The Iced Coffee Hour - An Unfiltered Conversation with Jordan Peterson

Starting point is 00:00:00 The more forward-looking you are, the more mature you are. The more your actions in the present are bound by the future. You might say, well, I just want to be happy. And the first question is, what the hell do you mean by happy? Do you mean extroverted? Do you mean full of positive emotion? Do you mean you're not suffering? Like, what the hell do you mean happy?

Starting point is 00:00:18 There is a much more profound way of evaluating life's utility than the hedonic evaluation, because many difficult things cause suffering but are worth doing. So do you think people are less happy today than they were 20, 30 years ago? Yes. What do you think is the biggest cause of that? Universities.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Lies. Really? Lies. You have to have an orientation towards the truth. And it has to be a kind of terrified orientation. What would you say is your biggest insecurity? We really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show.

Starting point is 00:01:03 Like, seriously, it means a lot. The fact that... I've been looking forward to this for a very... years. Years. We've been hoping that this would happen. So it really does mean a lot. I know you're very busy. You have, obviously, the YouTube channel, the podcast, you just close out the tour. And then, of course, Peterson Academy, which I looked at the trailers. It looks amazing. They're nice, eh? Yeah. Yes. The production quality. It's like, I look at that and I'm inspired. I'm like, I need production quality like that for our show. Up your game, man. So during our research, we found a video of you where someone asked you about IQ. And you said you were previously tested quite a while ago, and you said it was an excess of 150.

Starting point is 00:01:41 Granted, it does decline as you age. And you also said having a high IQ like that means that you have high volatility or variance in other areas of intelligence. As intelligence increases, the variability in intelligence increases. So psychometrically, there's sort of one way to be not very bright and a variety of ways to be very bright. So there's differentiation at the upper end. right and so my i would say i'm not particularly gifted mathematically so i struggled with statistics i

Starting point is 00:02:12 eventually figured it out but it certainly didn't come to me easily i don't tend to think mathematically i've certainly had students who are like immeasurably more intelligent than me on the mathematical front i had a student at harvard she went from zero statistics to winning teaching awards for teaching it in about six months she was a little autistic She was also a very good writer. That's a rare combination to have that extreme spatial, mathematical intelligence and extreme verbal intelligence. You get a person like that now and then, it's pretty rare.

Starting point is 00:02:47 And she was just coded that way to be able to do that? That wasn't anything that she did to be able to learn quickly? IQ is very biologically determined. Very. And it's very rough. It's no wonder. My student and I, Daniel Higgins, who was a partner in mine in business still, we, at Harvard in the 1990s, we did a lot of work

Starting point is 00:03:08 investigating the world of psychometric measurement. So that would be the assessment of cognitive ability and personality. And we delved very deeply into the literature on neuropsychological function. And so that's from a field that basically derived its information from animal experimental studies as well as human beings, study of human beings with various forms of brain damage. There was an effort, I don't know if that's still ongoing, to develop tests that would be associated, where people would show deciments that were associated with known areas of brain damage. They developed a lot of specialized tests. My student and I, on my old supervisor, we

Starting point is 00:03:55 computerized a battery of so-called neuropsychological tests, and then we used them and IQ tests and personality to predict academic performance and managerial performance and like line worker performance trying to figure out, well, two things. What exactly is it that makes someone productive depending on their positioning? And then also how could that be measured effectively so that if you wanted to hire or place or promote, you could do that in the most effective possible manner. And so that meant that we had to thoroughly familiarize ourselves with the neuropsychological literature, I already kind of new with the IQ literature, which was quite new to me and then with the personality literature. And so the basic claim of the psychometricians on the IQ side is that

Starting point is 00:04:41 for all intents and purposes, IQ is relatively unitary. So intelligence, general cognitive ability, personality is multidimensional, but cognitive ability, although it differentiates at the upper end, is a pretty solid unit. And so, and no one likes that idea. And no wonder. It's no wonder. So why would people not like it? Well, it seems very unfair and anti-egalitarian to note that there's wide variation in the trait that is the best predictor of long-term success in complex occupations.

Starting point is 00:05:20 It's not like the cards are dealt out equally. They're not dealt out equally at all. How much of that is genetic? Most of it. So if you have smart parents, you're probably going to be smart. parents, you're going to be slightly less smart than the average of your parents. Because imagine that your intelligence isn't determined only by your parents. It's determined in a way by the whole stream of your ancestry. Now, if you have two smart parents on average, their ancestors are going to be

Starting point is 00:05:46 slightly less smart than they are. So you get the best way to predict your IQ, if we didn't know anything else, would be to take the IQ of your mother and father and average them and then reduce it somewhat, because that's called regression towards the mean. So there's a tendency for biological forms to default back to their standard configuration. Or increase it if the average was lower than... Yeah, that's right. So if you had two parents who were impaired in their cognitive ability or far below average, on average, you'd be smarter than they were.

Starting point is 00:06:16 Would that then suggest that with enough time we're all going to be about even if everyone's kind of... Oh, yeah. The average is 100. Hasn't it been going up over time, though? There's debate about that. It's gone up over time in some ways for sure. So although it's difficult to increase IQ, you get companies now and then who pop up and claim that they can increase your cognitive function.

Starting point is 00:06:40 There's zero evidence for that. There's no, what happens if you practice a complex task, you tend to get much better at the complex task, say a video game, but it doesn't transfer over and make you generally smarter. No one's figured out how to increase IQ with cognitive exercises. You can maintain or increase your IQ with exercise, cardiovascular and weightlifting, because your brain is a very demanding organ. So if your cardiovascular system is healthy, especially as you age, that's a huge deal.

Starting point is 00:07:11 There's nothing that you can do that's more important than staying in physical shape to maintain your cognitive ability. But nobody knows how to increase it. I mean, that would be a discovery of infinite value, but no one's figured it out. you can suppress IQ quite easily by say not stimulating young children to the degree that their intelligence has room to play, let's say, or by not breastfeeding them, that that's a good way to have stupider children. If that's what you're after, breastfeeding confers, I think, something like a three to four point increment per year breastfed. It's something like... Why is that? Is it just the bond?

Starting point is 00:07:54 nutrition. The brain's a very demanding organ. And so it uses a tremendous amount of your metabolic resources. And so nutrition and exercise make a huge difference. So if you take, you asked about biological determinism

Starting point is 00:08:10 with regards to IQ. So imagine that you take twins, identical twins who are separated at birth. And then you track their IQ as they age. Well, by the time there's 60, their IQs are so similar regardless of their background that it's as if you're testing the same person twice.

Starting point is 00:08:26 So strangely enough, if IQ is environmentally determined, you'd expect twins separated at birth to diverge as they age, they don't, they converge. So... I can see why that makes people very upset. There's a whole bunch of reasons to be upset by it.

Starting point is 00:08:41 I mean, when Daniel and I sorted this out in the 90s, we thought that this might be the shoal upon which Western culture demolishes itself because IQ is a vicious predictor of long-term success. It's by far the best predictor. It's five times as powerful as conscientiousness, which is the next best predictor.

Starting point is 00:09:05 So conscientiousness is associated with industriousness and orderliness. It's associated with political conservatism. It's associated with traditionalism. Outgroup, let's say, skepticism towards outgroups to some degree. That's conservatism more. And we probably can't measure conscientiousness. as accurately as we can measure IQ. We have to rely on personality scales and self-report and reports from other people.

Starting point is 00:09:32 That's the best we've been able to manage, and no one has been able to come up with a practical test of conscientiousness. Like I'm probably trying 50 things in my lab, bringing conscientious people into the lab, giving them different sorts of tests, seeing if we could figure out what activity, conscientious people would do better in the lab, so we could use that as a measure. We could never do it. We did things like, for example, imagine you have rows of ends, M's,

Starting point is 00:09:59 U's, which are visually quite difficult to distinguish. Imagine a variety of rows of those, and then your job is to go through and circle all the ends. You'd think perhaps that would be associated with something like diligence or industriousness, conscientiousness, but it's just another IQ test. It's very, very hard to find a cognitive test that isn't just IQ.

Starting point is 00:10:18 And IQ is very easy to measure. This is another thing that makes it troublesome, let's say, apart from the fact of unbelievable variation between people. Like, people with extreme IQs are so much more productive than people with on the lower end of the scale that they're not in the same universe in the sense. And they're certainly in the same moral universe and they have the same value intrinsically.

Starting point is 00:10:45 And IQ is not associated with morality, let's say, just because you're smarter doesn't mean you're a better person. And in fact, I think there's a temptation that comes along with intelligence that's Luciferian, and that's been warned about in mythologies forever, bitter intellect, you know, the person who has been gifted by God, so to speak, with a great intellect, who believes that the world should bow at their feet in consequence or presumes that they're rational, what would you say? Their cogitations produce systems of value that should be imposed upon the world. that's the Luciferian temptation. But there's a massive difference between people at the upper end of the

Starting point is 00:11:26 cost of distribution and people at the lower end. And so, and it's easy to measure. It's very robust. So, for example, imagine you had a library of 10,000 questions. Questions about anything, they require abstract cognition to solve. That's the only criteria. Multiple choice questions, vocabulary questions, general knowledge questions, mathematical questions, spatial rotation questions, anything that requires

Starting point is 00:11:54 abstract cognition. Okay, so they have 10,000 questions. Extract out a random set of 100 questions, give that to 100 people, sum their scores, rank order them. That's IQ. Now, the technical IQ test correct for age, but, you know, that's irrelevant with regards to the measurement. But before we get into that, we've got to do some quick math because the less money your business spends, the more money you get to keep. And with higher expenses on materials, employees, distribution, and borrowing, everything is costing more. So to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are upgrading to our sponsor, NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system that brings in accounting, HR, financial management, and inventory into one platform with one source of truth. With NetSuite, you could reduce IT costs because NetSuite lives in the cloud with no hardware required, and it's accessible from anywhere.

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Starting point is 00:14:37 Because Elon has said on a podcast before that his mind is like a storm and that most people probably. Yeah, well, he's probably also a little on the manic side. Like, so, so there's a phenomena. What of the phenomena that's associated with creativity is known as fluency and people who are fluent idea generators generate a lot of ideas. Now, that can get out of control. It gets out of control in media. And people like Musk, probably people like me, a lot of creative people, a lot of writers in particular, have a manic edge. And so they're, they're being flooded with ideas constantly. So like when I, this isn't quite so much the case for me anymore. Maybe it's a consequence of being older might also be a consequence of having my nervous system in somewhat

Starting point is 00:15:20 more stable configuration. But when I was running my first book, Maps and Meaning, like I was thinking about that book when I wasn't doing my research, let's say, which was kind of a break for me in many ways. I was thinking about that like 16 hours a day, nonstop, like ideas. a verbal stream of ideas associated. We're running through my head at high speed constantly, constantly. How are you ever? So Musk is going to have that aspect. That's fluency.

Starting point is 00:15:52 So you can do a fluency test. Fluency tests are actually pretty straightforward too. So one of the things, one of the ways of measuring fluency, for example, I would say, write down as many four-letter words that begin with the letter S in three minutes. So, or you can use words of any length beginning with any letter. And you score that for pure fluency, you just score that for number of words generated. And if you do that with a typical group of 50 people, some people generate like eight words and some people who generate 300. You know, that's a big difference.

Starting point is 00:16:23 And then you can, there's other fluency tests that assess more creativity, which is associated with IQ, but creativity has an additional element, which is captured by the personality trait openness to experience. creative people. So imagine that if you bring an idea to mind, there's some probability that an associated idea will come along for the ride. One thing reminds you of another. Yes. Okay. Now imagine that you assessed 100 people and you gave each of them a prompt and they wrote down what came to mind. A lot of the things that were written down would be similar, right? And that's partly how we can understand each other. An idea means something similar to you that it means to me. But, The more creative people, though, are going to have other ideas come to mind that are more distal and statistically unlikely. So they make longer leaps. Right. And that can degenerate into insanity as well, right? Because you can make leaps that are unwarranted or that are incomprehensible. Or you see that fragmenting in schizophrenia, for example. And often a main... Where does confidence come in? Because I feel like you could be very smart, but not take action on anything. There's no technical definition of confidence. There's no psychometric definition.

Starting point is 00:17:37 But confidence and self-esteem, which is also a very ill-defined phrase, they mostly load on trait neuroticism. So the two of the main personality traits are associated with emotion. So people who experience more positive emotion or have a lower threshold for positive emotion, those are extroverts. And people have a lower threshold for negative emotion. So that be anxiety, grief, shame, pain. There's more.

