EntreLeadership - Core Beliefs and Mindsets for Success with Dr. Jordan Peterson

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Today, we’ll hear about: •      How to uncover your core values with Dr. Jordan Peterson •      This could make or break your business with Dr. Jordan Peterson •      This caused Dr. Jordan Peterson to change his political thinking •      Dave Ramsey’s favorite rule from Dr. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life Links mentioned in this episode: •      The EntreLeadership Podcast: https://bit.ly/TheEntreLeadershipPodcast •      There's No Such Thing as a Dragon by Jack Kent: https://bit.ly/42tB3A4 •      12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson: https://bit.ly/42s2aeT •      Get access to the Summit 2023 livestream replays: https://bit.ly/43QZpFj •      Learn more and apply for an Advisory Group: https://bit.ly/3IWVFK7 •      Get your tickets for EntreLeadership Summit 2024: https://bit.ly/3LRiZJH •      Have a question for The EntreLeadership Podcast? Leave a voicemail at 844.944.1070 or submit your question for a chance to be on the show with Dave Ramsey: https://www.entreleadership.com/ask Start growing in business and leadership with the EntreLeadership Newsletter. Sign up to receive tactical tools, advice and resources in your inbox every week: https://bit.ly/3IRWnsL Support our sponsors: •      NetSuite: https://bit.ly/NetSuiteEntre •      BELAY: https://bit.ly/351P9AE •      Payority: https://bit.ly/3IaA5SK •      Staples: https://staplesbusinessadvantage.com/ramsey Learn more about EntreLeadership Events: •      EntreLeadership Summit: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipSummit •      EntreLeadership Master Series: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipMasterSeries   Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching: •      Elite: https://bit.ly/3tI2fN8 •      Advisory Groups: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipAdvisoryGroups •      Executive Coaching: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipExecutiveCoaching •      Workshops: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipWorkshops Listen to all the Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere in our Ramsey Network app: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq Learn more about your ad choices: https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy: https://www.ramseysolutions.com/company/policies/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A special edition of the Entree Leadership Podcast today. At Entree Leadership Summit, we were able to sit down with Dr. Jordan Peterson on the stage with our platinum attendees. And do an interview. It was quite interesting, as you might guess, with Dr. Peterson. There's a lot of things you can accuse him of, but being uninteresting is not one of them. So there you go. It was a lot of fun, actually, and I think you're in for a treat. if you want to hear more from Dr. Jordan Peterson.

He's got a lot more leadership insight than we can cover in just this hour that you're about to listen to. Check out Entree Leadership Summit Live Stream replays. Summit is the premier leadership conference of the year where we bring together the top minds in business and in leadership. Dr. Jordan Peterson is one of our speakers on stage in addition to this podcast that we recorded with him, and he delivered some wisdom that every business leader ought to hear. So even though you'd miss this year's event, there's still time to get access to the summit live stream replays. Go to ontorailorship.com slash replays to learn how the best leaders lead from Dr. Jordan

Peterson and from all of our summit speakers. So here's our interview with Dr. Peterson. Well, for you guys that are joining us on the podcast, we appreciate it. What you're hearing, the cheering you're hearing is from our platinum attendees at the Entry Leadership Summit, and they just came back with lunch and had no idea that I was going to be sitting here with the one and only Dr. Jordan Peterson. Welcome, Dr. Peterson. Good to see you all. Good to be here as well. Yep. Obviously, you guys know who he is, best-selling author and clinical psychologist and general ruckus causer on Twitter, and among other places, and stirring it up out there

for sure. So good to spend time with you. Thanks for hanging out with us. Yeah, well, it's good to meet you in person. We had a good conversation, what, two weeks ago? Yeah, we did on the Ramsey Show. We sure did. So let's get to the important things first. I think grandparenting might be the best thing on the planet. What is your grandpa name? Let's see, what does my granddaughter call me? She's five. She just calls me Grandpa. Yeah, yeah. And I have three grandkids. And yes, is it the best thing on the planet? it? It's definitely up there, that's for sure. All the joy and hardly any of the responsibility. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm convinced grandbabies are about the best thing out there. If I'd

have known how great they were going to be, I'd have been nicer to their parents. Well, you can make that up to them now. Yeah, that's right. Now we can cause all kinds of trouble. So the dragon tie, that's with the theme of the children's book, right? That's right. Yeah, well, the lining of this coat is from, there's no such thing as a dragon. Which is your favorite children? Yeah, yeah, I used to read it to my third year undergraduates at the University of Toronto as an introduction to a course I did there called Maps of Meaning. It's a very short book, and it's very playful and funny, and it tells the story of a family who denies the existence of a small dragon in their house, and there is a small dragon in your

house, you can be sure of that, and the moral of the story fundamentally is that if you ignore small things that are causing trouble, they turn into big things that will devour you. And that's essentially what happens in the book, is the dragon grows big enough so that nothing can ever be done in the house. And then it runs away with the house. And the little boy insists the whole time that the dragon is there, and his mother and father deny it. And after it runs away with their house, they finally admit to its existence and begin to pay attention, and then it shrinks, and then it, you know, shrinks down to a manageable size, and they all cohabit happily together.

