyzed by strikes and very economically unproductive. And 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 don't see that, I don't see that at the moment coming to an end in the U.S. i mean, I've traveled a lot in the U.S. i don't know how many cities I've traveled to the last four years multiple times in the U.S. i've seen virtually every reasonably sized major urban center. And there's a lot of great things happening in the U.S. 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.

[Bob Menery]

You said you've traveled earlier. You said you did 60 cities. Was that worldwide?

[Jordan Peterson]

No, that was all in the U.S.

[Bob Menery]

You said you go to Europe a lot too. Is there any, any other countries or cities where you, you feel more sane or like, wow, this is really a good culture or. They're progressing in a way that's positive.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 well, there are lots of European. The Scandinavian countries are doing very well. They're very sensible, very wealthy. 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.

[Unknown]

So earlier you said something about like, hard to define out who they are, but isn't they just kind of like the big pharma, big tech, industrial, military industrial complex, like that's, that's the controlling factors as far as an American?

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, 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, assorted dispersed serfs. And that's not helpful.

[Unknown]

Do you think that's happening now or not happening?

[Jordan Peterson]

Definitely, yeah, definitely it's happening.

[Unknown]

So how do you reverse something new.

[Jordan Peterson]

And 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 gerrymandering 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 lackadaisical 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 same in the States. So you could kind of sit back on your laurels and think, well, I. 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 tyrants.

[Unknown]

Changing subjects a little bit. You personally struggled with a Xanax sort of addiction. You were in a coma.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

For. For how many months? Two months.

[Jordan Peterson]

Kind of depends on how you count it. But I. It was complicated because 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 insomnia. And so I was prescribed these benzodiazepines and they stopped that from happening. I could sleep again, very low dose. And I just kept taking them. Yeah, I mean, 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 university job came under assault and there was a lot of things happening around me, and I. I had taken antidepressants before that, and that was probably part of an immunological problem as well. Many years later, I. I tried to stop taking them.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that did not go well. So. And then. Well, it's be. It's because that's off. That often happens to people. You shouldn't take benzodiazepines for more than a couple of weeks. So anyways, things spiraled out of control in consequence was. Was. That took about three years to.

[Unknown]

So being in a. I'm just so curious about the coma thing. What. What was that experience like?

[Jordan Peterson]

I don't remember much of it.

[Unknown]

Zero of it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Not zero, but it's pretty fragmented.

[Unknown]

Like you just. Just blacked out or you just. You just wake up one day and the time's gone and you. Is it like sort of.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, yeah. It's. There's no real difference between that and being asleep.

[Unknown]

So you were dreaming?

[Jordan Peterson]

Not that I can remember, no.

[Bob Menery]

So, no.

[Jordan Peterson]

I was very ill when I. When I went to Russia for treatment, strangely enough. And 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.

[Unknown]

And anyways, you don't deal with any of that now.

[Jordan Peterson]

I still have a lot of pain, but not compared to how much I did have.

[Kyle Forgeard]

So that.

[Bob Menery]

That. That was probably what you would agree. I think you had multiple things happening, but that was probably the lowest point in your life.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes.

[Bob Menery]

And how did you get motivated again or battle to.

[Jordan Peterson]

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, 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.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So that. That's there all the time. But compared to what it was like it's nothing. It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous.

[Unknown]

Do you know what the actual.

[Jordan Peterson]

How to describe it?

[Unknown]

You don't know what the actual diagnosis?

[Jordan Peterson]

No.

[Unknown]

Actual diagnosis?

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Unknown]

So I was just curious because something I struggled with for a really long time was just the idea of death. And 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, not really. I mean, I've done a lot of investigation into religious ideas, let's say, and no part of that complex of ideas involves conceptions of the infinite conceptions of the afterlife. But I gotta 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 six 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. And he went and consulted his conscience. He called that his daemon. 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 you lived your life completely, that might be enough. And here's some 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 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 liked having children. We really like having grandchildren. But it's not obvious that we would do it now again. Well, why? 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 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. 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 fundamental religious orientation, I suppose, would be something like 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. The gospel stories, the story of Christ, 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, ennoble 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.

[Unknown]

So about contending with death is just about living your life to the fullest.

[Jordan Peterson]

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, and to 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 who Wrestle with God. So 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? That 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 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.

[Bob Menery]

Two people that you would consider your heroes or that you admire the most in your life.

[Jordan Peterson]

Solzhenitsyn. Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one. He was the Russian dissident who wrote the Gulag Archipelago and took an ax to 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 gulag camps for very long period of time. Then he had cancer. It's like pretty brutal.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And historically documented, you know, so that's. I have other intellectual heroes, I suppose. Suppose Dostoevsky for example, who's absolutely remarkable thinker and author and in the same vein as social Russian, interestingly enough.

[Bob Menery]

What about Elon Musk?

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

I mean, how many impossible things is he doing at the same time? And with, with this hyper efficient super. Yeah, it's, it's, it's incredible. It's incredible.

[Bob Menery]

He might be the most impressive person in the world. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

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.

[Bob Menery]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 talk 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 hype 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 Hersey, 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 fortunate 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.

[Unknown]

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 to. Is sure look up to admire. Why do you think there's such an attack on masculinity overall? Because it's 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 that's terribly indiscriminate because it's a crucial distinction between power, mad, incompetence. 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.

[Unknown]

But the payoff is not having to accept the responsibility.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, 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. 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 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 dragon. Right. That's an 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 raked me over the coals most thoroughly and with most malevolent intent, have clearly done me the biggest favorite. They're the most popular interviews I ever did. They brought my work and my endeavors to the attention of many, many people.

[Kyle Forgeard]

When's the book drop?

[Jordan Peterson]

No. Mid November.

[Kyle Forgeard]

Mid November. And how about Peterson Academy?

[Jordan Peterson]

Peterson Academy launched September 9th.

[Kyle Forgeard]

We'll put both those links in the description. Yeah, we appreciate you coming on man.

[Jordan Peterson]

App in there, too, if you want. And the future authoring. Those are very useful programs for people.

[Kyle Forgeard]

We got to do.

[Jordan Peterson]

Really.

[Kyle Forgeard]

We got to do the exercise.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. One of the. 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 and 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 a clinician. 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 to. 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.

[Bob Menery]

There we go.

[Jordan Peterson]

Musk is doing. I mean, he's a remarkable person, but people are remarkable, so who knows what you could do?

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You guys have done well, you know, and you're very young. Sky's the limit. And that's a good thing to know. You know, it's. You've got. How old are you?

[Kyle Forgeard]

30.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. So you've got 60 more years. Right. Who knows what you could do if you got yourselves fully together? You know, you're already in a great position. You're very influential. You could do a world of good. That's a fun thing to figure out.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 publicly.

[Bob Menery]

Let's do it.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let's walk through it and I can ask you because I learned, 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.

[Bob Menery]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

So think about that. And if you want to do that, yeah, okay, let's do it. Let's do it. We could do that. Maybe we could do that around when the book launches.

[Bob Menery]

All right. Jordan Peterson.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hey, thank you, sir. Thanks for the invitation. It's real good to get to know you guys a bit.