Starting point is 00:18:06 but that's the basic cluster. They're more likely to experience negative emotion on a regular basis, plus their threshold for experiencing it is lower. It takes less to activate it. So confident people are lower in neuroticism. Now you could also add some extroversion to that, right? So the typical person that you would experience as hyperconfident would be low in neuroticism, so very free of anxiety, for example, and somewhat high in extroversion,

Starting point is 00:18:35 because that makes them outgoing. So they're not anxious, they're not inhibited. Anxiety freezes you, right? So, and makes you wary. And it'll inhibit speech, for example. Extroverts are more fluent. So a confident person would be someone who's high in extroversion and low in neuroticism. Now, there's variance of that too.

Starting point is 00:18:57 So you might experience a disagreeable person as more confident because a disagreeable person, that's another personality dimension. It's associated with femininity, as is neuroticism. A disagreeable person will tell you to go to hell. So you can have a quiet, disagreeable person who is pretty confident because they're going to say no to you if they're inclined to. And they'll tell you to go to hell when they feel it's necessary or maybe just randomly. What was your disagreeability? It was extreme.

Starting point is 00:19:26 My disagreeability. It was very low, I think I remember it. So are you going to put this sword? Your low in agreeableness? Yes. So it's feminine is what he said. saying. No, no, no, no. It's the opposite. This makes you masculine. Yeah, and you kind of look like that. Your face has gone on. I was agreeable.

Starting point is 00:19:41 Jack was the agreeable one. Okay, well, we don't need to go into agreeability. I was the disagreeable one, but the femininity. But that's why it worked so well between us. We get along very well. Well, disagreeable people are skeptical, eh? Their default position is like, yeah, I fucking doubt it. Yeah. Right. So, and an agreeable person is something like anything you want, dear. Now, the, well, not that agree. Well, the upside of being agreeableness, as I said, is a more feminine trait. And the reason that agreeableness, it's useful in, it's likely useful in intimate family situations. And so a good default stance towards infants is agreeableness, right?

Starting point is 00:20:23 Because an infant between the ages of zero and nine months is always right. Like if an infant is in distress, your job as a caregiver is to attend to the, infant, not to make value judgments, not to be skeptical. It's like, and that's partly because human infants are so, we're born early because of our head size. So a mammal of our size should have a gestation period of two years, not nine months. So human infants are born prematurely in a sense. And so they're very helpless.

Starting point is 00:20:57 And so it's necessary to be very agreeable in their care because they're obviously, especially before they can move, they're 100% dependent. Now, the problem with that is that being agreeable isn't the best thing for dealing with children as they mature, and it's certainly not the thing that you use to deal with, let's say, adult males or institutions. I mean, one of the things that's pathologizing the world at the moment is the proclivity of women to use agreeableness as their default rule of moral presumption in situations. where it's completely inappropriate. Disagreable managers are more successful than agreeable

Starting point is 00:21:38 managers because they can't be taken advantage of it. That's the problem with being agreeable. Then also it generates resentment as if you're agreeable and you are pouring yourself out in others care constantly. Then it's easy to feel that you're not being appreciated properly. And perhaps you're not. You're not necessarily that good at bargaining on your own behalf. Now, you know, if you're disagreeable, you can also be a complete son of a. It's like, you know, all of the personality dimensions have their pathologies, especially at the extremes. And you can't say one is better than the other. If you're a sophisticated actor, what you do with your personality over time is you expand

Starting point is 00:22:17 its range so that you can match your behavior to the demands of the current situation. So disagreeable people, you know, they are, they tend to say no. They're very skeptical so they can miss opportunities. they're suspicious of people. And, you know, that's real useful if the person you're suspicious of is a bad actor. But it's not that helpful if the person isn't. So you pay a price, you pay a price for everything you have, right? It's in one way or another. One of the most transformative messages that you put out is the importance of taking personal responsibility in the biggest way possible. And in fact, on Rogan, you asked yourself, what is the meaning of life? And you concluded

Starting point is 00:23:01 that it's the meeting that reveals itself when you take maximal responsibility for your own life. Could you discuss the philosophical? Why did that strike you? Because I think the meaning of life is a question that everyone asks themselves all of the time. And at different parts of time in your life, you're always coming to different answers. And I thought that that is the exactly... Different wrong answers. Sure, different wrong. Would you say this is a wrong answer? I talked to a philosopher yesterday and we were discussing modern conceptualizations of divinity, let's say, conceptualizations of God. And there is a line of philosophical thinking now

Starting point is 00:23:37 that is philosophers who are debating whether existence itself and hypothetically the spirit that gave rise to existence can be characterized as evil or good. Because if you look at the world, you could say, well, the amount of suffering outweighs the amount of pleasure. And so therefore existence itself has questionable utility. That's what the antinatalists presume.

Starting point is 00:24:00 That's what Gertes, Mephistopheles pronounced. He was a great, what would you say, hero to Karl Marx, the ultimate antinatalist. But it's a foolish way of conceptualizing the world because it presumes that the right axis of evaluation is something like pleasure versus pain. Like it's a hedonic evaluation. Well, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true at all. I don't think it's true existentially. And partly, here's a reason.

Starting point is 00:24:30 You know, you might say, well, I just want to be happy. And first question is, what the hell do you mean by happy? Do you mean extroverted? Do you mean full of positive emotion? Do you mean you're not suffering? Do you mean you're calm? Like, what the hell do you mean happy? You know, so it's very ill-defined term.

Starting point is 00:24:46 But it's also not even obvious that is what you want. So what might you want instead? Well, here's a question. It's like, what memories can you draw on that, what would you say, situate you most effectively in existential space? So imagine that you're taking yourself apart with your conscience, wondering whether or not you're a worthwhile person, evaluating yourself morally. You don't look back in your past and ask yourself how often you were happy.

Starting point is 00:25:19 Like, that's just pointless. What you do is you go over your biography, let's say, and you think about if you're trying to defend yourself from your own accusations even, you think about those times where even under duress, you push the boulder successfully up the bloody hill. And the funny thing is, is that those situations without the difficulty, wouldn't have the same impact. And so there's, there is a much more profound way of evaluating life's utility than the hedonic evaluation, which I think is very primitive and pointless because many difficult things cause suffering but are worth doing. Marriage does that.

Starting point is 00:26:02 Children do that. Like any career that's worthy of its name, any job that's worthy of its name, it's not, you can't evaluate its utility on the basis of its happiness. That's that problem. The fact that we do that by default is nothing but an index of how pathological our culture is. We just assume axiomatically that the right. evaluation, even for the quality of life, is the hedonic evaluation. That means we're basically hedonists. That's not a helpful orientation in the world. It's very immature. What I find interesting

Starting point is 00:26:35 is you also mention on another podcast for conflict resolution in a relationship. Let's say you're being annoyed by your wife or your girlfriend or something. You can open up that conversation with you're annoying me. Now, maybe that's me. Maybe it's my fault. Maybe I shouldn't be annoyed. And if it is me, I'd like to fix that. So please tell me it's me if you think it's me. Well, you might want to even open it with the statement, not so much you're annoying me, but the statement, I'm annoyed. So it's personal.

Starting point is 00:27:04 Well, there's no accusation there. It's a statement of emotional fact, let's say. I'm annoyed. Okay, well, why? Well, it couldn't be you. And that's the simplest solution for me, except that I have to live with you if you're my wife. So it's not that simple a solution. But in the moment, it would maximize my head.

Starting point is 00:27:23 hedonism to assume it was you. You know, that's the thing which we should emphasize that a bit more, is that emotional orientation is, by definition, immature. Like a two-year-old is run by emotion. Once you mature, you can even think of this technically. As you mature, the control over your perception and behavior moves from instinct-based subcortical structures that govern motivation and emotion, their instincts to the cortex, which is context-dependent, future-oriented, and communitarian. So, you know, my happiness isn't as important, let's say my moment-to-moment happiness isn't as important or as meaningful as the psychological and physiological health of my family. So you make sacrifices for that, and life is a sacrificial enterprise.

Starting point is 00:28:19 I even put myself in the hypothetical situation of this. say, you know, I got a girlfriend, she was annoying me. And I, I imagine myself being the person saying, I'm annoyed by you and it's probably my fault. And if it is, I want to fix that. And it even made me like a little bitter. Like I was already, like, it had already hurt my body. Oh, it's very annoying. But it's good because it strips away the ego entirely and makes it completely solution-oriented. It removes the emotions. It's assuming the other person's solution-oriented. But if you, if you're vulnerable. It also assumes that the solution that you're negotiating towards is one of peace and harmony, right? So, so you need a, you need a, that's part of what constitutes a valid

Starting point is 00:28:59 religious orientation in the technical sense. It's like, well, what, the notion of solution presumes an orientation towards some end. Well, what's the end? Well, that's the religious question. What's the ultimate end? That's the religious question. And it's like, well, why not, if it's your wife and she's annoying you? Like, why not just, beat her until she stops doing those things. You know, and you say, well, no reasonable person would do that. It's like, well, first of all, you have a lot of, what would you say? You have a lot of unwarranted faith in reason, that's for sure, because it's not obvious at all that that's not a reasonable solution, especially if it worked. That's certainly what tyrants think. It's not like

Starting point is 00:29:43 they're unreasonable. So let's say you're oriented towards something like long-term peace and mutual aid and benefit, till death do us part in sickness and in health, right? And so you're viewing the relationship over the longest possible period of time. And then you're presuming that the other person is indistinguishable from you in that regard. Because they are.

Starting point is 00:30:08 If you're married, it's like the person that you're married to is there with you all the time. There's no separation between you and her. Not if you're really thinking. about it because you're the quality of your experiences dependent upon one another and so you make a unit now the christian ideal this is an ideal that lurks underneath some but not all modes of sanctifying the union between men and women the christian concept is that you put the union of

Starting point is 00:30:43 the two of you at the pinnacle and that that union is the recreation of the original adam is the original Adam before he was separated into male and female was both, an amalgam of both, a kind of hypothetical, perfect being, a hermaphroditic figure. That anyways, the idea is that you put this, and that that's equivalent to Christ, by the way, weirdly enough, the idea is that there's a union of purpose and perception and action that can be attained by the communication between a couple. and you want to elevate that above both of your limited self-interest. So you're always negotiating towards that.

Starting point is 00:31:26 It's like how do we idealize this union? So then if that's your orientation and you're engaged in some strife, the logical question is, okay, who the hell's got the problem here? Because maybe it's you, and like I said, that'd be convenient for me in a way, except I'm stuck with you, but maybe it's me. And then there's another impediment that isn't merely egotistical. No, it would be lovely for you to presume that you're right and people love to do that. But there's another reason for that too.

Starting point is 00:31:59 That's sort of outlined in Dante's Inferno. Because what you see is if there's a recurring problem in your relationship, even your relationship with yourself, is that there's something underneath that that's driving it. And unpacking that is a journey into hell. That's why people don't do it. Like if you have a problem in your marriage, that's a real problem, and you delve into it, it's like surgery for an infection. You'll get to the bottom of it.

Starting point is 00:32:28 It will not be fun. And something seriously ugly is down there. And so that's down the rabbit hole in the Dante's inferno. Now, Dante put betrayers at the lowest level of hell. And that's pretty damn accurate because often what you'll find is if there's a recurring problem in a relationship. the reason that that problem is there is because, let's say, the person who's primarily responsible for that particular problem has been betrayed in some way that's either stopped their development at a certain age so they're immature or that's rendered them bitter and distrustful.

Starting point is 00:33:03 And so you see a lot of problems between men and women in that manner because there's a element of the female psyche that distrusts men as a category. And the same is true for men. They distrust women as a category. And that's a real problem in a particularized relationship like a marriage. It's like, well, why don't you trust man? Well, maybe you're a woman who never had a positive experience with a man in your whole goddamn life. That's increasingly common, right?

Starting point is 00:33:35 All the men you knew were absent. You know, sporadic relationships with your mother, nothing dependable, right? Or a series of sponges or work. worse, right? Exploiders. How do you best work on those issues to fix them? Which issues? I would say anything that's under the surface, like you're talking about finding an infection

Starting point is 00:33:56 and going down and surgically removing it. How do you even begin to broach those topics with a significant other? Well, in my marriage, when Tammy and I got together, we'd known each other for a very long time by that point, but I indicated to her that if we were going to be together, we're going to tell each other the truth. that's a hard thing.

Starting point is 00:34:17 And so it's hard in a sense. It's hard in the short term. That's another one of these indications that the hedonistic orientation is wildly lacking. Like there's nothing the least bit entertaining about solving a serious psychological problem. You know, and I'm oddly constituted for that because I don't like conflict.