Sounds like a good therapy session. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's the core of psychotherapy, because partly what you do in psychotherapy, and this was established by Freud, is that you confront the dragon that's run away with you, you. And that might be something traumatic that happened to you long ago, or it might be this consequence of, you know, an accruing set of traumas that have aggregated across time. And the goal always in psychotherapy is to turn and face that which is chasing you. No, and the moral of the story, the therapeutic story, and this children's story, is that

if you pay attention to the things that you're afraid of, you can generally master them and cut them down to size. And that's what attention is for, actually. Changes everything. All right, changing gears for our business audience. I'm really, I should have read this five years ago when it came out, and it's what, over 15 million copies probably now, 12 rules? Yeah, 10 million in the English language, and I don't know how many million on the international front.

It's hard to keep track of that. Fabulous, of course. Chewy read, very chewy, but very good, very good. I'm enjoying going through it. And the bookmark is from the seven-year-old grandchild. Oh, yeah, that's good. She left me a note on a napkin, so I'll use that as my bookmark. But one of the things I've enjoyed watching your move and watching what you're pulling off in your space

and with your brand and the whole process is just how you're leaning in on values. At Ramsey, we've got 14 core values, which my friend Pat Lincione makes fun of me. He says, how can they be core if there's 14 of them? but yeah, because he thinks we ought to only have three, and he and I have a lot of arguments about that, but he's wrong. But we've got core values, and the problem with values is once you state them,

if they really are values, then a lot of your decisions are already made. It's the execution then that's painful. If you say, you can't work here if we do this, this is a core value, we don't mistreat people, and you're mistreating someone, you can't stay, then automatically we know what we have to do when someone misbehaves in that way, but now we've got to go through the pain and the process of letting someone go,

and it's very, very painful. So a lot of these guys have not necessarily set their core values in place. They're guiding principles. How do you go about uncovering in an organization and a business what your core values, your guiding principles are? Well, I would say the first thing likely to do when you're trying to solve that problem is don't fall prey to HR or managerial speak. You know, there's nothing I find more painful except maybe reading art criticism than reading badly written corporate vision statements. No, God.

Because mostly they look to me like their post hoc justifications and hand-waving. and that makes them hypocritical and false as well as generally inelegant and painful sort of aesthetically. That's a really bad idea. What you want to do instead is you want to figure out what it is that you're trying to do. And maybe what you're trying to do, it's possible that what you're trying to do fundamentally is make money. And I actually don't think there's anything wrong with that fundamentally. I don't think that should be something that is, what would you say, core to your life, because if you're willing to sacrifice everything to money,

you're going to run into some serious problems very, very rapidly. But, you know, as part of your business endeavor, I actually think it's a worthwhile goal because it brings a certain amount of discipline to your endeavors. You know, I do almost everything I do on a for-profit basis because it's one of the ways of stopping yourself from making stupid decisions, right? Because it's not that easy to run something in a manner that will actually generate a profit,

and it keeps you lean and careful and focused if you require yourself to do that. And you shouldn't be apologetic about that either, because unless you're willing to sacrifice everything to money, attempting to run something profitably just means that you're running it in a way that can maintain the organization and allow it to grow, and in principle, that's admirable. If you want to derive your core values, you have to figure out, well, why the hell are you doing what you're doing?

you know what is it and you really have to think that through it's like you're willing to devote your life your time your resources of your energy the time you could be spending with your family you're willing to devote this to this enterprise well what is your enterprise aiming at and it probably has one aim that's transcendent let's say and by that i mean above all other aims and you need to be very clear about what that is and once you are clear about what that is, there will be a handful of principles like game rules that will emerge from that. If this is what we're doing, then we have to do this. And you don't want too many of those because they say bad rules drive out respect for good rules, right? Minimum necessary rules.

You're playing a game of sorts. There's some victory in mind. And in order to play that game and obtain the victory, there's a set of rules that you have to abide by, or principles that will enable your actions. And that's what your core values are, and that's part of your mission statement. Like a mission statement isn't some ethical postage stamp that you paste over what you're actually up to to look good. That's unbelievably damaging and hypocritical. What a mission statement is, and the statement of core values, is it emerges as the consequence of serious thought about what it is that you're engaged in. You know, like if you're working in construction,

well, high-quality housing, aesthetically pleasing, at the lowest possible cost delivered with maximal efficiency to clients that you serve hospitably and develop long-term relationships with. Like, that's a pretty good vision. I mean, people need somewhere to live, and they obviously need someone to provide it,

and if you're going to do it, you might as well do it well, and why not make it beautiful and treat your customers properly while you're doing it, like, where's the moral inadequacy in that? You know, and maybe the leftist will shake a finger at you and say, well, you're doing it at a profit, and that's all for you. It's like the proper response to that is, well, you're an inefficient dimwit if you run it at a loss, and so there's no morality there. Well, obviously, and you can't grow and you can't market,

and it's just a sign of your inadequacy. There's no exploitation in profit, not if you understand that, well, there is no exploitation, no necessary exploitation in profit. And it's very important to get that right so that when you're attacked, you're not feeling guilty. You know, we're talking backstage about this idea that successful people often, at some point in their career, they decide they're going to engage in philanthropic enterprises and they say, well, it's time for me to give back. It was like, well, what are you saying when you say that? I've been ripping you off for 30 years and I've got away with it.

