The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 232. Narrative, Story, and Writing pt. 2

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

As an alternative for those who would rather listen ad-free, sign up for a premium subscription to receive the following:*All JBP Podcast episodes ad-free*Monthly Ask-Me-Anything episodes (and the ability to ask questions)*Presale access to events*Premium, detailed show notes for future episodesSign up here:https://jordanbpeterson.supercast.comIn part 2 of 3 in our Narrative, Story, and Writing compilation released January 21, we explored how stories impact how we see the world. In this second part, we look at what it means to write with purpose and what that ability can add to your life.We also look into how reading and writing connects to personal growth, and how character is built by forcing an articulation of what we think, how we feel, and why.This compilation consists of conversations from season 4 with people like Randall Wallace, Jocko Willink, and Andrew Doyle. There's also a section from Mikhaila Peterson podcast, episode 54 with Jordan and Mark Manson.

Welcome to episode 241 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson. In part one of the narrative story and writing compilation released January 21st, we explored how stories impact how we see the world. In this second part, we look at what it means to write with purpose and what that ability can add to your life. We also look into how reading and writing connects to personal growth and how character is built by forcing an articulation of what we think, how we feel and why. This compilation consists of conversations

from season four with people like Randall Wallace, Jocco Willink, and Andrew Doyle. We also included a few clips from the time I had dad and Mark Manson on my podcast. I hope you enjoy this compilation episode. Remember if you don't want to hear me read ads throughout this episode you can go to jordanbeepeterson.supercast.com and sign up for the ad free experience. I hope to the University of San Diego. You went to the University of San Diego. What did you take there?

I was in the university of San Diego. I was in the university of San Diego. I was in the university of San Diego. I was in the university of San Diego. I was in the university of San Diego. I was in the university of San Diego. I was in the university of San Diego. I was in the university of San Diego.

I was in the university of San Diego. I went to the University of San Diego. You went to the University of San Diego. What did you take there? I was an English major. All right. So you finished college and then what happened? You're not going to ask me why I was an English major? Why were you an English major?

I thought when he hears English major, he'd been going to say, wait a second, here you, this guy talking about machine guns and blowing things up. What in God's name are you going to go study English for? I have to say that that thought did pass through my mind. Okay. Why was nine English major? I was an English major because believe it or not, when you're in the SEAL teams and especially when you're in any officer position, when you're in the seal teams, and especially when you're in any officer position, you have to write and read all the time. So, when one of your troops does something and they deserve some kind of recognition for that,

you have to write them an award. And if the award is written well, there's a much better chance that it'll actually that be given to the person that you're writing it for. You have to write evaluations for your troops. And the evaluations that you write is how your troops are judged so that they can be promoted. On top of that, if you want to go do a mission, you have to write a concept of operations, which is a document, which is 5, six, seven, eight pages long that you send up the chain of command

that then they scour through and see if they're gonna prove your mission or not. You know, that's so insanely important, you know? I mean, one of the things I did a talk at Harvard four years ago, and I pointed out two things to the students in the audience. One was that a tremendous amount of civilization and effort had gone into producing the institution that they were now part of,

and that everyone who was part of that institution was hoping that they would come there and learn everything they possibly could that was relevant and important and that they would be the best possible people they could be and they would go out in the world and do as much good as they possibly could. That was the essential mission of the enterprise and that was really the case and also that learning to write in particular was going to make them more powerful than they could imagine.

And a number of students came up to me afterwards and said, I really wish someone would have said that to us when we first came here. And it's the writing part of that. I kind of got obsessed with that when I was working as a professor. And I'm working on a piece of software right now to help which will launch soon to help people write because what I observed in my own career and it's so interesting the parallelism is so interesting but not surprising is that Nothing can stop you if you can write and it's for the reasons you just laid out. It's like When you write you make a case for something Whatever it happens to be and if you make the best case,

well, then you win. And you get whatever it is that you're aiming at. And so, you know, you said, maybe that's why I didn't ask you why you went into English, I guess that might have been the reason is that the utility of learning to write is so self-evident to me that it could pass by without question. But it's also interesting to think about how it fits into this broader, well, let's say, at least partially, military-slossed strategic way of looking at things. You describe the intense relationship between marshaling your arguments properly,

getting everything in order on the page, and making strategic progress truly in the military sense that those things are tied together very, very precisely. And it's obviously your ability to communicate as well. That's, well, look what it's done. You have your podcast, you have your YouTube channel, you have your books, which many of which you self-published. So that ability to communicate is, I just can't understand why it's not

presented, especially not entirely, but especially to adventurous. Well, let's say young men, we could say young people, your adventurous, you want to make a mark is you bloody well better learn how to write. Because if you learn how to write, well, then you can think and you can communicate your thoughts. So not only are you deadly strategically, you become extremely convincing. And then you can go and do anything you want

and no one will stop you. And that's never told to people. And I don't really understand why. You know, you hear the pen is mightier than the sword, which is just a cliche, unless it's fleshed out. But the reason you laid out the reasons perfectly, yeah, you have to communicate what happened as well as having it had had it happen. Right. So you you already connected the

dots, but obviously, not only am I having to write and present my argument, I'm also having orders being issued to me, which are written. I'm sure you've heard the term rules of engagement, well rules of engagement is a 12-page document that is in a bunch of legalese. And I've got to translate that document to my troops, some of whom barely graduated high school. And so I've got to be able to do that.