Starting point is 00:34:38 It really upsets me. And so it's hard for me to delve into underlying problems. But what I like even less is having those problems continue. It's like, no, we're solving this right now. And so what does that mean? Well, it'll eventually mean tears on one person's part or the other. Might mean some screening. God only knows. You know, people have all sorts of ways of putting up resistances to that kind of inquiry too. You know, you're mean. Well, maybe you are. You know, leave me alone. I'll stomp out. I don't want to talk about this.

Starting point is 00:35:15 Turn red, get angry, accuse you of all sorts of things. You know, and you have to be able to persevere through that. And that also means that you have to have faith in the motives for your inquiry. Because maybe you are just being a cruel son of a bitch. And you won't let the person alone going into their past and mucking about. You know, so then the question there is, well, how can you trust yourself? Well, don't lie. That's the bottom lines.

Starting point is 00:35:44 Like you want to trust yourself in a difficult negotiation. You better bloody well be sure that your orientation is upward. And how do you be sure of that? You evaluate yourself the same way you evaluate anyone else. You know, if you're in a relationship with someone, they lie to you constantly. You're not going to trust them. It's no different for you.

Starting point is 00:36:01 So that's why you have to have an orientation towards the truth. And it has to be a kind of terrified orientation. And that's easy for me because I know what happens to people when they don't solve their proximal relationship problems. You know, they end up in some sort of hell. Divorce court hell. That's fun, especially if you have a few kids. You can, like, be miserable for 20 years in divorce court.

Starting point is 00:36:25 See, I tend to be conflict avoidant, like you mentioned. But I also tend to think in those situations, in the big picture, most of what's going on is not that big of a deal. Yeah. So I rationalize that, hey, we have a great life. a lot of things are going well. This, you know, a month from now, we're not even going to remember. Yeah, yeah. To me, it's like a lot of those things, just let it go.

Starting point is 00:36:49 Well, the question is, you know, what's the rule? Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. So, and that's a perfectly reasonable rule. But another rule is, you know, don't, don't be willfully blind. Okay, so how do you distinguish between those two things? I might, with my clients, I would implement, have them implement something like a rule of three. So you bother me. It's like, once irrelevant. Why? Who knows what's up with you? Maybe you're hungry. Like, I don't know what's, or maybe it's me. The fact that we had some emotional

Starting point is 00:37:24 upset between us once, it might alert you, but it contains virtually no information, right? So you just think, well, we'll just let that lie. Twice. Same thing. It's like, oh, that's twice. Okay. So now that's a bit more serious. Now I'm watching you a little hard. Three times? Well, then I tell you, you did it this time, you did it this time, you did it this time. It's the same thing. I saw it and I'm not deluded.

Starting point is 00:37:51 So a rule of three is a good one. It's a good one because it gives you, you know, and you could make it four or you can make it five, I don't care, but once isn't good because then you fly off the handle and everything. And so you do want to let go what can be let go. Well, what is that? Things that don't repeat. It's the repetition that's the problem, right? Because, well, and people also don't construe their lives very intelligently in this regard, because we tend to focus our lives on the exceptional vacations, for example, or special occasions. It's like, that's foolish. Your life is what you do every day. The mundane things you do every day, that's 95% of your life. You want to get those right. And if there are things that interfere, with those. Like maybe every time you put your kids to bed, it's miserable. Well, that's not good because you probably only spend 20 minutes of one-on-one time with any given kid on average every day.

Starting point is 00:38:48 So if bedtimes are miserable, that's your relationship. Well, that's no good. You've got to fix that. Or maybe, you know, there's unpleasantness when you come home after work or at breakfast or lunch. I don't know. If it repeats, it's a problem. So that's what you're looking for is repeating patterns. of discord. And if they repeat, the basic rule is if something repeats, it's not going to stop until you fix it. Your wife or you might be acting out patterns of misbehavior that have cascaded down the generations for God only knows how long. So a few weeks back, I mentioned a new dating app I got set up on called The League, and I got to say it is a complete twist to modern dating apps I've never seen before. The League is specifically made for people that are career-focused,

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Starting point is 00:39:50 where you can quickly see if there's a connection. You're basically put up to talk to somebody else that you know very little about. It tested my confidence, honestly, a lot, learned a lot about myself, and also it's a great way to meet new people and see if there's chemistry right away. So I've been on the league for a couple weeks now,

Starting point is 00:40:05 and I got to say, it has overall been a very good experience. I love their multi-city dating options for when I'm on the road for podcasts, and on top of that, their search filters are second to none. What I find crazy is that the league is a 50-to-50 ratio men to women, which is basically unheard of on dating apps. Honestly, I'm just really enjoying using the league, and if you want to upgrade your dating life too, I recommend you guys try out the league.

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Starting point is 00:41:41 no matter what stage you're in, Shopify.com slash ICH. Thank you so much, Shopify, and back to the episode. You talk about the importance of honesty and truth quite a bit, which is another thing that resonates with me a lot. And I like to have certain rules and guidelines in my life that I know can make decisions. So I don't have to leave that to my subjective, you know, random, arbitrary decision-making machine that I have. So if someone sets out to only ever tell the truth, would that be setting themselves up for success or failure? And is there ever a time to not be truthful? For example, we've asked guests on this podcast before. Tom Billiou, funny enough, had a really interesting answer to this, which is, if your wife doesn't look good in a dress,

Starting point is 00:42:26 do you tell her? You say, don't ask me questions like that unless you want the answer. My answer to that is, yes, you tell her. But like, the thing is, is questions like that aren't realistic in a way because they strip out the necessary context. Like, you can't tell your wife how she looks in a given outfit unless you negotiated how to do that thoroughly. Right? So that would mean, for example, that both you and her are pleased if she looks attractive. And you might say, well, of course, a husband's going to be pleased if her wife looks attractive. if his wife looks attractive. It's like, really? How attractive? And to who? And when, exactly. And also why?

Starting point is 00:43:07 And those are very complicated issues. And so, you see, there's no shortage of men who punish their wives every single time they look attractive. Just like there are no shortage of wives who punish their husbands every time they do anything competent. You might say, well, why would that happen? Well, let's say you've had bad experiences with men and you can't distinguish between competence and tyranny. So every time a man makes a decision to do something, you see that as a manifestation of patriarchal power, and you quash it.

Starting point is 00:43:34 And then a year later, your husband's completely useless. And you wonder why you've been saddled with him, but that's fine, because you can play martyr to your friends. And so that's a good deal for everybody. And so the same thing applies to attractiveness on the part of your wife. It's like, do you trust her? And how short, should her skirt be when she goes to the bar with her friends? exactly. And when are you going to say something about it? Well, there's a lot of preparation work that has to be done before you.

Starting point is 00:44:02 if my wife asked me if something that looks good on her, I'd tell it. And lots of things look good on her, so that's a good deal. And I buy a lot of her clothes, which I find extremely entertaining. She also, see, the reason you want to be able to tell her is because she has to be able to trust you. But she also has to not play stupid games because the stupid game is, well, I'm asking you if you look, if I look good in this dress, but really what I'm trying to figure out is do you love me? That's not a straight game. It's like, are you asking whether I love you or are you asking whether or not I look good in this dress? And people are often very murky in their questions. You don't know what the hell they're up to and neither do they. And so it's very difficult to respond in a truthful manner when you're in a complex situation and five different things are going on. I know it's the white lie conundrum, right?

Starting point is 00:44:50 Yeah. If you ever have to tell a white lie, you haven't set the situation up properly. There are times when the best you might be able to matter. in that situation is a white lie, but that doesn't make it good. There are other situations that I can think of. Like, for example, let's say there's been a long relationship. These people have been married for like 10 years. But then there's an ex of the guy. And she reaches out to the guy for no reason.

Starting point is 00:45:17 And this was a girl that your current wife has always had a little bit of a, come on, what's going on over there? Like, they always were very insecure. They felt uneasy about that past relationship, right? And you've tried your best to talk it through, but you haven't. done it, I guess, to make her comfortable enough. And you don't know if you can't. Well, she texts you. Do you tell your wife that she texts you, knowing it's just going to devolve into this thing?

Starting point is 00:45:40 When you have no feelings for your ex at all whatsoever, but you know it's going to create a catastrophe, all these arguments and plates will be thrown, whatever, do you still tell her? Do you just throw it to the side because it means nothing to you? Well, any secrets that you keep from your wife, like, you don't have to tell anyone everything. I mean, first of all, who wants that? And you have a right to privacy. But keeping secrets from the person who's adjacent to you is not helpful. It's just not helpful because it means there are areas of your shared life that are off limits. And partly that's not good for you because then you don't have access, let's say, to her intelligence and perception in those situations.

Starting point is 00:46:23 No, you know, like I would have to know the details because the details in a situation like that matter. But the optimal solution to that problem is to work it out so that that problem no longer exists so that you're not jealous of each other's exes. And, you know, that's complicated because, well, are you fully committed to your wife? Like, and why should she believe that? What do you mean fully? Exactly. And so those are very complicated issues and people check each other out with regard to such things all the time.

Starting point is 00:46:54 You know, little kids will misbehave, especially if you bring them to new, situation. And you might say, why the hell are they misbehaving? They know perfectly well what the consequences of that will be, especially if you're, you know, a diligent disciplinarian and the rules are minimal but clear while you bring your kids to a new situation and they act up. Well, why? Well, because they want to see what you'll do. Well, why? Because what you do defines the new situation. And they'll risk punishment for that. They want to know. So they'll bug you, even if they're buging you in a way that has resulted in something unpleasant for them consistently in the past. It's like, no, I want to know.

Starting point is 00:47:34 Well, a lot of that's relationship between a man and woman. It's like, what are you up to? Well, did you ask me straightforwardly? Well, probably not, because that's hard, but that I could torture you into some revelation. And I want to know because my life depends on it. So people play pretty rough games. It's better to get the game straight.

Starting point is 00:47:56 That's hard. You know, like, because the question, how committed you are you to your wife, that's sort of indistinguishable from the question, how committed are you to your own life? How committed are you to the journey up Jacob's ladder? How interested are you in spending some time in hell just because it's entertaining and you don't have anything better to do? These are hard things to sort out. How much trouble do you want to cause exactly for that, exactly for the delight of having the problem, a false adventure? So everyone needs to be playing the same rules of the game. That's the minimal basis. The basic understanding. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got to have a constitutional framework in your marriage, let's say. It's a bit more complex than that because you also have to agree on the rules of transformation.

Starting point is 00:48:43 So let's say you have a friend and you can play a game with the friend. But now you have a little bit more sophisticated friend and you can play this game and that game. And then an even more sophisticated friendship would involve a multitude of qualitatively different. games. Well, then you need to negotiate transition rules, right? How do we change the game we're play? So that's a bit more complex than just the, you know, the constitutional framework per se. But yeah, you have to, well, that's what that's what traditions do for people mostly. It's like men and women in principle once had traditional roles. Well, why? Well, you want to negotiate every little thing with your wife? Just try. You know, who should do the dishes and win? You can spend five

Starting point is 00:49:26 years figuring that out, all the, what would you say, resentment and irritation that come along with the kitchen. God, what a mess. It's very difficult for people to negotiate a relationship from scratch. And so generally what human beings do is default to something approximating tradition, because it solves the complex problem. And then, you know, the radicals go in there and muck up the tradition, and then people are just lost. They have no idea what to do. They have no idea how to negotiate. They don't even know what they want. Like, most of the radicals, many people when they're conversing. It's like they throw out an indication of their misery, but it's ill-defined and you have no idea what would satisfy it. Neither do they. It's like an

Starting point is 00:50:07 endless mining expedition. So do you think people are less happy today than they were 20, 30 years ago? Yes. But what do you think is the biggest cause of that? Do you think it's comparison? Do you feel like it's a video? Universities. Lies. Lies. Really. Lies. The way that I boiled down my university experience in the most simplest of forms was, well, I went to UCSB. I don't know if I'm to even shout out the gauchos. Should I even be doing that anymore? I had an okay time there. I had a fun time. But I feel like, like even from when I was younger, I noticed a change from the teacher is teaching you how to think versus teaching you what to think. It completely changed. I feel like, honestly, in high school, which was like 2013 to 2017, it went from

Starting point is 00:50:54 expanding your brain to solve problems for yourself versus this is what you should think. So I don't know if that's how college should be, because obviously you do need to understand the curriculum. They need to be teaching you mathematics and stuff like that. So, you know, what it is that you should actually be thinking about. But I don't know. Have you noticed that change in academia? Well, academia is saturated with propagandists. We've let the, what, resentful radicals in beginning in the 60s, and they've essentially taken over the universities. So is that helpful? No, not in the least. So it's hard to be a good university professor. It's hard to be a good researcher. And it took a long time for the institutions of higher education to be

Starting point is 00:51:37 reliable transmitters of both tradition and the spirit of inquiry. It's easily disrupted, and it's disrupted now. When did you make the commitment to truth and honesty? In 1985, of 1984. 1984, yeah. Perfect year for that. And why did you do it? Because I understood at that point, both personally and sociologically, let's say, that lies produce hell.