Now I've got this pile of loot like Scrooge McDuck and I'm going to give 10% of it back so I can pat myself on the back. Well, that's not a good story. I mean, I've had a lot of jobs in my life and I've run a number of businesses and some of them have, you know, run into serious trouble and not worked out well and the others have thrived. and it is definitely the case that if you're going to run a business properly, that you have to run it as an ethical enterprise, and that there's no reason whatsoever to be apologetic about that. Quite the contrary, and one of the things that you could do on the leadership front, more broadly politically, let's say,

especially in relationship to the ongoing culture wars, is to stop being guilty about what you're doing. You can't let the bloody radicals on the left, especially because they're jealous and envious, and generally absolutely useless at doing anything even remotely productive. Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel. You can't let them torture you into the guilt-ridden admission

that your business enterprise has been exploitative. And it isn't exploitative merely because you generate a profit. I mean, look, if you're being a greedy weasel and you're ripping everyone else off, then you should stop doing that. But if you're offering genuine service to people and you know that you are if you have long-term returning customers, right? Because that means you've established a relationship with them.

That's actually a sign that you're engaging in a highly ethical enterprise. And it's incumbent on you to stop being guilty about that. And not just not guilty. It's like, no, up yours. What we're doing is good, not bad. You don't get to put us back on our heel morally. That's the difference in the free market and a voluntary market. Well, look, here's the way.

of thinking about it. You might want to get down to the core of what's ethical. How do you know that two people, that could be you and your customer, are engaged in an ethical enterprise? And the answer is, you both do it voluntarily, so there's no compulsion and force, but you do it in a manner that you both want to repeat. Like that's actually the definition of ethical. And look, imagine you have a relationship with your wife or your husband. and hopefully that's the case. It isn't just that you have a relationship, is you have a repeating sequence of micro-relationships, an indefinitely repeating sequence of micro-relationships.

And insofar as each of those micro-relationships is going well, you want to repeat them. And it's the fact that you're both voluntarily on board with that over the long run that indicates that it's an ethical enterprise. And you know well as small business owners, or maybe some of you are larger business owners, that you mistreat even one of your customers at your peril. Because if you mistreat someone,

not only will they remember that, and they will never forget it, and we have a specialized module as human beings, by the way, to remember cheaters. So you might forget people you cooperate with, but you do not forget people that ripped you off. And not only that, you will tell everybody you know about it. If you mistreat a handful of your customers,

I don't know how many. If you mistreat 100 customers, your business will fail. Because they'll tell 100 people, and that's 10,000, and that's probably enough to sink you. And so if you've been treating your customers well enough so that they've established long-term reciprocal relationships with you, same applies to your suppliers, then by definition you're engaging in an ethical enterprise. You know, and you might say, well, it could be better. It's like, well, good, make it better. But it's already ethical if it's sustainable. You know, I hate that word, but you know what I mean. If it's voluntarily sustainable, it's ethical. And one of the wonderful things about a free market society, it is a society of voluntary exchange.

That's what makes it ethical. Nobody has to be your customer. And certainly no one has to be your repeat customer or your supplier. And what that means is that you have to conduct yourself in a manner that's commensurate with mutual gain, right? And maybe mutual expanding gain in order for the whole game to continue. And that's what you want your marriage, is you want repeated interaction. in a manner that produces mutual expansion so that you want to keep playing with your partner, let's say,

but you want to do it in a way that makes the whole game better as you progress. You do exactly the same thing on the business front. And this isn't some hand-waving, you know, moralistic whitewashing. It's like, no, companies that don't do that, companies that rip off their customers fail. Companies that even mildly mistreat their customers fail. Now, that isn't true if there's,

an artificial monopoly, let's say, but then you're not in the domain of voluntary exchange. So as long as the system is set up so that your customer has a choice, and so does your suppliers, you have to conduct yourself in an ethical manner to succeed. And conservative types have done a very bad job of making that case. To the leftist, in particular, it's like, no, you don't understand. If we weren't ethical, given the rules of voluntary exchange, we would fail. So you come after us and you say, well, just because we, you've made a profit so you're an exploiter.

It's like, no, you have failed to make a profit because you're a loser, and now you're resentful about it, and you're coming after me, right? You know, and it's a bit more complicated because a lot of the people who criticize you, they've gone off to university, and they've been supplied by resentful and bitter losers, I would say, on the intellectual front,

with an array of sophisticated arguments about why you're an exploitive capitalist. And they're quite articulated about that, you know, and they're good at exploiting guilt. And another problem is that competent people who are conscientious, and that's a very good predictor of business success, especially on the managerial front, conscientious people are guilt-prone. And because conscientious people will be scouring their conscience all the time for things they've done wrong. And that's a good thing if you're going to run a business,

because you should pay attention to the details. But what it does is it opens you up on the attack front, Because if a radical comes after you and says, you could be a little less sexist than you are, and you could be a little less racist than you are, and maybe there's something about your profitable activity that's exploitive, if you're conscientious, you're going to feel guilty right away and say, well, you know, I probably could be better than I am, which is true.