So I've got to be able to read and then write and be able to then communicate and talk to the team and brief them in a manner that they can actually understand what it is I'm talking about and what it is our mission is and why we're doing this mission. So that was why I decided to study English when I went to college and believe. So that was a conscious decision. Absolutely. And with that end in mind, so tell me exactly what the decision was with regards to

studying English. What did you know that because it's not as you pointed out, it's not self-evidently the most practical of pursuits and not necessarily what you'd expect someone with a military orientation to pursue. Right, here's the thought process. I wanna be a good seal. The good seals that I see can communicate, they can write and they can read.

That's what I need to learn how to do. I need to learn how to do that better so that I can persuade my chain of command that we need to do this mission or we need this piece of gear or this guy over here needs to get an award or he needs to get promoted. All those things are done by being able

to write and communicate properly. Okay, so let's say you take the example of a seal who's got it all, but this literacy. Okay, so what happens to him compared to someone who has all those skills? Well, if he can't, if he can't write well, and he is in charge of six guys, and one of those guys works hard or does something that deserves to be recognized, this is the responsibility of that leader to write that person in a war. Okay, so he can't reward his, he can't reward his, his good workers, his good soldiers. He can give him a pat on the back, but about a back isn't going to get him promoted.

An award is actually worth some points towards your promotion. And the people that are on that board that are giving that reward, they're never going to meet that leader, and they're definitely not going to meet that guy. There's no bias. It's based on this piece of paper that you hand in,

you hand in this piece of paper, they read the piece of paper and they say, a award approved or a award-dot-approved. Or you wanna do a mission and you send that up the chain of command. And it's the same thing. It gets to a certain point where they're just looking at it and reading and trying to decipher this pile of junk

that you put together. And by the way, if I'm in charge and Jordan sends me a concept of operations that doesn't make any sense. Why would I possibly let you go out and execute an operation that I can't even understand what it is you're trying to do? So it has a huge impact. It has a huge impact. Okay, well, I'm dwelling on this because it's upsetting to me.

I would say that young people in particular aren't stringently instructed that the ability to, that literacy makes them powerful in every way they can possibly imagine, except the absolutely immediate. And so it's just sad to me that it's not sold in that manner. You want to be weak? Stay illiterate. You want to be strong? It's like put yourself together physically, fair enough, man. Get brave and street smart. But then you could add some literacy to that and you're unstoppable machine. So I concur 100% and you know you said being literate makes you powerful and Throughout recent history if we're trying to oppress someone what we don't want them to be able to do is read or write or Articulate themselves

Right, well, we haven't even talked about reading you know We just talked about writing and fair enough so but obviously you studied English So you also read and so what's the advantage you studied English, so you also read. And so what's the advantage to that as far as you're concerned, practically speaking? Well, obviously there are so many lessons that you can pull out of books. And you can get to a point where nothing really surprises you because you've at least seen some indication of what can unfold through reading.

So again, for me, it's very much focused on combat and war, but there's lessons that you learn and you say, oh, I've seen that before. There's a book called About Face, which I think the last time you and I talked, you were writing the forward for the Gulag. And I was about to write the forward to, I don't know if that's your favorite book, but I was lucky enough to be able to write the forward

for my favorite book, which was re-released because I was talking about it all the time. And the book is called About Face. And it's about a guy that was in the Korean War and the news in the Vietnam War and his name is Colonel David Hackworth. But I would read that book. When I was on deployment, I would read, open up that book anywhere and I would read two pages or three pages before I'd go to bed if I was in my bed that night. And there was so many lessons

that correlated to what I was actually going through and a real obvious example was when he was in Vietnam, he's working with the South Vietnamese soldiers and therefore by proxy, the South Vietnamese government. And guess what, they're all corrupt and they're not motivated and they don't have the right gear. And here we are in Iraq and we're working with Iraqi soldiers and therefore by proxy, we're working with the Iraqi government. Guess what? They're all corrupted. They're not well equipped. And how do you, how did he deal with it? How do we deal with it? So there's an example of when you read, you can learn and you don't have to, you don't have to go through the school of hard knocks. You don't have to get punched in the face repeatedly with things that turn out to be situations

that other people have absolutely gone through. And the amount of the level of capability increases so much by seeing something one single time. Well, if I see something one time, I'm infinitely better than if I'd never seen it before. So if it's like those, you know, those little puzzles, they give you a little puzzle, some kind of a mind-bender, right? The mind-bender's only work on you one time. The riddle only works on you one time. Then you go, I know the answer to that. That's the answer. You never get fooled by that again.

So just knowing, just seeing it one time, you're infinitely better. So when you read enough, you're capturing all these lessons. And you know what? I gotta say this. It's not just reading. It's not just reading. And I learned this because as I started doing my podcast, and many of my podcasts are just me reading books, I realized how to read more intently, even more intently than I did when I was going to college and I was gonna be writing a paper about a book.