Starting point is 00:52:07 Was there anything that made you realize that? Sure. Lots of things. Lots of things. I'd been studying, partly it was a consequence of the study of atrocity, because I'd been to studying atrocity, really from the time I was 13 on work. motivation for serious misbehavior, you might say, like sadistic murderousness and the enjoyment that can be derived from that. And so, and the absolute cataclysmic hells that were produced by

Starting point is 00:52:35 totalitarian states in the 20th century, how do they come about through lies? So when I became thoroughly convinced of that. And if you're thoroughly convinced of that, well, to the point where that appears as a fact, there's an obvious moral conclusion to derive from that. It's like you want to contribute to hell, keep on lying. What was the final straw that broke the camels back for that? Was a certain book that you read, a personal experience? Because it's very specific. There's a combination of both. I mean, my life in 1984 was still somewhat dissolute. You know, I like to drink. And so I had a hedonistic orientation to some degree. And, you know, alcohol, doesn't bring out the best in people's characters.

Starting point is 00:53:20 Alcohol almost universally makes people less than they are. It's fun because it eradicates your concern for future consequences. It actually kind of does that physiologically, you might say, because alcohol is a potent anxiety-reducing drug. For some people, it's also a psychomotor stimulant like cocaine, and it was certainly that for me. And for other people, too, it can have a heroin-like effect, which facilitates the sense of social belonging.

Starting point is 00:53:47 I think I had all three of those effects from alcohol, so I liked it quite a lot. But the consequence for me was, you know, I would misbehave when I was drinking in ways that made me remorseful the next day or the next two days or the next week. And I realized at that point that that was a performative contradiction in a sense. Performative contradiction is when you act out something that's a lie that runs contrary to your moral beliefs, right? And so I was looking at the literature and atrocity trying to determine how the proclivity to bring those states about,

Starting point is 00:54:32 those hellish states about, might be ameliorated. Like, what's the opposite of evil? That's the question, I suppose, I was trying to solve. And so when I saw patterns of behavior in my own life that were making things worse than they had to be, then that was an indication that it was time to stop. And I moved to Montreal after that to go to graduate school, and that was a pretty dramatic transformation in my social milieu.

Starting point is 00:55:00 And I started to drop a lot of the things that I was doing that were counterproductive. It took me another four years, four years, something like that, to like just stop drinking altogether. stop smoking, to exercise more, to be more disciplined. Did you find that difficult? Did you find that difficult to do? Yes. Of course. Of course. Yeah. I was very good at drinking. Good at it? Yeah. Well, yeah, I suppose, you know, I mean, I was very social. I had a large group of friends. I had a blast. I had an interesting experience with alcohol, which was

Starting point is 00:55:38 I had made a personal decision to completely abstain from it. I was, I was discussing. by it for a really long time, up until being about 21 and a half. And I went to like a party school. Everyone claims it's a party school. This one, there was a lot of drinking, obviously. And then I finally made the decision after I had realized, you know, it's funny. I just remember this right now. I, I wrestled with the decision to drink because I just thought it made everything worse, obviously. I thought you're like poisoning and polluting yourself. I thought that it's hurting like your relationship with spirituality, everything. And I remember after, you're, I remember after After all this debate, I went and read your opinion on alcohol.

Starting point is 00:56:17 And it actually allowed me. It gave myself permission to drink, which I know sounds exactly the opposite of what you're saying. But you had said it was really only a sin or bad if you do it in excess. So I finally allowed myself to drink. Yeah, I didn't like to do it except in excess. Yeah. Well, I soon later found out that, you know, that is pretty nice on occasion. Not a recommendation.

Starting point is 00:56:40 But I found your opinion on that. And this was after about a year and a half of honestly, I was suffering a lot. So I was in my head. I was anxious. I couldn't be myself. I felt like I was disassociating in environments. But actually, I took, I drank alcohol and it brought me into the present for the first time in a very long time. And I think, oddly enough, that was a part of healing, which sounds completely counterproductive and not intuitive at all.

Starting point is 00:57:05 But it helped me, oddly enough. It's like training wheels. To experience, you know, like a social environment physically. like you're actually there to experience happiness for the first time in a very long time. I did it with a close friend of mine. But I don't know if that means anything, if there's any significance to that

Starting point is 00:57:21 or, you know, I don't want to be recommending alcohol. The significance fundamentally is that things are complicated. Like lots of teenagers now don't drink at all. So you might say, well, that's a good thing because alcohol, all things considered, is problematic. But if you're not partying, because you have no friends,

Starting point is 00:57:41 and you're in your basement miserable and depressed, that's not an improvement. No, and so I suppose to some degree whether or not something is good depends on your starting point. You know, like I can understand, for example, why so many young men admire Andrew Tate. At least Andrew Tate has all the positive aspects

Starting point is 00:58:03 of a successful narcissist. It beats the hell out of being depressed and anxious. Now, is that a stellar goal? No. But it's an improvement over isolated misery. You know, you see this in female mate choices. There's a strong proclivity in women to be enamored of bad boys. There's a variety of reasons for that.

Starting point is 00:58:26 But one reason is, well, they're a hell of a lot more interesting than martyr, miserable, depressed, anxious, self-conscious, low self-esteem non-starters. So now, is that an optimal choice? No, but comparatively, that's the attraction of the shadow figure fundamentally. What did Nietzsche say about morality? Most morality is cowardice. What did he mean by that? Well, he didn't mean that morality was cowardice. He said, most morality is cowardice. And what he meant by that was people find themselves too timid to do anything. And so instead of admitting their lack of courage to themselves, they put a moral gloss on it and say that the reason

Starting point is 00:59:09 they're timorous is because they're good. That's a form of moral hypocrisy. You know, there were kids in my high school, for example, who never drank. You know, they were good kids, but they weren't good. They're just cowards. That wasn't helpful. Now, my friends, my delinquent friends in junior high and high school, a lot of them became alcoholics.

Starting point is 00:59:32 So their lack of cowardice on the exploration front also caused them a tremendous amount of misery. Look, there's actually a literature on this. So imagine you took adolescents on a distribution of rule breaking. Okay. There's kids who never break any rules on one end. And there's kids who break them all the time on the other end. And then there's the kids in the middle who experiment with rule breaking in adolescents. Well, the ones who never break rules are at much higher risk for depression, anxiety, and dependent personality disorder later in life. They're too inhibited. And the ones who break rules all the time, well, they end up in prison. So you want to have that. I'm not saying that you should be in the middle exactly. I'm saying

Starting point is 01:00:15 that there's a optimal mode of being that allows you to explore, even in ways that could potentially be destructive, and that that's the best pathway to facilitate development. It's like 12 rules. It's the order and chaos. It's walking the line between what's familiar and known versus exploring something else. Because you don't want to make the error presuming that a totalitarian order is equivalent to morality. It's funny, what you said was actually exactly the conclusion that I had came to, which was I was assigning a false sense of morality to myself because I was sober. Even though I actually, it just made me feel good about myself. Right, right. Because I thought that I was holier than thou.

Starting point is 01:00:56 Yeah, right. Because I wasn't drinking. And I was denying myself that because other people would say that, like people that cared about me, but I wouldn't actually accept it. And it was out of cowardice. It's interesting how alcohol affects everybody differently because for me it puts me to sleep. I'll have two drinks and instantly I'm just like, all right, I'm tired, this isn't fun, I'm not enjoying myself. For some people, it's an accelerant. No, it's, yeah.

Starting point is 01:01:17 It's saying that's why it's not drinking for the most part. We test the people in the lab in Montreal, you give them three drinks in 20 minutes, so a pretty decent dose. Their heart rate would go up 40 beats per minute. It was just like a shot of cocaine. Those were often people who had a history of familial alcoholism, so they had a genetic predisposition to be alcoholic. but they were getting a psychomotor stimulant kick. And it looks like that was opiate mediated. So for some people, when they drink,

Starting point is 01:01:41 they produce a lot of beta endorphin, which is an opiate, an opiate. It's in the opiate family. And so there's endless benefit to that. I had a friend in Montreal, an old guy, Frank Irvin. He was a cool old guy. He looked like Ernest Hemingway. I liked Frank a lot.

Starting point is 01:01:58 He had a monkey farm on St. Kitt's, vervent monkeys. and him and his wife, Roberta Palmer, who was also very cool, they ran an alcohol lab for years, and they gave these fervent monkeys free access to rum and coke, and 5% of them would drink Tacoma on first exposure. It was funny. They had videos of that, and it's like a frat party.

Starting point is 01:02:23 It's very funny to watch these drunk monkeys, but 95% of them wouldn't drink Tacoma, right? They'd have a bit in stock, But 5% of them would, it was like, where have you been all my life? Like Barney Gumbull on The Simpsons, you know. So alcohol is a great drug for some people. It wasn't for you. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:43 It's just a natural disposition to either being accelerated while you're taking alcohol or being, I guess, slowed down. Well, if you're very fortunate, let's say, and you really want to become an alcoholic, it would be good to be susceptible to the anxiety reduction element and the psychometer stimulant element and the opiate element. and then, you know, hooray, it's a very good drug, except it makes you stupid. That's also the part of the problem with being hedonistically oriented. It's short-term gratification. It's like, well, that's fine, but what do you pay for? Yeah. That was one of the reasons, too, why I completely stopped drinking is because the more successful I got, the bigger the price I had to pay. Like, taking half a day off became so valuable that I thought to myself, do I want to pass that up for two drinks?

Starting point is 01:03:28 Yeah. would I rather just not have the two-year. Well, that was another thing that also convinced me to stop drinking is when I was working on my first book, I couldn't, first of all, it was too emotionally demanding to work on when I was hung over. Like, I just couldn't handle it. It was just too much because, you know, reading about sadistic Auschwitz guards is rather disturbing at the best of times. And if you're royally hung over, it's much worse. And also, I couldn't edit because I couldn't think clearly. And, you know, one of the things, so here's something to consider.

Starting point is 01:03:58 So in the biblical stories of transformation, Abraham, the story of Abraham is a good example of that. So Abraham leaves the confines of his family. He's from a wealthy family. He leaves the comfort in the confines of his family. He goes out into the world. God comes to him as the spirit of adventure. And then Abraham goes through a series of transformations of personality. His name is actually Abram to begin with A-B-R-A-M.

Starting point is 01:04:25 He's renamed about two-thirds of the way through the story. And the reason for that is that his identity transforms so radically that it's as if he's a new person. Okay, so what does he do? Well, he starts aiming up. And then his personality transforms, he has to make a sacrifice. So it builds an altar and he makes a sacrifice. Well, what's the sacrifice? Well, you just said with the sacrifices, you jumped up a rung in terms of the field of opportunity

Starting point is 01:04:50 and responsibility that was in front of you. And you thought, oh, my time's too valuable to waste half a day. Well, that also happened to be in graduate school. It's like, no, I can't afford this anymore. And it's partly, it's not even I couldn't afford it. It's like I have something better to do. This is something that anybody who's watching and listening, for example, if you want to deal with an addiction, it's one thing to quit.

Starting point is 01:05:13 Quitting doesn't exactly work. You have to replace it with something better. And if alcohol's great, or if cocaine's great, before each like, well, what could be better? Well, that's your problem fundamentally. But, you know, you said, well, you discovered that your time was value. Yeah. So it's better to, I certainly came to that conclusion in graduate school. It's like, no, what I'm working on is so interesting that I don't want to compromise it even a little bit. You know, and as so imagine that you move up these rungs, that's Jacob's Ladder, by the way, up these rungs of transformation. With every major

Starting point is 01:05:46 transition, there's going to be a sacrifice. Yeah. I think over time, too, that's why I became more disagreeable is just because your time is so valuable that you know what you need to focus on and you tend to put down other things. Yes, definitely. That's a matter. Sure, sure. That's one of the advantages actually to being disagreeable is that you can prioritize more stringently. And you know, that as a virtue, that's got a bad rap in our culture because you're supposed to be agreeable all the time. You're not supposed to discriminate. You're not supposed to judge. It's like, really? You're not supposed to discriminate. So everything's the same, is it? That's how you're going to organize your life. There's nothing that distinguishes that from utter chaos.

Starting point is 01:06:24 You have to be unbelievably discriminating. That's the logos, right? So when God throws Adam and Eve out of paradise, or when they actually fall out of paradise because of their pride, which is a more accurate way of representing it, God installs a cherubim, which is a kind of a monstrous angel, and a sword that's on fire that turns every which way. And what does that mean?