But that doesn't mean that you give the moral upper hand to your accuser. It's like, well, who the hell are you to come after me? What have you done with your life? Do you have a family? Have you produced anything of value? Or you like an 18-year-old pup who is wet behind the ears, who's not maintained themselves at all, and think because you've been educated by idiots, that you now have the moral upper hand. So, yeah.

I think that's the critical thinking breakdown on the argument about generosity through taxation. Taxation is not voluntary. Yeah, that's a big problem. And it's not generosity. And yet it's posed as, we're going to increase taxes. to be generous. And anyone who is generous, anyone who is compassionate

is going to go along with that. The actual basis for generosity is voluntary. Your heart has not changed when someone forces you to do something. There's another element to that. I read a great definition of Christian charity, and it applies to charity in general,

but this happened to be specifically a description of Christian charity. generosity and productivity right both right you don't get to be generous with someone else's money that's not generous that's the theft of someone else's money to elevate your moral virtue falsely

right if you're going to be charitable well the first thing you have to do is be useful enough to have something to offer well that's not easy and then you have to be useful enough to have enough to offer so that you can actually afford to distribute it in whatever way you see fit without causing you or the people who are immediately dependent on you undue stress. And that's not, that's profit for God's sake. Obviously, you know, if you're just barely getting by, well, you're not going to be able to be charitable. I mean, sometimes people are even under those circumstances, but it's somewhat self-defeating

in that they cut the ground from underneath their feet. if you're going to be charitable in the most fundamental sense, you have to be productive, and then you have to be generous. And, you know, a shortcut to that is to say, well, no, your productivity is just theft. And so now we can steal from you, and now we can be generous with your money, and now we can claim moral virtue

because we've stolen money from the exploiters to be generous with. It's like there isn't a bit of that argument that's credible in the least. But because conservative types, and maybe even the classical liberals, it's easy to make them feel guilty, the radicals, you know, have a free hand in putting that agenda forward. There's no, there isn't a single element of that that's moral in any sense whatsoever.

I mean, I suppose you could say, look, left to their own devices, people are so innately cruel and useless that all they'll do is hoard money for themselves and never be philanthropic. And the answer to that is, conservatives voluntarily give more money to charitable enterprises than liberals do. End of argument. So, and that's despite taxation. So you don't have a moral leg to stand on on that front. We were fighting an income tax in the state of Tennessee 10 or 15 years ago, 15 years ago, I guess now.

And I told the guys, if you think the state of Tennessee needs more taxes, just send them some. Send them some extra money. Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. You can do that. No one would do it. Well, there's a little line at the end of the Canadian tax form that allows you to do that if you want. Yeah. That's right.

No one doesn't. Some money, man. it's going right ahead. No one does it. It's the most inefficient charity on the planet. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, and even charitable enterprises, you know, it's one of the, it's no easier to do good with money than it is to run a profitable enterprise with money.

And maybe that's because those are actually the same thing. You know, there's no shortage of harm done by stupid giving. And just because you're hypothetically motivated by, compassion doesn't mean that you're going to run an enterprise that's going to do people good. It's really hard to do good. It's way easier to sow discord and cause trouble and to mask that with some facade of compassionate care. And so there's plenty of evidence on the foreign aid front that foreign aid does way more harm than good. And I think that's, I think the evidence is 100% credible. You know what it's like if because you all run small. I'll tell you a story about

what changed my political thinking when I was very young. When I was 16, 13 to 16, I worked with a socialist party in the province of Alberta, which is where I grew up. And I was fortunate enough to know the leader of the socialist party in my province, home province of Alberta, who was the only opposition member of parliament in the whole province. It was like 36 conservatives and one socialist. And the only reason the people in my home district voted for this man was because he was a good man. He was a labor leader, and most of the socialists at that time in Canada were former labor leaders. And they did stand at least in part for the genuine interests of the working class.

Anyways, I worked with them for a few years, and I got disenchanted in part because when I went to the conventions of the party, I met the radical types, and they were the same as they are now. And like, they just, I thought, what the hell's up with you people? You're just bitter and resentful. Like, you claim to be caring for the poor, but that's just a lie. You're just bitter and resentful. And you think morality consists of praying in public, right? It's like, you hold a sign that says, I'm against poverty.

It's like, well, who the hell isn't against poverty? You know, that's not a, I'm for poverty. It's like, you know, more homeless. because it makes me feel better by comparison. It's like nobody thinks that. Nobody thinks that. And so that set up a cognitive dissonance in my imagination. I thought, well, if this end of the political distribution has the moral upper hand,

why the hell is it producing all these resentful activists? And now, that's a question that we're asking ourselves in spades now. But then I was nominated. I served on the board of governors of this little college that I went to, Grand Prairie Regional College. And all of the people who were on the board were people, I presume, people like you, they were all owners of small businesses and they'd been successful. And the towns that I grew up in in northern Alberta were like 50 years old. You know, they'd just been scraped out of the prairie.