And so I'd read it in a certain way. But even that reading was a little bit detached. A little bit detached because you're looking for a theme or you're looking for character development or what have you. But when you read to learn about human nature and life, you detach less and you kind of put yourself in there and you experience it a little bit closer. And then when you take a step back, you go, oh, yeah, I know what he was thinking right there because I was right there with him. And so there's a certain attitude. You kind of have to put yourself into the work and really read it with that kind of

intensity, if a lack of a better word. Is it possible for a human being to read intensely? Absolutely. Because that's what I try and do. Well, that's no different than acting intensely or playing intensely. Of course, you want to put the book on. You want to become that person. That can rattle you up, man, especially if the person is thinking all sorts of things

that you've never thought. I mean, I love reading for that reason. I could pick my peers too, which I really loved. It's like, well, you know, I have these people around me, but then there's these people who've lived before me and in different places and I can set them up on my shelf. I can enter into their world and I can benefit from everything they've thought and saturate myself without person. And it's very disruptive, especially if the person that you're reading has a mind that's more powerful and more well developed than your own.

I mean, Friedrich Nietzsche spun me around for about three years and I was reading Jung at the same time intensely and the same thing, you know, it was very disruptive but unbelievably useful, unbelievably useful to try on other people like that. And you get the benefit of their entire life distilled into their book, you know, it's 30 years of work. I read this one book called The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, which is a great scientific work. I think it's the greatest neuropsychological work of the last 50 years. It's very hard book. I think it has 1800 references, something like that. And this guy, Jeffrey Gray, he actually read all those references and he understood them. And so it took me six months to read the book,

but I got an entire education out of it. I got to experience in six months what it took him 30 years to learn. Like what a gift that is, it's unbelievable. I was listening to an interview with Gary Kasparov. I think you said Russian. He was a chess sport champion for 20 years, something like this. And he, they asked him, and the interviewer didn't ask him

directly if he could beat this young guy named Magnus Carlson, who's the current kind of prodigy of chess. He's just phenomenal and the highest chess rating ever, et cetera, et cetera. And he didn't get asked directly if he could beat him, but it was definitely implied if I remember the interview correctly. And it was very interesting to me, Gary Kasparov. There was two things that I found interesting. Number one was he said, he's younger than me.

And he didn't mean that, and like if that was an advantage for Gary. He meant it, he's younger than and like if that was an advantage for Gary, he meant it. He's younger than me. So he has an advantage as an advantage because he's younger. And I kind of thought to myself, well, that's kind of weird because this isn't a physical, this isn't a wrestling match. This isn't a jujitsu match. Why would that help?

And then sure enough, you learn a little bit about cognitive decline and Gary Kasparov is 57 years old when he did this interview. And guess what? You start, well, depending on who you are, but you start to see cognitive decline around that time. And I'm sure it kicks into 25. There's, you can IQ is pretty unitary, but you can fracture it into crystallized and and fluid and fluid IQ is what enables you to learn. And it declines from 25 onward crystallized intelligence continues to grow.

Roughly speaking, because it's partly dependent on such things as vocabulary, which you can learn and which accumulate. But interestingly enough, you know, you were talking about physically, the best way to stave off cognitive decline is not cognitive activity. It's exercise. Weightlifting and cardiovascular exercise can, is the, it's by far the most potent means of staving off cognitive decline. Yeah.

So Casparov would have the advantage in terms of experience, but the younger guy would have the edge in terms of experience, but the younger guy would have the edge on sheer raw brain power. That's what I thought to. That's what I thought to. But guess what? It's wrong. And it's wrong for the exact reason that you just said. So Magnus Carlson, when he's 11 years old, he gets to open up a book and see every single match and move that Gary Kasparov, everybody. Right. That's what they do.

They document that stuff. Of course. And so what he got to do was what you got to do, you got to learn a person's 30 years experience in six months. Well, this young kid, so this where it might have taken Gary Kasparov, you know, eight years or four years to figure out how to get out of some particular quandary on the chess board. Well, Magnus just opened to a page and a book and said, oh, that's a five-year-old getting that quandary, I'm there.

And so what Magnus got to do is he got to start from here, and build. And so I make this point from a leadership perspective. Yeah, we can do the same things as leaders. We don't have to figure all this stuff out. We can jump up to Gary Casparov's level or at least get a baseline of what he knew and and win because we learned Very interesting to me. Well, you think and again with regards to selling this sort of thing interesting to me. Well, you think and again, with regards to selling this sort of thing,

you know, I'm stunned that it's possible to make history boring, for example. People should be so enthralled with history that they can't get enough of it. But with reading, you imagine, you have this opportunity to learn whatever you want from the greatest people who ever lived along that dimension. And, and, well, it's stunning to me that that is a hard sell. It's mysterious that it's, that it isn't something that everyone is just clamoring for. I mean, that, to me, that points to a devastating failure, inadequacy of

the education system. A mysterious inadequacy. Yeah, there's, I think maybe the transaction isn't always clear for people. I always talk about, well, if you're going to sell somebody a book, if I'm going to sell you a book, Jordan, you've got to give me $20 and eight hours of your time. That's what you know you're going to give me. You're going to give me $20 and you're going to give me eight hours of time, which you would probably have other things that you might need to do. And the transaction is not always clear of what you're going to get out of that, especially when look, you can spend a lot of time reading books and not get as much as you might want. You might not get your $20 worth out of a book. So you have

to be somewhat selective. Now, luckily, it's not even that hard to figure out which books to read because there's so many reviews and history about where these books came from and the productivity that they resulted in. But I think it's hard sometimes for, look, I can only speak for myself. When I was younger, it was really hard for me to figure out that transaction. Yeah, fair enough. Like I had a librarian when I was 13 who told me what to read,