Starting point is 01:06:49 Well, it means that a sword obviously cuts and a flaming sword burns. And so a flaming sword cuts and burns. And if it turns every which way, there's no escaping it. Well, why? Well, if you want to regain paradise, then everything that isn't appropriate has to be cut and burned away. And that can be a lot. So people are terrified at that. Like I've read metaphysical speculations that hell, there's no difference between hell

Starting point is 01:07:16 for the sinful and the sight of the sword that cuts and burns everything away because if you're 95% lies then anything that fixes you would look like death or worse and so the terrifying ideal that destroys everything about you

Starting point is 01:07:35 that's not worthy that's rough well you know you experienced that at least to some degree with regards to your conclusions about drinking and this is the case like as you so I never drink now so what happened to me is I it when I was about 27. It took me a while. And then I quit till I was about 50. And part of the reason I quit, too, was because I was having kids and there was no way I was going to be drunk around my kids. Like, no, that wasn't going to happen. And then my kids left and I was 50 and I thought,

Starting point is 01:08:06 well, maybe I could have a drink or two and see, because it's kind of a pain to, in a way, socially, to never have a glass of wine. Now I don't care. But then, you know, there was still some awkwardness about that and I don't know some curiosity so I drank a bit when I was around 50 and I thought it was just stupid at 50 as I was when I was 27 you know I'd have two or three drinks and then it was all right man we're off to the races you know and so so I just stopped again now and well now there's just no question about because I can't afford ever to make a mistake yeah so one thing I'm always curious about is I feel like everyone experiences life in terms of colors.

Starting point is 01:08:51 And some people's colors just happen to be more vibrant than others. So, for example, if I think I'm happy, if I think I'm as happy as I can possibly be, I'm a 10 out of 10. Or I would say, like, I have 10 out of 10 joy. What if that's someone else is just 6 out of 10? And what if I just... Well, you do see that with temperamental variation. I mean, you know, positive emotion can keep spiraling upward until it hits mania.

Starting point is 01:09:13 Like, there's an upper limit because at... At the, it's complicated, but if we just talk about positive emotion per se, not about meaning, let's say, just positive emotion. As you move up the scale of positive emotion, it gets more and more intense, but at the, like, it limits out with intipathology. So, manics are very happy. But meaning produces positive emotion. Meaning is positive, right? Well, that's complicated. No, not exactly.

Starting point is 01:09:44 It's complicated because sometimes meaning can produce misery, especially. in the short term. That happens with kids all the time. Look, there's a huge psychological literature that purports to show that couples without children are happier than couples with children. So then you think, well, children are a burden. No, your definition of quality and life is stupid. It's like, of course, you're not happy if you have children. It's like you're worried about them. Why? Because they might die. So, or be hurt. So that's on your mind. But that doesn't mean that it's not meaningful, right? And so in a very profound way, you have to snap the connection between hedonism, either on the positive or negative emotion scale and meaning. Like,

Starting point is 01:10:28 the relationship is by no means one to one. So let me give you an example. So in notes from underground, Dostoevsky put forward a very trenchant criticism of utopian socialism, and purposefully so, because that was one of Dostoevsky's prime focuses of contemplation. And he said that if you provided people with all of the hedonic delights that they would want, and you put them in a situation where that was provided to them continually, all they would do is smash that up so that something strange and mysterious and unpredictable would happen because we have this requirement for what? Suffering?

Starting point is 01:11:14 Maybe. How about the suffering that forces you to develop? Is that a instinctual demand? Probably. You know, people will pick false adventure over no adventure. Like, we're wired for trouble, for sure, to seek it out. People are caused trouble all the time, especially when they don't have anything vital to do.

Starting point is 01:11:37 In fact, that is what they'll do is cause trouble. Because that's a false adventure. It's hard to imagine that the highest quality of life does not produce the highest average positive emotion. I'm not sure about that. I'm not sure about that. I don't know if that's optimal. Like if you're listening to music, the happiest music is elevator music. It's just happy.

Starting point is 01:12:02 Like it's trivial. But that's the thing. Like there's a there's a lack of depth to unadulterated happiness. But the depth provides positive emotion. Right, but the depth also is associated with suffering. This is, see, you've apprehended this to some degree because you said that the notion of a call to responsibility was attractive to you. Well, that's a burden. Responsibility is a burden.

Starting point is 01:12:31 There's a weight to it. Now, you might say, what it means to say, he who has a why can bear anyhow. You could say, well, if the purpose is sufficiently noble, the weight is irrelevant. That's a better way of conceptualizing it, I think. And I think that's right. So you want to have an orientation towards your life and the world

Starting point is 01:12:53 that makes even the suffering it's not just justifiable. Welcome. Well, couldn't that just be meaning? Feeling like you have... What do you mean? Just. Uh-oh.

Starting point is 01:13:08 Uh-oh, Graham. Just meaning? It's having meaning. It's having purpose. It's feeling important and needing to be somewhere for something that I think is greater than yourself. Yes. Well, that's also part of the sacrificial element of maturity. So one of the things I've gotten trouble for saying, which is true anyways, is that you don't grow up until you have kids. And people who don't have kids who think they're growing up take exception to that. And I can understand why. But I don't really care because you're not mature until someone matters, more than you do. And that, unless there's something wrong with you, like seriously wrong, and that happens to people, if you have kids, that will happen to you. You know, and you might say you could be committed to something else with equal intensity. It's like, yeah, maybe. I doubt it, but maybe, you know, there might be one person in a thousand who's capable of taking on a burden

Starting point is 01:14:02 that's equivalent, let's say, to care for a child in some other form, care for an ailing relative, for example, or a sibling, or maybe even sacrificial love for a husband or a wife. Very rare. Very rare. What maturity does that give you to have children? He got married recently. So he's, you know, thinking about the idea of it.

Starting point is 01:14:26 Well, you're responsible. They're obviously fragile in a very fundamental way. And that's your problem. So you better have your eyes open. And there's lots of ways you can foul up. And the thing about kids, they're perfect. And you can really muck that up. Now, you can also encourage their development

Starting point is 01:14:46 and facilitate the maintenance of that sort of paradisal quality of being. You want to do that within the confines of your house. And that's great. Like my experience with children was they certainly, I mean, I like children. I used to work in daycares when I was like 18. I really liked little kids. And so I never felt my kids. kids to be a burden. When I was working as a professor at Harvard, you know, I basically stripped my

Starting point is 01:15:13 life down to work and my family. That was it. There was nothing else. And that was fine. I mean, I loved my work and so that was fine. But my family was a very good break from my work and very rewarding. I mean, most of the time, if I have my choice, I'd rather hang around with my kids. That's always, that's been the case my whole life. It's still the case now. They're unbelievably rewarding. So the thing about kids, this is something that's very useful to know. The relationship you have with your child will be the only relationship you ever have in your life that starts with the following on the following presumption. There's nothing that child wants more than to have the best possible relationship with you.

Starting point is 01:15:51 They 100% want that. That's right on the table for you. You know, now people find that daunting and they're afraid of it and no wonder, but it's not unbelievably high-quality relationship. How does it bring in maturity, though? because you're contending with their fragility, there's errors that your errors are, the consequence of your errors are radically multiplied.

Starting point is 01:16:14 Okay. Right. And it's not just you that's on the hook for your stupidity. It's your kids, and they're not responsible for your stupidity. You might be. But, you know, so if you conduct yourself in a manner that makes them suffer, well, then you're contributing to the suffering of the innocent, that's for sure. and so, you know, you become aware of that.

Starting point is 01:16:36 And that, I mean, part of your question, your question has to be answered in part by discussing what it means to be mature. The more forward-looking you are, the more mature you are. The more your actions in the present are bound by the future. That's one definition of maturity. So even in relationship to yourself, you know, well, why not drink and have fun? well how about because there's tomorrow right right or your career right you know or the you're at a fairly high level of attainment and you do something foolish when you're drunk it might even just be a word that's spoken improperly or carelessly it's like it damages your reputation because people are

Starting point is 01:17:18 expecting more from you than that and if you violate that then all sorts of doors that you didn't even know were there slam shut and so you're orienting yourself to a long view of life. That's partly what Christ is referring to when he talks about life eternal. You start to view your life not as the moment to moment happening, but that entire pattern, perhaps not only across the span of your life, but like a multi-generational span. And then the other element of maturity is that it's not about you. Like it's partly about you, but it's just as much about your wife and it's just about as much about it's just as much about your kids and then your community right so instead of you being focused on self-centered gratification in the immediate present you're looking more

Starting point is 01:18:13 for something like harmony on the social front so you and your wife are getting along right there's a harmony established then your kids and your wife and you are getting along and that's a harmony that's a much better view also of mental health. You know, one of the disservices that the psychological and psychiatric community have done in the last hundred years is imbue people with the conviction that mental health is something that's in your head and that's yours. That's complete bloody nonsense. That isn't how it works at all. Like, you can't be mentally healthy if your wife is miserable.

Starting point is 01:18:49 That's not in your head. Your stability is dependent on the harmony of your. social surround and it's dependent on the integration of the present with the future. And the more mature you are, the better you are at taking all that into account at every moment. So, and there's a strange thing that goes along with that. So in the sermon on the mount, for example, which is a series of instructions, by the way. So Christ tells his followers, first of all, to aim up. And so you could think of that ultimately and the ultimate, expression of that would be something like your attempt to establish a relationship with the

Starting point is 01:19:28 transcendent or the divine. It's a difficult thing to define. But you can think about it more prosaically as well, which is, well, if you can think of something better that you could be doing practically in any of the dimensions of life that you're exploring, aim at that. You know, you might say, well, I don't know what the ultimate pinnacle of goodness is. It's like fair enough, but there's and proxible goods that you're probably aware of. Like one of the questions people can generally answer is, well, what stupid things are you doing to muck up your life that you know about, that you could quit doing, that you wouldn't quit doing?

Starting point is 01:20:08 It might be a short list, but it's something, it's like, well, there's an upward orientation there. That upward orientation can magnify as its practice. And that's part of the establishment of a religious mode of being. Anyways, you orient yourself upwards. then you assume that other people have the same intrinsic value that you do and then you concentrate on the moment and then you can have your cake and eat it too

Starting point is 01:20:31 because you get the pleasure of being immersed in the moment and there isn't anything in some sense that's a deeper source of meaning than that but that's predicated on the proper distal orientation right so christ says in the sermon on the mount that you should be like the lilies of the field right, that they don't toil and they don't spin. They're not Machiavellian. They're not Machiavellian in their orientation. They're not always trying to twist the fabric of reality so they get what they want.

Starting point is 01:21:02 It's like, no, aim up, then concentrate on the moment. And that, those two, those things should inform each other. You can imagine, here's an example of that. So you can imagine appearing on a podcast with Machiavellian intent to sell something, for example. or you could imagine following the thread of the conversation wherever it goes, assuming that the goal is to have the most engaging conversation possible. Those are very difficult, different orientations. If your orientation is towards engagement in the conversation and you set that frame,

Starting point is 01:21:40 then you can concentrate on the moment and look for the opportunities that make themselves manifest in relationship to that goal. And you can do that always in your life constantly. that's what a religious practice is for. So you're doing that in every moment. Technically, that's what it's for. And that's way different than a hedonic motivation. They're not the same thing at all.

Starting point is 01:22:02 You mentioned that you cannot be healthy in the absence of a long-term, stable relationship. Yeah, you can't regulate your own behavior. And eventually short-term relationships will turn you Machiavellian, sociopathic, and potentially narcissistic. Well, it depends on why you're pursuing me. Like, look, the data on this,

Starting point is 01:22:20 this is Christop Claire. There's no debate about this among serious psychologists, let's say. So there are two patterns of successful mating, let's say. Successful pursuit of sexual gratification. There's the mosquito model and the human model. The mosquito model is plenty of offspring, no investment. The human model is very small number of offspring, very high investment. Okay, so now take the humans. Now there's a distribution of humans. Some of them, are low investment meters and some of them are high investment meters. So low investment would be many offspring, no investment. Okay, now you say that's a strategy. It's a biological strategy. Okay, who are the people who utilize that strategy? They're Machiavellian, narcissistic,

Starting point is 01:23:13 psychopathic and sadistic. So, you know, if that's what you want, that's the, that's the, And if you're naturally like that, that will be your orientation. But if you practice that, that's also what you'll become. For a long-term healthy and stable relationship, does that have to be with like a partner, like a husband or wife or a spouse? Or could it be, say, a brother or a child? Well, that's better than nothing. You know, I mean, there's all sorts of relationships.