It was the last of the frontier. And everyone there was an immigrant. So most of the people who had started these small businessmen were immigrants who came there with nothing and built something. And even though I didn't share their political views, I found them individually admirable. And I also found that the same applied to the small businessman that I worked for at that point. I thought, well, you've actually done something with your life, you know,

and there's a solidity there, a productive solidity. Exactly. And so it was at that point that I realized they didn't know anything and just stopped working on the political front altogether. I decided at that point to become a psychologist rather than a lawyer or a politician, which is kind of where I was heading at that point in my life. And I realized that it was the people who had built productively that had the moral upper hand. They might not have been very good at expressing their ethos intellectually or explicitly,

but in terms of their character, they had established a victory. And I think this is actually the problem on the conservative front, broadly across the world, is that they're people of solid character, but they're not good at articulating the foundations of their ethos. And then when the radical leftists come along and take them apart ethically, they don't know what to do. They throw up their hands. Because, I mean, think about it this way.

Someone comes up to you on the street and says, justify marriage. And you think, well, I thought we sorted that out like 25,000 years ago. You don't know what to say. You have no idea how justify marriage. You know, a lot of the things we do in our life that are ethical, we do, we act out, we don't think through. Like, I presume the vast majority of you put up a Christmas tree.

Well, you have no idea why. You know, like, and if someone, anthropologist came over to your house and said, well, why do you put up a Christmas tree? You'd say, well, everyone does it. Something like that. It's beautiful and it's part of a tree. But you have no idea why. I mean, there are reasons for the Christmas tree. That's a place where you put the light that shines in the darkness at the darkest time of the year.

And that light signifies, in the Christian tradition, that light signifies Christ, and that signifies the service of the highest to the lowest. And you're acting that out, but you don't know it. And when you're married, you're acting out a very deep ethos as well. And you don't know what it is. But everyone's agreed on it. And a lot of your conservative virtues are things that everybody's already agreed on. And so when an intellectual comes along and says,

justify that, you don't know what the hell to say. And then you can be picked apart. You know, well, isn't your ideal of marriage, heterosexual, long-term, stable, child-centered couples? Isn't that exclusionary? And isn't the exclusion wrong? Well, you think, well, exclusion, yeah, well, that's wrong. And, well, I don't know. And then you're guilty.

And it isn't because you're wrong. It's just that you don't know how to articulate that traditional value. And, well, and that's a huge problem. That's a huge problem. But that doesn't mean you're wrong. And the same thing applies on the profit front. It's like it's hard to articulate why that's acceptable. Also because it does seem like if you're generating profit,

it's obviously the case that that can be used by you for narrow personal reasons, right? You can buy a yacht and fill it with supermodels and cocaine if you want. And that, but people don't. And most wealthy people in the United States, by the way, are like you. They're the owners of not immense businesses, you know, small to moderate businesses, and they're very conservative in their consumerist habits and careful in their distribution of their resources. They're not like Hollywood hedonists, you know, or the Wall Street psychopath types.

Not that all Wall Street people are psychopath types, but you know the kind that are parodied in movies. You know, your people who are very careful with your capital and you live moderately. That's also a sign of that ethos, but it's hard for conservatives to articulate that. doesn't mean you're wrong. It doesn't mean that you should be guilty. One of the ways you combat those kinds of things if you don't have... Number one, don't have to have an argument.

You just have to be right and just keep moving. But I don't have to defend. I don't have to enter into that conversation. Like, yeah, you're a nut and I'm moving on. Yeah, well, partly we're in a situation where you probably do have to learn to articulate it because what's happening is that that central ethos, that traditional ethos, even voluntary exchange,

it's under such vicious attack that if you don't learn to defend it and articulate it, it's going to be taken from you. And that probably means, I suspect that means that each of you is going to have to think to some degree about how to involve yourself in at least the local political landscape.

It's like, you know what the school boards are doing, or maybe you don't, and you should. I mean, these low-level political positions have been occupied by radical types. And the only real solution to that is to take them away and occupy them with people who have some sense. And the problem is you probably have something better to do.

But it doesn't matter, because at the moment, if you abdicate that responsibility, then the radicals are going to take it and then they're going to take what you have. That already happened in the universities. We abdicated our responsibility as professors, and the radicals took the institutions from us.

And as far as I'm concerned, they're gone. We're not getting them back. They're done. So what happened in the universities is the administration took over the faculty. The faculty retreated 3,000 steps. The administration took over the faculty, and then the DEI radicals took over the administration. And the same thing's happening on the corporate front, and the way that you're enabling that, I don't know how relevant this is to everybody in the room, but you hire an HR person, you hire DEI consultant, you start playing that game maybe to keep the critics off your back,

they will take you out. Don't do that. That's a big mistake. You think, well, you know, we have to play the public relations game. We have to look like we're appeasing the radicals. You can't appease a snake. It's a big mistake. And so...

So one of my, as I'm going through the 12 rules, I think maybe one of my favorite is make friends with people who want the best for you. I am convinced that one of the reasons we've been able to agree, Roe Ramsey from nothing, is that I early in my process realized that isolation for leaders is a death now. I mean, it's a real problem, especially running a small business, that you just don't have anybody to talk to about this crap.