which is what a teacher should do, right? There's nothing a teacher can do for you that's better than say, well, here's 10 books that will change you completely and who actually knows that to be the case. One of the things I'd really like to do, I've toyed with, well, with the whole concept of online education, one thing I'd really like to do is to divide up the variety of domains of learning and identify the top 10 books in each domain. So to ask an expert, it's like, well, you're a historian, you're a great historian. What 10 books are crucial? And I have a list on my website, a list of recommended books. There's about a hundred of them

that have been instrumental for me. And lots of people have used that list to purchase books. So that's been really good. But I'd really like to extend and expand it. Yeah, I have the same thing on my website. The books from the podcast and the same thing, all kinds of those books get sold, and it's beautiful to see, but the people that are checking the website or listening to the podcast,

they know that those books have been through a filter. They're there for a reason. They're there because they're going to be worth that transaction. And I think that's a tough sell for a lot of people. They can't figure out. Maybe they've invested in books before and they didn't quite get the return on investment that they wanted and buy two or three books and 50 or 60 dollars and 20 or 30 hours. Yeah, that's a great observation, I think, because one of the advantages to coming from a literate background is that you do, in fact, reduce the transaction costs. Because there's

an infinite number of books. Well, no, there isn't. But as far as we're concerned, there might as well be. And so the question of what to read really is daunting if you don't know anyone who reads, where do I start? And how can I not be a fool in doing this? So, well, okay, back to English. So, what were you reading when you were in university? Was it fiction novels? Was it nonfiction? What were you focusing on? It was like your basic English literature.

That's what I studied. And so I read everything. I read everything from each one of the little periods and it took the various classes. And really as tight as this may sound, it was actually the most impact was from Shakespeare. It was the most impact on multiple levels. And I'll tell you the primary level. And when I've covered Shakespeare on my podcast, I explain this to people. People think, well,

you know, I didn't really understand. I read it and understand it. And I, so I start off when I talk about Shakespeare on my podcast, I start off by saying, listen, if you think you're going to just pick up Shakespeare, open it up and read it and understand it, you're not going to. Because it's barely written in English, it's barely written in English, it's almost another language. And so you're not going to be able to just pick it up and read through it. It's written in an almost other language.

So what you have to do is you have to start to interpret it. And so what I realized with Shakespeare is number one, the weight of the words, that these words were so pregnant with meaning that you had to pull those words and parse those words and pull those words apart to see all the depth that each individual word had and then the way that they're put together. And what was great about this was by the time I was back because then I went right back into the SEAL teams and somebody would hand me a Rules of Engagement document and that was written by some lawyer in Washington, DC

and I'd pull it out and say, wait a second, this word, I don't know what this word means, let's pull this word out, let's see what this, let's see what this actual definition of this particular word is and how that changes my viewpoint of these rules of engagement And how can I translate that for my troops so that they actually know what to do? so that part For me was from a reading perspective starting to read Shakespeare and and saying, oh, okay

You're not gonna understand this and if you don't understand something that's okay You pull out the Oxford English dictionary, and you look it up, and then you not just find out what the meaning of the word is, but what's the root word? And where does it come from? And what kind of depth? And what kind of... Yeah, and that's really, that's unbelievably useful too, to discover the connotation of words.

And the Oxford English dictionary is particularly good for that, because you discover things that you never guess by looking at how the word developed. I mentioned the word, hamartia, like the fact that the word for sin was derived from an archery concept was revelatory to me. It's like, that's so cool. It ties this moral concept, abstract philosophy, back down to something as primordial as weaponry and hunting. And just the fact that that's the metaphor is absolutely fascinating. And then there's the overlap in meaning that I already referred to. And virtually every word is like that because word is an ancient artifact. It's like an animal in some sense.

It has an evolutionary history and it transforms across time. And each word carries the echoes of its past with it too, because each word attracts other words in a particular unique way. So it kind of lives in a word ecosystem as well. And the ecosystem contain information about the history of that word. And you think, well, why is that important? It's like, well, hey, guess what? You think in words, you talk in words, you have all these archaic what are what are archaic entities, these words, these living entities that you use. It's like the more

you know about them, the more you know about you, the more you know about other people, and the better you are at formulating and communicating your ideas. There's nothing lost in that kind of investigation. There's nothing but gain there. Yeah, so that was the English road for me. And it was good thing I asked you that question, right? Yeah, it was really insightful for you to come up with that. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was really insightful for you to come up with that. Thank you. Thank you. The question of what constitutes an acceptable value

structure is an incredibly deep question. And maybe part of the reason that your books have been successful is because so many people are asking that question now. I think so. Sorry. I'm anticipating your question, which I assume is, is why, why, why is that? Well, and what's it done for you?

This investigation. Well, it's, that's, that's an interesting question because it's, I've always seen my work, you know, and my background is just, is blogging. I'm not, I don't have an academic background in this stuff like you do. But I started blogging in 2008 and it initially I kind of used it as my own vehicle for personal development, growth, developing emotional intelligence, managing relationships, all of these things. And so kind of the way my career has unspooled is whatever issue I'm kind of struggling with at that period of my life, I investigated and then I write about it as, and the writing is kind of my own personal form of digestion, I suppose. And there's, I just kind of have this faith that if I'm going through it, then there must be a lot of other people going through it as well.