Starting point is 01:23:46 But just something to contend with that will always keep you in check is essentially what you're saying. Well, it's something to care for over the long run that isn't you. Couldn't that also be, let's say, a sibling or a close friend? Sure, sure. But it's just not as optimally. Relationships, but there isn't the advantage to long-term heterosexual, child-centered coupling is that it provides all those other benefits. You know, there's a polarity between men and women that's important,

Starting point is 01:24:13 a fundamental orientation that's important. If you can bring both of those viewpoints to any given situation, in all likelihood that's more advantageous. That provides a platform for children and grandchildren, so the continuity of humanity across the generations. And the core of that's obviously the relationship between men and women. Are there ways of approximating that? Well, obviously, but there are approximations.

Starting point is 01:24:40 And that doesn't mean, obviously, there are some people who have better friendships than their marriage, but that's irrelevant with regards to the main point because we're talking about something that's an ideal. You know, everybody falls short of the ideal. But part of the reason you can't maintain sanity isn't in your head. Like, here's a definition of sanity. You're well enough socialized so other people can tell you when you're an idiot and you'll listen.

Starting point is 01:25:04 So why is that a good solution? Well, there's a lot of other people. And if they're giving you signals all the time, all you have to do is listen. So that's a good deal for you. You know, you might think, well, that's, you know, sanity's in my head. It's like, what makes you think you can regulate yourself? You're pretty goddamn complicated, you know. So we regulate ourselves socially.

Starting point is 01:25:25 That's why we talk to each other. It's vital. That's so interesting. I feel like, once again, what you're saying, I feel like I'm, like, struck with my pride a little bit. Like, I feel like I can regulate myself. I can always aim up or try to do what is right and think, well, I guess I'm still basing my decision-making,

Starting point is 01:25:45 because a heuristic I use a lot of the time when I'm trying to decide what to do between like a moral conundrum is like what would the optimal person in this situation do and completely remove myself from this situation and then I do that. But I guess that's also relating. Well, that's right. Yeah. That's what you've done by. What you've done to some, that's a good observation.

Starting point is 01:26:05 What you've done to some degree is you've, you've constructed an idealized representation of another or a human being for that matter. That's like the son of man in the Christian conception. That's a good way of thinking about it. So what you're doing when you do that is no different from what, say, evangelical Christians do. When you ask themselves, what would Jesus do? It's exactly the same thing. And it's pulled from real people. It's just certain components about them.

Starting point is 01:26:31 So they're still technically pressing upon and pressing upon me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're essentially fabricating out of whole cloth, something approximating a classic religious orientation. You know, what would someone who is ideal do in this situation? Well, see, if you delved into that, this is where the religious investigation would take place. It's like, okay, who is this ideal that you're calling upon? What's the characterization of that ideal? You could write that all down. You'd see what your ideal is. And then you'd see that it has, that it approximates the figure of the hero in mythology. And so far as it has any utility to you. I told my friend this and he said, that is the start of religion or that is God. to people, which... Yeah, well, that's the intermediary figure in some ways.

Starting point is 01:27:21 So there's the transcendent ultimate unity, let's say, but that's ineffable. It's difficult to establish a relationship with. There's some intermediary figure. That's the role that Christ plays in Christianity, right? That's God brought down to earth. Why is Christ an ideal? Because he welcomes the catastrophe of fate. Right.

Starting point is 01:27:41 And so there's no ideal person who doesn't do that. I mean, James Bond does that. Like, well, seriously, like anybody that attracts your admiration is going to have that welcoming attitude towards even the difficulties of existence. Like, that's going to be a stellar part of their character. Otherwise, you wouldn't admire them. You admire people who can maintain themselves across a catastrophe. Right.

Starting point is 01:28:06 So the most admirable person is the person who can maintain themselves the best across the worst possible catastrophe. Right. And so that'll be lurking at the back of the. the ideal. So welcoming suffering and welcoming the catastrophe reminds me of man's search for meaning, which for me was one of the most important books I've ever read. And he also quoted, he also quoted a man who has a why can bear almost any half, right, right, right, which is what you quoted earlier, which is really interesting. Are there any other books or authors where if you

Starting point is 01:28:38 were to tell the viewers right now, if they started listening to them or reading them, that would make one of the biggest impacts that they can possibly. Well, that's a good one. Modern Man search for a soul, that's Jung's book. That's very good book. The Gulag Archipelago is like Victor Frankel on steroids. But it's a, it's a voyage, that book. Frankl's book has the advantage of being pretty accessible. It's accessible, but it's profound, it's relatively short, so that's a pretty good deal. Notes from underground, anything Dostoevsky wrote, beyond good and evil, although that's, that's a rough one. That's hard on people, that book. But Victor Frankel's book is singular in some ways in the popular literature

Starting point is 01:29:23 because of its combination of depth and accessibility. So I read crime and punishment because of you. And I had never, this was the first book I've ever read of that type. That was so deep. And it's interesting because now it reminds me of the conversation we had earlier where the emotions that they can bring out and the reader are so gut-wrenching. And it's like pain, but it's, It's positive and negative at the exact same time.

Starting point is 01:29:48 That's right. And just like classical music, great classical music. But it was a whole different set of emotions. I feel like I hadn't experienced before. And I found that interesting because I guess overall, you know, there was a lot of meaning in the book. And it brought about, you know, a different experience of life I had in previous experience. But at the same time, it was the contending of like the positive and negative emotions. And also, I mean, the way that Dostoevsky can write is so descriptive and like an accurate.

Starting point is 01:30:14 Well, it's also a great adventure story. great thriller, a crime novel. It's an amazing book. What do your thoughts on Eckhart Toll? I don't know enough about him really to comment in depth. I mean, Eckhart Toll is part of that 1960s humanist movement essentially. And like fundamentally the humanists were wrong. So it so that would go along with say conceptions like self-actualization. That would be Abraham Maslow and what did Carl Rogers describe it as something like the fully functional person. and the person whose actions are commensurate with their utterances, who's transparent to themselves and others,

Starting point is 01:30:53 who communicates in a manner that's striving to bring themselves and other people upward. But it's all within a humanist framework. And in the final analysis, that's, it's weak. It can't withstand ideological assault with any degree of resistance. I found Eckert Toll to be, I mean, his two, books were also some of the most important books I've ever read, A New Earth and the Power of Now. Both of those made tremendous differences. A lot of it has to do, the fundamental idea of those books is very similar to what a lot of different philosophers say. A lot of philosophers, when you boil

Starting point is 01:31:34 it down, like I'm sure you're, you know, you know that the fundamentals are pretty much the same. It's just the abstractions from it differ. I feel like if you've, I'm sure you've observed that. But I think those two books were some of the most important things for me, at least to use as tools, to alleviate. I learned a lot from the humans when like Rogers and Nazlo, for example, when I read them when I was, I don't know, something approximating. How old are you? 25. 25. So a little, how old are you? 34. 34.

Starting point is 01:32:00 I read them when I was little younger than you and they had, I learned a lot from Rogers and from Naslow. So, you know, the effect that a book has on you depends to some non-trivial degree on where you happen to be standing when you encountered the book. And if the person who's writing the book knows much more than you do about something at that moment, well, then the book can be very enlightening. And lots of books, like I learned a lot from Freud. You know, I don't, I think Freud was fundamentally wrong in his insistence that it was the hedonic element that drove life itself. He used the sexual impulse as a stand-in for hedonic orientation. I just don't think that's true, but I still learned a lot from reading Freud. lots of thinkers can be wrong in some ways and right in others and, you know, a discriminating reader pulls out the wheat and leaves the chaff behind.

Starting point is 01:32:50 I learned a lot from Ernest Becker's book, The Denial of Death, which is sort of the ultimate extension of the Freudian view. It's brilliant book. It's wrong, but it's brilliant, and there's much in it that's correct. Fundamentally, it's wrong because Becker believed that the heroic orientation in life was also a form of defense against deathings. It's just, that's not. It's a good theory. It's an interesting theory. Sometimes it's true, but fundamentally it's true.

Starting point is 01:33:19 You wrote in your book about growing up and living a very poor life, like at least, like financially speaking, and that you were an assistant professor supporting a family, and your wife Tammy had no green card, so she couldn't work, and you have a funny story about selling a neighbor a car, and then the door fell off on the car after you sold it. You had quite the rat trap of an old car, and that's for sure. I think I spray painted it because it was so...

Starting point is 01:33:44 All the paint had peeled off in the sun in Saskatchewan. It was... Well, it was enough of a rattle trap to attract the picture of police. Oh, no. I spray painted it in the... It works, though. Well, it worked until we had enough capital to get another car. But yeah, we pretty much drove that thing right into the ground.

Starting point is 01:34:03 But now... It's like the worst car. It's like the worst car. In 1975, Ford Granada. Everything about that car was bad. You wouldn't recommend it if someone's looking for a new car. I think it had a 400 cubic inch engine and no power. It's like I don't know how Ford managed to have a huge V8 in a two-door that had like no acceleration and no high speed.

Starting point is 01:34:23 It had no room in it even though it was a huge car. Yeah. It had no room in the back seat. Even though it was a huge car, it was really not a good car. So how is acquiring wealth going from that to where you are today affected your family beliefs and the way you see life? Well, for me mostly, and I think for my family, mostly, like, you know, you have to define wealth in a way, and wealth is a plethora of opportunity. And so, yeah, I have a plethora of opportunity in every possible direction. So that's great. What is it made? What difference has it

Starting point is 01:35:02 made to my day-to-day life? Well, I have more houses. It hasn't made much. difference because I already pretty much had everything I wanted, and I'm not particularly interested in the hegnistic end of what wealth might hypothetically bring to you. You know, I was pretty old when all of this blew up around me. And so, but mostly it's just a wealth of opportunity. That's wealth is a wealth of opportunity. Have you always been like that in terms of not pursuing things, or did that just occur with age? Well, I pursue things to some degree. I mean, I have a big art collection, but that's a form of exploration for me. Most of the art that I collected was propaganda from the Soviet Union, and I was very interested in that historically and also

Starting point is 01:35:49 aesthetically, because propaganda art is a weird blend, right? It's a blend of falsehood and truth, a very strange blend. And so it was very interesting to see these paintings, especially the ones that were done by people with great skill. And, you know, it was part of my investigation into the structure of totalitarianism per se. So I bought a lot of paintings, and that was very entertaining. But I did that before everything blew up around me. And so I did that on a normal level of income, let's say. How are you able to keep your ego in check with, you know,

Starting point is 01:36:24 what's happened over the past decade, just absolutely blowing up and becoming, you know, famous, essentially, acquiring what... I read a paper a long time ago called relations between the ego and the unconscious, which is written by Carl Jung. It's a great paper, but no one can understand unless they know what it's about. It's about that problem. So I talk about archetypal matters, right? And that has produced a focus of attention on my work.

Starting point is 01:36:53 Well, that's not me. You have to make sure that you don't confuse yourself with the truth, let's say, like in a personal manner. So the fact that I can explain, let's say, the Enuma Elish, which is a Mesopotamian creation, it doesn't mean that I figured it out. I didn't create the story. So you have to distinguish yourself from the effect that the ideas have. You don't want to take credit for that. Partly because it's extreme, first of all, it won't work.

Starting point is 01:37:27 You will definitely crash and burn if you do that 100%. That's the story of Icarus. You don't want to do that. You don't want to fly too close to the sun and have the whack, the sun, the heat melt all the wax in your wings. That's a very bad idea. And then I have people around me. You know, I have good counselors. My wife, very level-headed. My son and my daughter are awake and they keep an eye on things. And I have friends too that play the same role. So we're evaluating and watching all the time, trying to be careful. And I try to be. be careful. And remember, too, you know, to be grateful for all the opportunities that I have and for the fact that people aren't throwing stones at me, which they easily could be. I think gratitude is definitely something, a formidable opponent for an ego. Definitely. Yeah. And then obviously also having some people to keep you grounded, some people that you trust. Yeah, right. Well, that's part of that distribution of sanity. It's like if you have a complex situation, you're going to need a number of people around you

Starting point is 01:38:30 to evaluate and and investigate and make the way forward. And so, you know, I'm fortunate too that, well, I worked with my wife and we figured out how to work very closely together. And she has a cardinal role to play, and I work with my kids, and that works out very well. And so we're constantly communicating about how to negotiate what's in front of us. what would you say is your biggest insecurity my biggest insecurity well it's probably related to the question that you asked like how do you keep feet on the ground you know and i'm constantly reminding myself how fortunate i am you know my wife almost died that was quite the catastrophe i was extremely ill for three years in an unbelievably, unbelievable amount of pay. That's gone. People, you know, I'm

Starting point is 01:39:52 traveling all around the world and people are pleased to see me. I don't take that for granted. I'm very careful with people. I don't presume that that's normal or ordinary, ever, because it's not. I remind myself before I go on stage that I'm lucky to be there, lucky to be alive, luckily, lucky that it's not a mad mom because it easily couldn't be. So gratitude is an antidote to resentment and arrogance. What would you say your biggest weaknesses? Talk too much.