Right, right. You don't have anybody to process this stuff with. And so I put a group of guys around me. I called them the Eagles, and there are some of the most accomplished people in our community, and I put them together in a Bible study, and we call it the Eagles Bible study. But being around that group of men to bounce things off and to whine with when things were tough and to process decisions and all that, I'm convinced it changed everything. Make friends with people who want the best for you.

Charlie Tremendous Jones, one of the old motivators, used to say, five years from today you'll be the same you are, same as you are today, except for the books you read and the people you meet. So make friends with people who want the best for you. talk about that, especially in light of isolation issues for leaders. Yeah, well, you know, here's a way of thinking about, it's hard to get the terms right, because we talk about it, our culture, I mean, and psychologists as well, talk about it as mental health.

And it sort of sounds like something that's in your head, you know. In your brain, mental health means you have a healthy nervous system. mental health means you're well-structured internally as a psychological entity. And that's actually, it's half true. So here's an example. Let's say you are mentally healthy, and one of your children is doing very badly. Well, you're going to be suffering away. You're going to be anxious and distressed and have some decrement of hope.

And so that's not you exactly, not if you think of you as something that's only internal, but it's definitely something that's affecting your mental health. And the reason for that is that mental health is not you. So you need to be well-constituted psychophysiological, right? Your body has to be in working order, and the different elements of your nervous system have to be integrated into something like a coherent and visionary whole. And that's you.

But then, like, you need an intimate partner. and that has to be a diatic relationship that's communicating well, and then that needs to be nested inside a family, and that needs to be nested inside a community, including a community of friends, and then that needs to be nested inside a town or a city and a state or a province, and then a nation, and all of those things have to be working harmoniously together.

And so if you're going to be sane, you have to be acceptable to, valued by, and in constant contact with a social group. And then you need to, if you're wise, select your social group carefully. I mean, this is why there were businessmen organizations like the Rotary and the Kinsman and so forth. And, you know, we see their membership plummeting in recent years.

But it was there because people were wise enough to understand that even if you had attained things, you know, on your own as a solitary venture and entrepreneur, that it was extremely useful to have a community around you. It's not good that men be alone. No, no, no, look, here's how you stay sane. This is what sane means. Sane means that you are acceptable enough to other people,

so they tell you when you're stupid. Right, because if you have 20 people, well, that's exactly, you distribute the problem of your own sanity. That's right. Well, that's what marriage. Marriage, a huge part, the advantage of marriage is that, is that, you know, your wife taps you back into position and vice versa. And all you have to do is be acceptable enough.

so she won't leave, and she'll continue to do that. Right. Right. Well, every single one of us is so complicated that we can't regulate ourselves. Like, you'll fall apart on your weakest side. But if you have people around you who are bolstering you, and those would be genuine friends,

those are people who are pleased when good things happen to you and commiserate with you when bad things happen to you. Right? They're there when you, they're there in good times, bad. And you know who your friends are, especially if you've gone through bad times. And it isn't that those friends in some ways are additions to your mental health. They are actually, without them, there's no way you can be mentally healthy. Any more than a kid with no friends can be a happy kid. Right. The definition of a happy kid is one who's at the center of a well-functioning network

of voluntary friends. There's no difference between that and setting up your life properly. That's why children set their lives up like that. They're doing that to practice becoming a fully functional adult. And so you do, you need a network around you that's thriving and communicating. And, you know, another thing to understand, too, is the mechanism of free speech is the process by which those social relationships maintain their integrity. So, you know, in a marriage, if the principle of free speech doesn't apply in your marriage, it's doomed. Because you you cannot discuss your actual problems and solve them. And then they just accrue, like the little dragon that we talked about at the beginning of this conversation, they just accrue. And once there's

enough of them, then you spend your fortune in divorce court. Right. So unless you can speak freely with your wife, and that means there's going to be some conflict, because free speech means conflict, because you're dealing with real problems. Unless that principle of free speech applies, the relationship will disintegrate. And that's the same at every level. That's the same. That's That's why free speech isn't a right given to you by the state. Free speech is the precondition for the stability of the state, and it has to stay the hell away from it, from interfering with that principle, or it will doom itself. So that's why we think about it as a God-given right, right?

It's outside. It's the process upon which the integrity of the state itself depends, no matter what level you're conceptualizing the state. You know, because your marriage is a tiny state. And it's the same with your family. And if the information is flowing freely, that's going to cause some conflict, obviously, because you're going to discuss difficult things. And you have to do that because life is difficult.

And, you know, a problem's going to come at you at your family, and you guys aren't going to feel the same way about how to solve it. So then you have to have an argument about it. You have to exchange your opinions. And hopefully you do that in a way that helps you come up with a solution to the problem that's likely to work. And all that's dependent on free speech. Now, walk through how this connectivity with people causes your personal growth, causes you to become something tomorrow that you aren't today.