I actually think that's the answer to why your book was so successful is that it is the case that there's a large population of people who are who have the same questions that you do and and are stumped in the same way that you are or were and that you're leading them through a process of investigation and thought at exactly the level that's There's this idea from developmental psychology that a man named Vygotsky originated called the zone of proximal development and adults speak to infants and toddlers with implicit knowledge of the zone of proximal development and what they do is speak at a level that slightly more advanced than the infant or toddler can understand and that leads them so they can mostly understand the adult speech, but not quite, and that leads them further, right? They can understand, but they're also forced to develop further understanding. And I've noticed when I was teaching that it was often the case that when I was trying to figure out something out, that was the best time to teach it, rather than after I had figured it out, because then I would have forgot what the problem was and also what I didn't know. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me. I think part of it is,

this is kind of the hypothesis I lay out in the book and it's something I still believe, but I think when you live in a society where information is no longer scarce, where there's Essentially more stuff for you to consume and understand and learn about then is humanly possible The most obvious question becomes what is worth pursuing what is worth learning about what is worth trusting and believing in? I think if you look at previous generations You know information with scarce opportunities were more scarce. And so people had

kind of from an early point in their life, a more clear path of what they should be following and what they should be learning about. And I think today, starting with millennials and even more so with Gen Z, it's, you know, we've grown up with this over abundance of information and an opportunity of paths, life paths to choose for ourselves. And so it kind of, on paper, that sounds like a great thing

and it is a great thing in a lot of ways, but it also kind of invites these existential questions of what is worth pursuing. And I just found that, you know, myself and a lot of my peers and friends kind of went into what most people would call midlife crisis in our 20s. And for me, writing subtle art was kind of writing my way out of that. It was, as you said, investigating these value structures, you know, going back to the philosophers and trying to understand, you know, what their ideas around these things were.

And it's for me, it kind of, you asked, you know, your original question was, what did it do for me? For me, it gave me a sense of, since that I understood where I was, I guess, that I guess it helped me create like a map of how to navigate my life. And so it was subtle art. It was kind of, I wanted to provide the right questions for a layperson, you know, somebody who's not going to go meet Nietzsche or somebody who's

not going to study existentialism to ask the right questions that will kind of help them do the same thing in a more basic way. If you're trying to exist creatively, not only is it a very high risk proposition financially, but you lack that psychological comfort that comes from routine, which, you know, people, artistic people often are hypercritical of routine, but caught life, man. Routine keeps you sane and trying to invent yourself every day. That's not for the faint-hearted. I've seen very few people manage that successfully across decades. Absolutely. And I think particularly in comedy, because you have to work for about three or

four years on the circuit without getting paid anything. In fact, you're losing money because you're paying for your travel expenses and then you get someone, you don't get paid for it. And this is why a lot, you'll find a lot of comedians, particularly in the UK, are from quite wealthy backgrounds or privately educated because they have rich parents who can help them out, put them up in a flat and they don't have to work during the day. And they escalate much quicker through the ranks. But if you come from my sort of background, you can't do that. You have to have the job and then you you have to it's like having two jobs.

And so you have to really care about it. My advice is always I do believe, although it comes with that insecurity, if it is a vocation for you, you have to do, I mean, for me, I couldn't have done anything, it is a genuine vocation for me, even if I were making no money, whatsoever, out of comedy or writing, or the rest, I would still be doing it because I would feel unfulfilled if I were not doing it. I think there's something also quite, I mean, I take your point about the practicalities of living and the business of living, but my God, I think depriving yourself of your vocation can be so soul-destroying.

You know, it is, well, for, I've spent a lot of time studying creativity scientifically. The first thing that's useful to note is that creativity is not common. Everyone isn't creative. That's wrong. Some people are very creative. A minority of people are very creative. It's a continuum, but you don't get creativity till you get out to the point where what you're doing is original, and that's very difficult. So it's a minority proposition. And then of those original people,

there's only a tiny fraction that can make a successful financial go of it, because it's just you have to be creative, plus you have to have some sense for marketing and sales and business, and you have to be reasonably emotionally stable and etc etc. It's very very difficult. But if you are creative by temperament, well, that's you. And to not do that is to not be you. It's like asking an extroverted person not to be around people or an agreeable person not to engage in intimate relationships or a conscientious person not to be driven by duty. It's like that's what you're like. And so yeah,

you're stuck with it. It's a double edged sword creativity. It's vital. It's entrancing. It's necessary. It's transformative. It's disruptive, but it's a high risk, high risk, high return game. And the probability of failure is overwhelmingly high, even if you're an entrepreneur and, you know, more practically oriented in your creativity, the probability that you'll make money from your innovation or your invention, rather than other people is very, very low. But you need to find a way, I mean, it's also very difficult for your creative person to, a lot of creative people don't think in practical terms. They don't think in terms of money, actually, they're hopeless. A lot of them might, I know, are hopeless in this.

No, they also tend to be causally contemptuous of that to be guarded as practical concerns as selling out. It's like, you should be bloody happy if you have the opportunity to sell out. So I think that the idea is to find a way to pursue your vocation, but have one eye on the reality that, you know, you will have to earn money somewhere and I think it's, that's why I think I'm lucky. And so far as with Titania, I hit on something that had commercial viability, but it was very true to what I desperately wanted to do. And I think that's so rare.