Starting point is 01:40:28 Maybe. Do you see any reason to fix that? Do you see that a weakness? Well, I don't know. It's a strength with some potential temptations. you know, when the, with, in the podcasts, I still probably don't have my podcasts optimized. I still talk probably more than I should in my podcasts. But I've always talked more than I should ever since I was like two.

Starting point is 01:40:59 So it's, it's a, and there's obviously advantages in it because I'm very verbally fluent. And that fact enables, has enabled what I've done. So, you know, everything can be carried to accept. I try it. I'm good at listening when I remember to listen. And I like to listen. I'm very interested in people.

Starting point is 01:41:20 And so, you know, that makes it easy for podcasts. But it's more of a conscious effort. Because I feel like I've observed so, like a couple times in this podcast where you've noticed your string of conversation and then you like kind of think about it for a second. And then you're like, okay, I should come to a resolve or something.

Starting point is 01:41:38 Or would you say that that isn't what happened? Well, when I'm speaking, I'm paying attention to how the words are landing, which is something that people can learn to do. It's a very useful thing to learn to do. You can watch and you can see if what you're saying makes you stronger or weaker and you can more or less feel that with every word. And you can learn to put your foot down where the ground is solid. And that's unbelievably useful. That's what I'm doing in, well, all the time that I'm speaking, it's like, where's the next? bit of solid ground. Now, you know, I can get carried away with enthusiasm, and then I remind myself to look more, to look more. Are you afraid of death? I'm afraid of other things more. Why? Because death to me just seems like there's nothing that we can confirm in terms of an afterlife. So to me, that seems terrifying. I would be more worried about that than other things. I don't think about that ever really about because it's beyond my capacity of comprehension. So I just leave that lie fundamentally.

Starting point is 01:42:51 But if death is the thing you're most afraid of, you're very fortunate. So there are things that are far worse than death, like far worse. And I would say I've experienced a fair number of those. What would you say is worse? Unbearable pain that doesn't go away. Moral culpability, you know, like how much do you want to be responsible for the suffering that your stupidity has engendered? So that's rough. So that's why there's conceptualizations of the soul, let's say, in classic religious writings.

Starting point is 01:43:33 You strive to protect not your life but your soul, and that's right. And it's hard for modern people to understand that. because martyr people think that there's no death, no fear worse than the fear of death. But that's just because they lack imagination. So if you have enough imagination, this is why the terror management theorists, for example, are wrong. We construct our beliefs to protect us against death anxiety. It's like if the thing you're most worried about is your own demise, then you have it delved very far down the rungs of Dante's Inferno, because there's things that are much worse than death.

Starting point is 01:44:12 So that's why sometimes people regard death as a relief. We had a discussion before this podcast about responsibility of having a voice that people listen to, the responsibility of having a podcast. Do you ever worry, because this is always a worry of ours, if we bring someone on our show and we can't contend with their points, if they have something, if they're a really good rhetorityan, you know?

Starting point is 01:44:36 And we just, even if we have the fact, We can't relay them in such a way that trumps whatever rhetoric they can spew. Is that a responsibility that we then owe to our viewer and the people around us to not bring that person on? You have the responsibility to do the best you can, to get your orientation right, to do the best you can. It doesn't hurt people to see you, you know, put back on your heels or struggling in the face of a particularly well-designed manipulative onslaught. That happens to everybody. I'm concerned about that. I have guests now and then very rarely

Starting point is 01:45:10 because I pick my guests very carefully, but I've had guests that I regretted having, for example, because the conversation, I couldn't stop the conversation from degenerating into an argument. I'm not interested in the game of who's right. It's such a dull game. I quit playing that game like in 1986. It's like, you're right, have it your way, you know.

Starting point is 01:45:37 So I don't like conversations that degenerate into arguments and the sort of situation that you're describing where you have a guest that's particularly good with rhetorical flourishes. They know it can degenerate into an argument about who's right. Primate dominance, hierarchy maneuvering. It's dull. But, you know, there's no reason that you have to do your podcast perfectly. You know what I mean. You want to be on the edge. We like to think that we bear some sort of responsibility.

Starting point is 01:46:05 if we have someone on our channel that in essence, whether or not we agree we are platforming them, or we are giving them. I don't agree. Well, my sense of that, my experience of that has been that if you do what you can to explore and investigate and you're trying to maintain an orientation towards truth,

Starting point is 01:46:25 that the audience will sort that out. You have to give, you're not in the business of protecting your audience, right? You're in the business of conducting your audience, right? You're in the business of conducting your investigation and letting them come along for the ride. And you have to assume as a default that people, when people see most of them, when the evidence is in front of them, many people can see. The ones that can't, well, if you're trying to educate people, you're trying to deal with that problem too. So you follow the golden thread, you know,

Starting point is 01:47:03 and you assume that if you lay out the truth that the best that could happen happens. And you don't want to get the point where you're pulling your punches or confining yourself. You can make some mistakes in your exploration, you know. Otherwise, if you're not making some mistakes, you're probably not pushing hard enough.

Starting point is 01:47:23 You know, there's an optimal level there too. It is a relief to see what happens when you take not going to win the argument, going for truth and clarity to the nth degree, because I see you, which I assume to be, you know, someone in pursuit of that, to be successful and loved, granted, not without its downfalls and shortcomings of any real downfalls or shortcomings. You know, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, if you looked at my life in the virtual sense, you'd think I was beset by enemies all the time. But first of all, it isn't obvious that the number of people who should object to you is

Starting point is 01:48:00 zero, the optimal number. You know, like, if I'm upsetting totalitarian fascists, it's like, okay, you know, that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned. And also the disconnect between that online, let's say it in my real life, is absolutely staggering. Like, I knock on wood, and I don't take this for granted, and I'm also careful about it. But all the interactions I have with people in my actual life are ridiculously positive. You know, it's weird because wherever I go, and it's literally wherever I go, I'm surrounded by friends.

Starting point is 01:48:39 And so that's a stunningly good deal. And, you know, there's noisy radicals who think they object to things I say. Whatever. It's a pain. I mean, I'm being persecuted by my college in Canada. I guess the Supreme Court decision for that comes down this week. I suspect they'll find against me and have me pay the court costs of the college. That's my guess. But, you know, how do I feel about that? I don't know. Maybe it's an opportunity, right?

Starting point is 01:49:11 Dragons guard treasure. Right. So if a dragon shows up, you might be thinking, treasure around here somewhere, if I was smart enough to see it. And that's a good thing to know. That's a seriously good thing to know. It might be invariably true. It might even be true when it's really quite something quite monstrous and awful staring you in the face. You know, so if they do find against me and the college moves me to re-education, which is the next step, you know, I have no idea what will happen as a consequence of that. You know, and in some ways, I don't care, like in a detached way. It's like I'm not that thrilled about being a psychologist at the moment anyways, because my colleagues, by and large, have proved themselves to be

Starting point is 01:49:58 contemptibly weak in the face of adversity. It's not really a club I'm that thrilled to be part of. I don't depend on my clinical license for my income. And they're not really going to be able to damage my reputation. So they could cost me some money, but whatever. I can figure out a way to generate more money from what they're doing than they'll cost me. So what course would you say you're most excited for? Well, of the courses I've taught, the sermon on the mount, I would say. Yeah, That's a deadly course. So I did a course on each other. That was fun.

Starting point is 01:50:31 It's half of Beyond Human Evil. I'll do the other half at a different time. But the sermon on the mount will be released relatively soon. And that was great fun because it's a very, it's a wonderful bit of literature to take part. So, and it is an instruction manual. And it's an extremely useful instruction manual. So it was very fun to go through that. You know, if you're teaching and you're genuinely teaching, you're learning when you teach,

Starting point is 01:50:58 And that's also the case with the lectures. And I think all the people who are lecturing for Peterson Academy are doing that. You know, and this, I've been a, I'm in a fortunate position because I can identify top level lecturers and thinkers everywhere. And almost invariably, when we reach out to them, they say yes. So that's a really good deal. I'm sure you experience that to some degree with your podcast as your success is mounted, the probability that people will say yes, increases. And there's a lot of disenchantment, especially among the great professors, with the current state of our educational institutions.

Starting point is 01:51:34 And so we offer the pretty good deal. It's like, okay, here's the deal. Come to our studio. We'll find an audience of people who actually want to hear what you have to say. That's why they're there. And then you can teach whatever you want at the highest level that you're capable of, and will pay you better than you can, you'll be paid by, your university and it'll be better than a book deal and you'll be able to teach more people and

Starting point is 01:52:02 we'll treat you extremely well while you're there. Well, that's a good deal. And so people come down there and they're very happy because they're treated well and they want to come back. And so Larry Arne from Hillsdale taught a course on Churchill, which I think is really funny because like, are you going to find a course on Churchill at the typical university? I don't think so. We had one of the members of the Houses of Lord, teach a course on great leaders in history. Like, that's just not happening at the universities because nobody buys the great leader of history theory anymore. Resentful, bloody luciferian intellects. It'll be interesting to see what professors will do, exceptional professors, when given free reign, to talk about whatever they like to talk about. Well, that is what you want

Starting point is 01:52:44 to see. That's what they're doing when they're teaching. Bureaucracy and politics that comes with being in a, you know, university. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, one of the things that it's done for me is, you know, so when I used to teach my personality course, I would cover Freud in like an hour and a half. Well, that's, that's not helpful. I mean, I can understand why it's a survey course and all that, but I was going to do a course on Pige, Jean Piersier and the developmental psychologist and several other thinkers, but the course just ended up being about Piaje, because I had eight hours and I could just talk about Piaje. So it's quite deep, and I can just

Starting point is 01:53:20 endlessly do that. And so that's a great opportunity. It's such fun. And, and I, and I'm just And if you're lecturing properly, like a lecture isn't the deliverance of knowledge to, like, the empty shells of the recipients. What you're doing properly if you're lecturing is learning. So I'm with the course on Nietzsche, for example, I did the same thing with the sermon on the Mount. No, I'd read a section and then actively think about it. It wasn't like, I mean, I was prepared because I'd been preparing for 40 years, but I didn't. have the notes at hand, I wanted the revelations of the meaning to strike me in the moment.

Starting point is 01:54:01 That's part of that utility of that ability to concentrate on the moment if your orientation is right. So what's the goal? You walk on a stage for a lecture, you think, okay, well, I'm trying to answer an interesting question with the sermon on the mountain with me, well, what's the essential message of the sermon on the mount? That's a hard question. It's a central what would you say? It's a foundational document of the West. And so, well, what is it? What is it me? Well, let's find out. And then that's the exploration in the course. And it's the same with beyond good and evil. You know, I was taking pieces of it, sentences, because you can talk about any given sentence of Nietzsche for like a month because it's so unbelievably dense. You know, he was

Starting point is 01:54:46 very ill, very ill when he was writing. And so he couldn't write for long. And so he would think think and think and think and think and then write one sentence and all that thought was compacted into that sentence. And then he made like a whole book, many books out of those sentences. It's just incredibly dense and entertaining to unpack. So I'm excited about the course on Nietzsche. I'm excited about the course on what I did. I redid my Maps of Meaning lecture series. And I managed to condense it to eight hours, which is the best.

Starting point is 01:55:15 Congratulations. It took about 32 hours. Gosh. So I think that was the most effective exposition of those ideas. that I've managed. Samuel Andreaev's course on music has got rave reviews. Jonathan Pajos's lecture. Jonathan Pajos is a remarkable person.

Starting point is 01:55:31 Everything he says is worth listening to. It's like every word. Every time I listen to him, I learn something new and profound. And that's very rare. You know, I'm at the point in my life where if I read a book, it's somewhat rare for the book to have an idea that I don't know. But then I talk to Pazio, it's like everything he says, something new. Got to find out what he's reading.

Starting point is 01:55:53 You got to find out what he's... Well, he's reading like orthodox literature from the middle ages, Muslim. So it's arcane, you know, which is partly why he, and he also has a tremendous background knowledge of the world of art, and so he can bring those two things together. But that is

Starting point is 01:56:09 what he's reading. And so John Vervenki is lecturing, James Orr, Brian Keating on Cosmology. We have a great lineup. And it's such fun. It's It's such a fun project. Like, we're quite excited at the moment because we put a lot of money into this project,

Starting point is 01:56:26 multiple millions of dollars of personal money. And we have no idea if it was going to be financially successful, if it would work. Like, is there a market for it? Who the hell knows? Did we get the price right? It's $450 a year, which is dirt cheap by university standards. We have 10,000 students already in the first week just for pre-enrollment. And it's very likely that we'll be accredited.