Well, look, look, think about what we're doing in this dialogue, eh? Like, there's a variety of things happening here at the same time. So you and I are trying to establish a relationship, at least for the purpose of this podcast, right? And maybe if we have some sense, we're trying to do it in a way that would make it more likely for us to want to meet again in the future. So like we could attempt to dominate each other and we could attempt to one-up each other and we could attain some relative status in doing that right now. But if you did that to me, I wouldn't talk to you again and vice versa. So that would be a stupid medium to long-term strategy.

You know, instead, we could sit here and try to exchange some information in an exploratory way, and you could come away, you know, somewhat changed, and I can come away somewhat changed, and that's a good deal, and then maybe we'd enjoy that if we did it in proper proportion, and we think, you know, we could have another conversation, and that would be the beginning of a friendship, right, and you can see an ethic emerging out of that. Now, it's more complicated than that in this situation, because we have to do that, in a way that engages you. And that means we have to craft our gestures and our words

in a way that brings you in as participants in the conversation. You might say, well, it's not a conversation because you're on stage. It's like if it's not a conversation, your mind is going to wander. You're going to start thinking, you know, I might as well check my phone, or you're going to be thinking about other problems that you have in the back of your mind. They're going to come to the forefront. It's a conversation if the two of us are capturing your interest because we're watching you and paying attention to the situation and ensuring that the points that we continue to make are keeping your attention. Now, if you're a public speaker, you can tell that because of the silence.

See, you know that if the crowd is silent and people aren't rustling around, that they're not distracted. and you know if they're not distracted, they're focused, and you know if they're focused that it's a conversation. And so you're participating in the conversation with your nonverbal attention. But that doesn't mean it's not a conversation. It's still a conversation. And so we're doing that altogether.

Social media has made the comparison game get completely out of control. and in business we always study best practices. We want to see what another organization is doing. And the downfall for that I've seen so many times personally, and also with some of the folks we coach, the downfall of that is that you can get a bit ADD. You can get all over the map. In other words, you can change your direction 16 times

because you're constantly comparing yourself to others. And one of your 12 rules is compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today? Well, part of the problem possibly with social media is that it's a lot of one-off comparisons. You know, like I said, if we were never going to see each other again, ever, arguably, although I still think this is wrong, arguably I could take a chance to just defeat you, right?

Because then I would accrue the status and could move on. Now, if we're constrained by the fact that we have to meet again, then that's a stupid strategy. That's why you tell your kids, by the way, this is another example of how you act out an ethos that you don't understand. You know, maybe you have a kid on the sports field who's a real star. Maybe he's more skilled than anyone else on the playing field. But he's kind of a jerk, you know, and he won't pass to his teammates.

And if he scores, he takes all the credit and does a little dance, and if he loses, he whines. And so you're embarrassed. And you tell your kid, look, you know, for all your skill, I'm a bit ashamed to you. And the kid says, what's your problem, dad or mom, what's your problem? I am the best player out there and my team would have lost without my effort.

And you know, that might be true. And you think, well, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It matters how you play the game. And the kid says, yeah, but I tried to win and I did win. And so, like, what are you talking about? And you don't know what to say. And what you say is, look, kid, the winner is the one who gets asked to play again. Right, exactly that, man.

And if you violate that principle, you think you've won because that's because you're a fool. You're taking the local victory over the long-term victory. And you don't do that. You don't subordinate the long-term victory to the local victory. And when you tell your kid to be a good sport, you're saying, conduct yourself in a manner that makes you the person that everyone invites to play forever. And you do that. How do you do? You know how you do that.

You give credit where it's due. You don't take all the victory on to yourself. You try to nurture the people underneath you, so to speak, so that they can become as or more competent than you. You take responsibility for the flaws. You're not too triumphant when you win, and you're not too devastated when you lose. Those are all the principles of fair play.

And the reason those are principles is because if you play that way, people will invite you to keep playing. And so if your kid is a good sport, he'll have friends, and maybe friends for life, and then he wins. And you say, you don't sacrifice that. that kid so that you can be the best soccer player here today when you're, you know, in grade six. And, and you have this local victory. That's stupid. That's foolish. It's unwise. Now, you know, generally, we're not articulate enough to lay that out. But, you know, when you lay it out like that,

people can understand it right away. You have to conduct your businesses like that. Exactly. That's to be reciprocal. 100%. And the more reciprocal your business is, the more it'll thrive, you know. You want your customers to be not satisfied. You want your customers to be thrilled and you want to do the same with people you enter into a business relationship with. I mean, that's my criteria for being involved in a business. That was the criteria for the Daily Wire Deal that I made a year ago. It's like we both walked away from that negotiation thrilled. The idea was, yeah, absolutely, man. We're 100% on board with this. And that's what you want from a supplier, right? If you're the kind of negotiator that walks away

from your supplier going, I really got one up on him. It's like, yeah, till he figures it out. And then it has like a hundred schemes up his sleeve, how you're now low priority business on the supply chain front. You want the guy to think, oh my God, this is such a good deal. I can hardly believe it happened. And I'm going to do absolutely everything I possibly can to make this relationship last. And you want the same attitude, well, with your wife and your husband, that's for sure,

but definitely with your customers. if you have any sense at all. And most of you, all of you, I presume, to the degree that you've been successful, you know, you know this. You want people to be thrilled with the fact that they're dealing with you. You know, I mean, the best companies I've ever dealt with, they'll make mistakes. But then when you call them and you say, look, you know, this kind of screwed up, they say, hey, man, we're sorry, we will be over there to fix this right now.