I think some of the stuff I've written, some of the plays I've written for instance, I don't think we'd have any commercial success whatsoever, but I wrote them because I needed to write them and some of them didn't even get on. And maybe one day they will and that would be great. But what if you were kind of- Well, just think what you have to accomplish though, right? You have to have- Your creative endeavor aligned with market demand at exactly that time. It is impossible. It's very, very unlikely. Actually, that's why I always say don't attempt to anticipate this, guys, because you

won't. Like, the best thing an artist can do is do what they believe and hope, because a lot of it is luck. You know, I mean, there's actually, there's a technical literature on that too. I mean, what essentially what you do is continue to produce ideas. And it's a Darwinian competition, essentially, they're like life forms, these ideas. And now and then one will find a niche that it can thrive in, but, but the best way to maximize your chances that that niche will manifest itself is to be, is to overproduce.

Because I look, for a given example, I will answer a bunch of questions on Quora. So that's a website where anybody can ask any questions and anybody can answer. I answered about 50 when I was playing with Quora. And one of them was a list of everything people should know, of things people should know in their life. And I derived my books out of that list. Yes.

It was disproportionately successful. Most of the answers I generated got virtually no views, but it got, it must be hundreds of thousands now. But even before I wrote the books, it was tens of thousands. But how do I not written 50? I wouldn't have got that one. The other 49 failures, so to speak, were the answers weren't necessarily worse. They just didn't hit the zeitgeist,

like that answer did. And I think that's a great piece of advice over production because it's the same with the Beatles. They look like an overnight success. It's because they've been playing endlessly in those dingy clubs in Europe. You know, before it happened, it's, you, you, you, you, you, produce as much as you can.

If it takes 10 years to become an overnight success, that's, that's it. So, you know, of, of most of the things I've written, I've done nothing and gone nowhere and had no success whatsoever. It's just, but, but the one thing occasionally when it hits, that's, that's what sustains all the rest of it. And it's also why creativity is, it's, it's what sustains all the rest of it. It's also why creativity is continues to be selected, let's say, from a biological perspective. It's like, that's why I said it was a high-risk high-return game.

Almost everything you do creatively will fail. But now and then, you're disproportionately successful. And so that keeps the whole game going. You didn't have any sense to do that when you put the lectures on YouTube that it would explode in this way. I mean, that wasn't this way. That was completely. I still, I'm still shocked constantly by my life. I'm shocked out of out of sanity by my life. I just can't. This is why I asked you about tatania, you know, you, you get at the center of a whirlwind like that. And there's something very surreal about it. And I mean, I keep getting hit by surreal things. And it's very hard to wrap my

head around it. Like this red skull episode was just one of many equally surreal occurrences. But equally surreal occurrences, but yes, no, I had no, I had no idea. I knew I was working on something important back when I was in my 20s when I wrote my first book and it was out of that that all my lectures came and I spent 15 years working on that book and I worked on it about three hours a day. And so I, and I thought about it all the time. And so I knew there was something to it, not necessarily because they were my ideas, but because of the people who I had read and delved into while I was writing the book, I knew the ideas were significant.

And I could see the effect of the ideas when I was lecturing on my students. So I had some sense that there was something vital that I was involved in something vital, but sure. But how do you upload those videos a couple years before or a couple years later, you probably would have missed the zeitgeist and nothing would have happened, you know, I mean, it doesn't matter. I always think with any kind of creative endeavor or intellectual endeavor, it doesn't matter how good you are in a sense. It has to be good and the timing

has to be right. And, and let you say, if you just keep, I think persistence is it. If you just keep doing it, not only does your craft get better and you are, when it, if it does hit, you're in a position. There's no doubt. Look, if you, if you, okay, so in, in scientific literature, the hallmark of impact is citations. And so if your work is cited, it means that someone who's written another scientific article makes reference to something you wrote. And that's all tracked. And it's used for promotions, and it's used to judge scientific merit. It's its own science, citation tracking. A very small number of your published papers accrue most of the citations.

So that's the first thing. So what that means is the more papers you publish, the more likely it is that one of them will become highly cited. And my highly cited papers aren't necessarily the ones that I thought would be most impactful. So. Yeah. But the other piece of information from literature on creativity is that the best predictor of quality, and so you could index quality by impact, let's say, or by citations, is quantity.

It's not a great predictor, but it's the best one. And so this is a good advice for everyone out there who's a musician or an artist, it's like produce, produce, produce, as much as you can because you do get better at it, right? You absolutely do, and so there's that, but there's also, I think the other important thing is to actually be true to yourself, in your artistic endeavors, insofar as don't be trying to anticipate the design guys, don't be trying to anticipate what other people are doing. My big concern in the current climate that we live in is that a lot of artists are choosing to self-sensor because the penalty for risk-taking has got too high. You can be completely, I mean, if I think of the example I think. Well, that's a good thing.

Think about what kind of catastrophe that is because we've already discussed the fact that the impediments to creativity are almost insurmountable. And so then you add an additional one, which is self-sensorship because of social pressure. It's like you just decimate the creative enterprise by doing that. We wouldn't have anything. We, the Western canon, would be decimated ridiculous. I mean, an example I often think of is one of my favorite playwrights is Edward Albee. And when he came to write his play The Goat, which was a very controversial play because it was about a man having an affair, a sexual affair with a goat behind his wife's back. And obviously that doesn't sound palatable. Well, at least he went beside behind his wife's back.