Starting point is 01:56:51 So I think we'll have the best of both worlds because we'll be able to offer people. I think the best courses that've ever been filmed, both in terms of content, but also in terms of production quality. I'm very happy with my daughter, Michaela, and her husband, Jordan Fuller. They built this studio, which is a hard thing to do, and they brought in a production team, and they hired editors. And it's really good. It was the trailers were, they exceeded my expectations. which were high. I wanted to be sure that he had the best courses ever,

Starting point is 01:57:24 but they're like, by far the best courses in it. If it's anything like the trailers. It is. They all like the trailers. That's the thing is the trailers are actually, they're not puffery for something that's basically dulled. The trailers look like the courses. They're very tightly edited.

Starting point is 01:57:41 They're full of illustrations. You know, we got lucky because when we filmed the courses, we fill all of our professors against a white wall with no edges. And at the same time, these AI systems emerged that could do custom-made illustrations for, if you know how to use them, every course has its own style sheet.

Starting point is 01:58:04 Like, it's integrated, so the offerings have a cohesion, but they all have their own style sheet. They're beautifully illustrated. We can fill in the background behind the professor with commentary and images and words and that technology only emerged like six months ago. So that was perfect timing.

Starting point is 01:58:22 And the universities themselves are doing everything they can to burn themselves to the ground as rapidly as possible. We hardly even have to market because every day some university does something cataclysmically stupid and expensive. You know, what are our hopes? Maybe we can educate a million people. Maybe we can educate 100 million people. Who knows?

Starting point is 01:58:45 right because there's an unlimited market the price is very low it's universally accessible we're going to be able to translate all the courses into the world's major languages that's already at hand there's some expense in it but if we generate enough capital that's irrelevant and we probably will by the looks of things I mean who knows but 10,000 pre-enrollments in the first week is quite promising and people have actually been positive about the price so it's I mean it's very inexpensive. People are happy about the price, which means that maybe we undershot it slightly. But, well, because maybe if you get it right, some people are upset. So where do you balance the price on that versus getting more revenue to be able to read this back?

Starting point is 01:59:31 Pricing is very, very hard. I mean, there's a lot of things to take into account, right? Because you might say free. Well, that's, free is a stupid price. Free means your platform will be invaded with parasites and bonds, right? Because there's no success rate is going to be very low. Well, it's just not a good price. First of all, people are skeptical of anything that's free. Second, people don't want something for nothing if they have a moral compass. Third, if the price is reasonable and not too low, then no one who isn't committed will participate. And we have a social media platform that's part of it. And wouldn't it be nice to have a social media platform that had all the benefits of social media, but that only contained people that were actually committed to

Starting point is 02:00:19 the ideal, which would be the expansion of knowledge. Well, so the price serves as a barrier that way, right? Because you're not going to do it if you're just casual or you only want to cause trouble. And so that's a good thing. And then we, well, you want to, you want to price it high enough so that you can expand rapidly and continue to develop and you want to price it so that if you produce a profit, you can use the profit to generate new enterprises. There's lots of, we want to integrate my son's program essay, which helps people write. We want to integrate that with the platform. We have all sorts of ideas for growth, and that requires capital. And so pricing decisions are very difficult. The way you solve that is you charge what the market can bear. That's the rule. And there is

Starting point is 02:01:05 a better role than that. And why? Because every single person out there who's deciding whether to purchase something is making a very large number of calculations with every purchasing decision. And there's no way that you can second guess that. Like you can't replace that with some rationalization. So what's this worth? Well, we sort of went for somewhere between $20 and $200 a month. That was the initial parameters, right? And it took a long time to calibrate down to 450. Why 450? Well, it's not nothing.

Starting point is 02:01:46 It's more expensive than the typical Netflix offering, for example. So it distinguishes us from them to some degree. But also if it's successful, it generates enough capital so that we should be able to expand our offerings very rapidly. You know, when capitalism gets a bad name because people are foolish and they're conceptions of money. It's like, well, who needs all that month? Well, you know, your typical capitalist, you're atypical capitalist, Elon Musk, he's not Scrooge McDuck, like he's not swimming around in a money bin full of coins, right? All he's doing with his money is pursuing more opportunities. And if you

Starting point is 02:02:23 generate profit, then, well, you could live a life of parasitical hedonism, but, you know, if you have something that's halfway's better to do, why the hell would you do that? that we have the opportunity in front of us. We have the opportunity in front of us to hypothetically bring the best higher education has to offer to like 100 million people. Well, how could you possibly imagine anything more interesting and rewarding than that? Like, that's what the profit is for. It's like, do I want a Ferrari? Not really.

Starting point is 02:02:59 They're too low. I'm old. You know, and like I have some nice things. I have some nice houses and that's good, but you have to put your money somewhere. Mostly we put it into more enterprises. And then it's fun to see if you can make those work, right? Because we bit off very complex problems. Can we bring higher education to many, many people at the highest possible quality, at the lowest possible cost?

Starting point is 02:03:25 That's a very interesting set of problems. And at the moment, it looks like the answer to that is yes. We have a number of jurisdictions who are interested in. in accrediting us. And as long as we can negotiate the bureaucratic hurdles, then we should have a full-fledged university, including accreditation, in six months. And even if accreditation doesn't work out because the bureaucratic impediments are too great, we'll just negotiate with corporations to accept the credentialing because the credentialing will be real. That's where I think education is going anyway. It's online. Like, I learn a lot from just watching YouTube videos. And I feel like that

Starting point is 02:04:03 That is the most in-depth that you could get sometimes in way more detail. And lots of jobs aren't requiring official like college degrees. Well, it's partly because the college degrees don't signify what they did. Yeah. And will ours signify that? Yes. Oh, well, also, just for the sake of full disclosure, let's say, there's two pathways you could walk down if you enroll Peterson Academy. You could just take courses like you were listening to YouTube videos, let's say.

Starting point is 02:04:32 or you can take the exams and walk through the accreditation process. You don't have to do that. And we actually don't know what the market, comparative market is. A lot of people have asked whether they could take the courses without the exams. Now, so we don't know if the exams are like, will it be 25% of the people who actually want to work towards accreditation or 10% or 60%? We have no idea. It could be quite low because it could be quite a lot. a low number. Don't know. Depends on how many people just want to learn for the sake of learning.

Starting point is 02:05:08 I am curious about this. Do people retain information better in person? No, I don't think there's any evidence for that. I don't think we know enough about the situational determinants of retention to decide. I suspect there are factors other than in-person versus remote that determine retention. Probably distraction, as my guess. Sure. And level of engagement with material, something like that. But no, I don't think that's a problem. Well, the other thing, too, is that most university lectures are very low quality. So at the typical university, especially the bigger universities, the research oriented universities, you can get along quite fine and be a terrible teacher. And so I would say at the typical large state school, five percent of the

Starting point is 02:05:59 courses are high quality, you know, and then 40% are okay. And then, you know, there's half that, you know, it's just death to sit through. And there's no excuse for that. That's another thing that we can do at a minimum is raise the bar for the universities. You know, the universities, the ideal least they could have done this 20 years ago. It's like, who are the best lecturers? Because if the other thing about in person, if you're lecturing to a thousand people, it's not in person. You know what I mean? At some point, yeah. There's so many people there that it's impersonal. It might as well be replaced by video as far as I could tell. In fact, you can listen to video it twice as fast. That's a big deal. Or four times as fast. You can review it.

Starting point is 02:06:38 Our exams are set up in a very interesting way. So multiple choice exams. But each question will be timestamped with the lecture. So if you get the question wrong, you can just go to the lecture and you can find out so you'll be able to use the exams to teach you. Right. And so yeah, it's very excited. We've got Another 50 courses lined up. We're going to produce at least three a month, and we might be able to ramp up past that. And we have some wild plans in place, too, for lectures that I can't discuss yet. But we have some truly revolutionary ideas. And I don't say that lightly.

Starting point is 02:07:15 And they're very likely to occur, assuming that, you know, the enrollment rate continues. So I'm very happy about it. it's gone better than I could have hoped, actually. I was quite stunned by the trailers. The trailers? Yeah, yeah. I mean, they go back to the trailers. Come on, you can't.

Starting point is 02:07:36 Those trailers were something. Yeah, they're deadly. And they're all like that. Like every single one of them, it's like they're punchy, they're cool. They've got this, like with Greg Hurwitz's course, it's on narrative construction because he's a novelist. It's got this film noir look, pulp fiction look from the 1950s. It's cool. The music is well-timed. The editing is really tight. The trailers are coherent.

Starting point is 02:08:00 And the professors are, we have great professors. And I think that we're going to set up a system where we find the best professors in the work and give them carte blanche to teach what they want. That's such a good deal. So have you considered having a financial literacy course? Oh, definitely. Because I think that is very well. Definitely. Well, I also want to bring on to the platform. economists from the Austrian school, Mises and Hayek, and teach people the basics, the basics of free market exchange. I wouldn't love that. Oh yeah, that's definitely.

Starting point is 02:08:37 But also modern day literacy is just an everyday personal finance. Yeah, well, not only personal finances, but like an orientation towards financial management and success. You know, like people think, for example, that profit is a dirty word. It's like, well, that's insane. Profit is what enables you to grow.

Starting point is 02:08:54 Like, that's just, if you have that attitude towards profit, basically what you're doing is punishing yourself morally and ideologically for doing your job well. Well, that's not, that's going to demoralize you. So that's not good. It's no, it's like pick a hard target, figure out how to solve it, offer the best services you possibly can. And if you can generate money, that indicates you're doing it efficiently and you can take the capital and go to something else interesting with it. And so, and there's no end to that. Like, there's no end to the number of courses we can offer and the number of professors we can bring onto the platform. And obviously,

Starting point is 02:09:33 as it's successful, you know, it's going to be even easier for us now to attract high quality lectures because we can say, well, this is what your course will look like. And this is how many students you'll have. Like, who the hell's going to say no to that? If they actually want to teach, it's such a good deal. You know, if you write an academic book, you're lucky if 5,000 people, people buy it. Like, really, that's a major success. And maybe half of those read it. Well, with a good course, maybe you'll have an audience of a million. It's a thousand times more success. So, yeah, we're very excited about it. And it looks like it might be working. So, you know, and soon we're going to have monthly payment structures. And I'm going to negotiate with corporations

Starting point is 02:10:16 to offer scholarships. And so, you know, one of the things we'd like to do is, find the 10,000 smartest young people in the world, right? Because there's all these developing countries where there are geniuses lying latent here and there. There are cognitive resources aren't being utilized. You know, there's some Elon Musk in India and some poor family. Maybe you'll never have the opportunity to move ahead and to offer the world what he could offer. We are in a position where we can be able to find people like that. I'm going to go to corporations and say, like buy a thousand scholarships. We'll screen people,

Starting point is 02:10:54 we'll bring bright people in from all over the developing world and educate. I love that. Then we'll be able to hook them up with potential employers. I mean, we'll set up a platform where we shouldn't be able to identify

Starting point is 02:11:08 the smartest and hardest working people in the world. It shouldn't be that hard to hook them up with employers. It's like, look, they're stellar. They work hard, they're committed. They're all in. They're educated. They're not ideologically adult. It's like, do you want to hire them?

Starting point is 02:11:22 Would you pay for the privilege of hiring them? That would be incredible to utilize your tests with employment. That you could basically just select, hey, these are the people that we believe are the most qualified based on our rankings. Right. And just have them there. Right. Well, that's in such an efficient society where it's like, yep,

Starting point is 02:11:39 you just pick and choose like that person. Right. That would be incredible. Definitely. Yeah, well, that's been a dream for since 1992. I talked to my partner, Daniel. about building a online psychometric battery that would enable us to find the smartest people in the world

Starting point is 02:11:56 who don't have any opportunities. Like, we don't want to let that kind of genius go to waste. That's foolish. Deadly foolish. You know, what's one person like Elon Muskworth? What's he worth? 150 billion? Maybe there's a thousand people out there like that.

Starting point is 02:12:11 Because there could be. Yeah. All right. Cool. Jordan, thank you so much for coming on the show. It really means a lot. Really appreciate it. Thank you guys for watching. Check out Peterson Academy.

Starting point is 02:12:22 It'll be linked down below. Thank you. Until next time. Thank you guys.

The Iced Coffee Hour - An Unfiltered Conversation with Jordan Peterson

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