And please let us know if there's anything else we can do to rectify our error. And that's not just, you know, HR marketing hand-waving. They're over there the next day and they fix the mistake. And so then you think, well, you know, not only do they try hard, but even if they do screw up, they fix it. I'm perfectly happy to continue that relationship into the foreseeable future. That's the basis for voluntary exchange that iterates. See, one of the things that psychologists have learned is that that's how ethics itself emerges. like ethics is the pattern of behavior, let's say, in conception,

that governs repeated into relationships. So I could dominate you on a one-on-one, let's say. But the problem is you wouldn't want to have anything to do with me again. And if we're going to interact repeatedly, which we want to do, if we're going to establish a credible, let's say, and deep business relationship, I better be treating you, certainly treating you as well as I would treat myself, and vice versa.

and I think it's partly because there's no difference. If we're going to interact in the long run, the difference between us starts to disappear. Because your interest is now, it's literally now my interest. They are the same thing. You know, and if you surround yourself with a thousand people and their interest and your interest is now theirs and vice versa, well, you have a thousand people working in your interest.

I mean, how could you possibly have a better deal than that? There's a thousand to them and one of you. If you're working hard to work to promote their interests, and they see that, they're going to work hard to promote yours. And then everybody wins. And what I mean by that is that's actually how societies become wealthy, you know, abundant. I mean, literally everybody wins. And it's not because then that 1,000 and 1 are extracting excess resources from the other million. No, they're actually creating abundance.

They're creating wealth. It's not theft. you can't steal what's not there but it has to be produced and you produce it obviously you produce it through the voluntary exchange of labor clearly you know and this is another place where the left

they're so off target ethically you know the degree of absolute poverty in the world in the last since the fall of the Berlin Wall essentially it has plummeted so fast it's unparalleled in human history you know there wouldn't be any people in the world who were in privation now if it wasn't for political corruption. And that's all because,

it's all because the principle of voluntary exchange has become almost a universal norm, even though, you know, we're starting to savage it again. And that's lifted the billions of people that everyone predicted would starve the majority of them into the middle class. Right, in 30 years. It's an absolute bloody miracle. And the idea that the leftist radicals who criticize, that could possibly have the moral upper hand in the face of that kind of evidence, it's a kind of miracle. And it's a miracle of the inarticulate guilt on the part of the classic liberal and conservative types, because the evidence is crystal clear. You know, there are a vanishingly, a vanishingly small proportion of the world's population is in absolute privation.

And if we continue, even on the developmental pathway that we're on now, there'll be no poverty in the world at all by 20, 25, despite the fact that there'll be like 8 billion people. I mean, my God, it's such a miracle, and that's a voluntary exchange miracle. And to the degree that you're participating in that, you're bringing that about. There's nothing to feel guilty about on that front. And you have to become articulate enough to start to be able to defend this. And maybe that's why you want to take on your political responsibility, you know, because doing that would force you to become articulate enough to defend your principles.

And that's a good thing to learn. You know, and then your models for the young people in your community who are looking at a pathway forward that involves responsible citizenship instead of this idiot subjectivity that they're being conned into by the radicals. It's like, no, get out there and be responsible and productive and generous. That's a way to have life. You know, get married, have some kids, start a business, do something productive, profitably, and then be intelligently generous.

They'll have some meaning in your life. and then when the storms come, you'll have something to buttress you. You know, some real relationships, some real accomplishments. You know that in your own life, you know, the things that you've done well. That's what you've got when the storms come. So you want to invite young people along for that, and you've got to shed your foolish guilt in order to manage that. Dr. Jordan Peterson, ladies and gentlemen.

Well, that was fun. I'm glad you were with us. I don't get to do weird stuff like that very often, and I'm not that good of an interviewer, but you don't have to be with him. All you get to is just toss a piece of meat into the cage and the lion will get after it. I mean, there you go. So, fairly easy to do, guys. And what an interesting, interesting dude.

A lot of fun. Hey, if you're like most business owners, you don't have anybody to talk to about the struggles of running a business. And ultimately, that affects your ability to grow and make decisions. We created advisory groups so you could join. other business owners who are looking for the same thing as you. Community. I walked with a group of men we called the Eagles in the early days of our business the first 14 years. Every Wednesday morning we got together. Those are guys outside my business that spoke into my life in a lot of areas,

and business was part of it. I'm convinced that part of the reason Ramsey's where it is today is because of that group. So when you connect with like-minded, like-valued business owners in an advisory group, changes everything. So go to Entreeleadership.com slash coaching to learn more and apply for a group. Hey, folks, that about puts this version in the books. Remember, better a weary warrior than a quivering critic. Leaders serve. Leaders are active, not passive.

Leaders act on principle, not appearances. This world needs more high-quality leaders. So choose to lead. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. Thanks for listening to the Entree Leadership podcast.