Exactly. And it wasn't sort of an open sort of paganistic thing. Absolutely. But I mean, it's a shocking play and it's meant to be. It's about where our lines of tolerance are, where they lie and why. And all of his friends told him, don't do this, you've got a valuable career and incredible reputation, you're turning 80, you're 80, he was probably 80 years old when this play came out. And they said, you're just going to scupper everything. And he said that when he got that response, that's the reason he did it. He went out there and he put the play on. And it turned out to be a huge success. It won, I think, the Tony Award for Best Play

was critically and commercially successful. It was absolutely massive. So it just goes to show, I think, to an extent, I mean, I'm not saying disregard feedback from other creative people or people who have suggestions. What I am saying is if you're true to your muse, whatever that is, the rewards will come, actually, or they are more likely to. Okay, so that brings us back to free speech, too, because you know, the problem with laws that

abridged free speech is they abridged creative endeavor. And that's a terrible thing, because it's the source of endless renewal. And it's the thing that fixes corrupt structures. And so to take aim at that is to take aim at the very process that would rescue you from the conundrum you are pretending to be obsessed by. I wrote the screenplay for Love and Honor and that got me into the office of a young woman named Rebecca Pollock, who's Sydney Pollock's daughter, Sydney Pollock directed out of Africa, Jeremiah Johnson, three

days of the condor. And I told her the story of Braveheart in about 10 minutes and she went, my God, go write that. And I said, do you want to outline her something? And she went, what, I'm going to tell you how to write act two, go write that. And that led me into... What do you think it was about you that made doors open for you like that?

It's quite a remarkable theme. I mean, these are all very difficult enterprises to gain a foothold in. And you tell stories over and over about people offering you the chance. Was that the salesman, the salesman skill that your father had? Do you think what, what was it? I, I have to guess Jordan because the, to see ourselves as other CFs is clearly the hard thing. But I do think, I do think I am incredibly blessed

that I had this salesman father, whose heart was as big as the ocean, and I had this brilliant mother who was absolute steel inside and tender. I mean, she was an iron hand and a velvet glove. But make sense because you think, well, you need the creativity and you've got that and you need the discipline to work and you've got that. But that's not enough. You have to be able to market. You have to be able to make contact with people. You have to be able

to communicate with them about your material because otherwise you languish. But you have that too. Yes, but I think there's something, and look, whenever anyone says, oh, this was it, thank goodness I have this gift of God, it's so self-aggrandizing like you're elevating your gifts, but I think there is a thing that I didn't create, but I have chosen to follow, which is there's something about being bold and being willing to take the punch, to be able to walk in. It's like when I decided I would write my screenplay first. I like writing original screenplays without going to a company and saying that it was an original screenplay, what we call a spec screenplay, that got me into Rebecca's office in the first place that got her to listen about Braveheart. And there's an element of tremendous daring to say,

I don't have to have your endorsement or your money to sit down and write this. And in fact, I like the equation of it to say, if I write this and I've made this choice a dozen times in my career, if I write it and it doesn't sell, I will live with that. But I will have written what I believe, I will have written what I want,

I will have written the movie I wanna make. And if you say you don't wanna buy it, the next guy might and then you're gonna look like an idiot. And that equation. That theme comes out quite strongly in secretariat. Yes, yes it does. Because she pursues that, that investment in her horse and that famous remarkable horse, single-mindedly and at high risk. Yes. and I feel that there's something, and obviously we can be projecting this onto the horse.

But the metaphor of the movie for me was, actually I wrote the song of the end credits, called It's Who You Are. It's not the prize, it's not the game, it's not the score, it's not the fame. When every road looks way too far, it's not what you have, it's who you are. And that, you choose your race, and then you run. And I'll say that to myself over and over, I say it to myself daily, don't miss the chance to live this day. And when I'm divorced and it was the most

wrenching horrific thing of my life, and I would get out of bed in the morning and drop straight down to my knees and pray for the strength to get through the day. And at the end of the day, when I would get down on my knees to say thanks, I would think, well, I did have faith today. I did get through the day. And at least enough to get through the day. And if that catapult you into depression as well. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not, I mean, it sounds like it's from what you're relating. And that came through in your book too, that that, I mean, you don't talk about it much, but when you touch on it, it's quite clear that that was an experience that took the slouts out

from underneath you. Yes. And I don't talk about it too much because there are other people involved, but it's my family. And it was wrenching for all of us, but it may be that depression also contributed. Yes. You know, it was so good. It's highly probable a result. It's very difficult to live with someone who has a predisposition to depression.

Yeah, it's hard. And so, yeah, it certainly was the fight and within me. But at the same time time there was something beautiful. I mean, there were many beautiful things that come out of such darkness. One was, I was putting up Christmas lights that the house I had moved to to try to rebuild my life. And in my sons, I would see my sons three days a week. And that was very strained. And I was trying to make my home look beautiful. And I was putting up Christmas lights.

And I was getting really depressed. And I was talking with my therapist, a brilliant guy. And I told him about that. And I said, you know, I can't really date anybody and I'm not seeing my sons enough and my neighbors don't celebrate Christmas and I'm putting up Christmas lights and I'm getting more depressed doing it. And he said, well, how about this? You don't put your Christmas lights up for your neighbors to see. You don't put them up for someone you're dating to see.

You don't even put them up for your children to see. God sees your Christmas lights. Put your Christmas lights up for God to see. I thought God was what a great way to think of everything we do in our lives. Like here's what it is most. If I labor in anonymity, if nobody knows it, but I've done it so that God sees it, then that's better than if I did something I don't believe in that everybody applauded me for. And so that that's just been a it's a

choice I continually have to make and struggle with to affirm, but it's it's the one I really believe in. I don't think that people would create anything that was truly original if they didn't think like that. You know, because if it's original and surprising, there's no track record for it. There's no proof that it's valid, right? You have to, there's just no option but to take the risk. And so if that line of thinking didn't exist, then there'd be no way that you would take the risk. Exactly. I mean, I was always the kid that,

maybe that's what we creativity and religion, religious thinking are aligned so tightly, it's that you have to make that leap of faith to produce something that's original, virtually by definition. Yes. And despite, you see that again, that theme sort of playing out in

secretariat because all the advice that is given to the Chenery, Chenery is her name, right? Ms. Chenery, she owns this horse, remarkable horse, and anyone sensible would have sold them because she was going to lose everything, including her credibility. Yes. But she didn't. And she was right, but there was no proof of that to begin with. That was a leap of faith.

And I really don't see how you can do something original without that leap of faith. Because just as I said, there's no track record. Well, Jordan, I hadn't thought of this at all before this conversation, but it strikes me that there's something, as you mentioned that, in common with you and her. And when I say how isolating it is to take that leap. I got to know Penny. I've had the opportunity to make several movies about people who are still living when the movie's being made. And every time I do it, I swear I won't do it again because I'd rather be free to yes, yes. But I got to know Penny and boy,

there was fire in that woman. And she was well into her 90s when we started making secretariat. And she was incredibly attractive. The her eyes were so full of life and were so direct. And when we went to the Kentucky Derby together right after the movie was made, which was certainly a magical moment,

you know, we just made the movie. And now we're going to, it's the next running of the Kentucky Derby. And I got to go with Penny. And of course, Penny is at Churchill Downs. She was a rock star. And everybody knew we were making the movie. Disney movie is going to be seen by a lot of people.

And we saw the race together. And everything builds up at the Kentucky Derby to the Derby itself. The Derby is like the eighth race of the eighth or ninth race of a whole day of racing. And then there are races after the Derby. So when the Derby was over, it builds this crescendo. Everybody walked back into the party rooms and forgot us. And I was left out on a balcony, just penny, and me. And we're standing there together and I thought, okay, this is a sacred moment. And this is probably going to be the last time I see her. And she looked down at the horse that at just one, they had taken the saddle off the horse

and were kind of cooling him down. And she looked down at the, that's a well bred horse. Just casual comment. And I looked at it and said, Penny, we've come to the end of this movie process. And now it won't be in the movie. But tell me, what did you not tell me? What did you want to say that has never been told? What have you kept from me?

And she paused and she looked down at the box seats where she would sit as an owner. And she said, I sat down there alone every day alone. The other owners would tolerate me, but they never accepted me. And I just thought about that there's that cost of stepping out there, of leaping out there alone. And the thing to me about it is, there's a route. And you have to believe it's worth doing for itself. Yeah, exactly. And in a way, you hope it's worth doing, but you don't know. I have a friend here who's a rabbi named Mordecai Finley.

And for anybody as Gentiles me, it's always fun when I say he's my rabbi. And rabbi Finley was a Marine. He's a brilliant thinker. And a friend named Steve Pressfield, his incredible writer wrote a book called The War of Art, which you'd be very interested in, I think. The Steve Pressfield was investigating his own faith. He had decided to look into spiritual matters.

And he asked me to go along with him to Rabbi Finley's lectures at the University of Judaism and Rabbi Finley is very practical guides. Got a son in the Marine Corps. It's got a daughter in Israeli intelligence and And he's a tough guy and and he said you know people say Follow your heart instead of your head. Well your heart's the only thing less reliable than your head. So that statement sort of sat for a minute and somebody raised their hand and said, well, then how do we know what to do? And Rabbi Femmey paused for a long time as you do, by the way, like you're considering

the question of fresh. It's not like, oh, here's my pad answer. It's like, well, let me find what's the true answer right now? And he paused like that. And he said, a couple of times in my life, I've been hanging by my fingernails over the abyss. And I let go because I couldn't hang on more. And I fell into the arms of God. And he said, I didn't know it would be the arms of God when I let go. If I had known it,

it wouldn't truly have been letting go. And I was sitting there in this crowd of people going, and he looked at me and pointed at me and he goes, Christians know this, Christians know grace. In our tradition, we have to sort of look for that concept. It's there, but we have to look for it. But he said, it's grace. And I think about that it's it, I don't know every time. When I sit down that I'm not wasting my time, that I'm not just going to run, you know, a ream of paper or that I'm not going to beg her my children, or I'm not going to write

something that somebody is going to hate? But my mother had a saying she gave me when we had just made, we were soldiers and my father died as written in my book about the end of we were soldiers, my father passed away. You died on 9-11. And we, after his funeral and I was back to work, I was calling my mother every day and I called her and said, how are you doing? And she said, well, I'm doing okay. How are you doing? And I said, well, I'm nervous today. And she said, why? And I said, well, we're testing the movie tonight. We're going to have its first public test. And she said, well, why does that make you nervous?

And I said, well, there are a lot of people that come to these things intentionally just to be snarky, just to sling mud at you. And when you've put your blood and your sweat and your tears and your money into a work and you know people are gonna do that, it kinda makes you nervous. And my mother said,

well honey, if they crucified Jesus Christ, there gonna be some people that don't like you. So Jordan, if they crucified Jesus Christ, there gonna be some people that don't like you. Ha ha! you