Transcript of Jordan Peterson: 5 Ways to Shift Envy into Growth & How to Recognize and Pursue Your True Calling

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To be open to learning does mean at least to some degree always what am I doing wrong? What do I have to give up?

What do I have to let

go of? What do I have to transform? That could be very painful. There isn't anything better that you can do with failure, no matter how unjust, than to learn from. 1 of the most articulate men of our time.

Clinical psychologist

turned culture warrior, doctor Jordan Peterson.

The men who prefer short term mating opportunities are psychopathic, narcissistic, achevelian, and sadistic. So 1 of the unintended

consequences of the sexual revolution is that

the freed up women have They have it because they encountered

someone who wanted to hurt them. People who

have post traumatic stress disorder don't have it because they were hurt. They have it because they encountered someone who wanted to hurt them. People can go through all sorts of horrible things and not be traumatized. You wait till you tangle with someone who's malevolent. Boy.

You will not be the same person afterward. Afterward. The dark tetrad males are differentially attractive to women, mostly younger and naive women.

How does a woman even begin to detect or notice the difference?

The number 1 health and wellness podcast.

Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. The 1, the only Jay Shetty.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose. The place that you come to become happier, healthier and more healed. Today's guest is someone that I've wanted to talk to for over 6 years and I can't believe it's taken us this long to be in the same room for that much time but we are finally here and he said it to me a few moments ago that maybe this is the right time and I always trust time in that sense and timing. So I'm very grateful to finally have on on purpose doctor Jordan B Peterson.

Author, psychologist, online educator, and professor at the University of Toronto. The Jordan B Peterson podcast frequently tops the charts in the education category, and if you're not a subscriber I promise you you'll want to be after this episode. Doctor Peterson has just launched Peterson Academy with hand selected professors from top universities around the world. It's received an incredible amount of acclaim already. If you haven't checked it out make sure you check it out after this episode.

Jordan has written 3 books. Maps of Memening and academic work presenting a new scientifically grounded theory of religious and political belief and the best selling 12 rules for life 1 of my favorite books and beyond order which have sold more than 7,000,000 copies. And Jordan's 4th book we who wrestle with God will be released this November. Please welcome to On Purpose doctor Jordan b Peterson. Jordan, it's great to honestly finally be with you.

As I was saying to you, I was kindly intro introduced by my dear friend Lewis Howes to Mikaela around 6 years ago and that's when this conversation started. So I really appreciate you making the time and

I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. And I appreciate the invitation.

I feel so many people today. I'm sure you hear this a lot as well. They feel that they're surrounded by toxicity, whether it's at home, whether it's, work, whether it's online, they feel like they're in a space where they can't become more. They they at least from their perspective.

Well, I think some of that's actually a technical problem, and I I think it's an extremely serious problem in our society. So we've invented these new communication technologies, which we're utilizing now. The long form discussion seem to be pretty radically on the positive side of that I would say. But the discourse on places like Twitter, Facebook, in comment sections and so forth is pretty degenerate. And I think the reason for that is that the evolved mechanisms that we use in face to face real world discourse have been stripped away in the electronic domain.

And the problem with that is twofold. The first problem is the exploitative sadistic psychopaths have free rein because they're not held responsible for their utterances. They're anonymous. They get rewarded for the propagation of their emotionally arousing material. The algorithms will capitalize on it.

And that's that's a very toxic combination. And then the anonymity as well, like, we know perfectly well from an a vast array of psychological experiences that normal people, anonymized, are much more likely to let the negative part of their character have free rein. And so I really see this as a technical problem is that societies and psyches are always threatened by the what they call the dark tetrad personality proclivities. Narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, that's parasitical predatory. A parasitical predatory is a psychopath, and sadism.

And you have those impulses within you, and there are people who are primarily characterized by those motivations. We have evolved mechanisms for keeping that under control but they're all dispensed within social media. And so what seems to be happening is the dark tetrad types are hijacking the political discourse on the right and the left, polarizing and dividing and capitalizing on that, and it's catastrophic socially and psychologically, but they benefit from the ensuing chaos by attracting attention to themselves in a manner that's undeserved and counterproductive. I think the danger in that is sufficient that it's civilization threatening. I mean, we can't underestimate the power of these electronically mediated communication networks.

They're insanely powerful, and they amplify people to a degree that's almost unimaginable. And so the manipulators and the bad actors have disproportionate influence. On our Peterson Academy website, we have a social media network, and, we're trying to incorporate all the features of social media networks that have made them attractive. But our system differs from, let's say, Twitter. Why?

Well, there's a payment barrier. And you might say, well, I would rather it was free. It's like, free, If it's free, you're the product. And if it's free, there's 0 barrier to your exploitation. Right?

So the bad actors, you could I think this is probably a rule. In a social communication system that's free, the psychopaths come to dominate because they can take it it's not free because you're devoting your attention and attention is valuable, and the bad actors can take advantage of your attention and pay 0 price. Well, if you set up a system where actors can take advantage of your attention for 0 price, the psychopaths are gonna dominate. So 1 of the things we might hypothesize, I don't know if it's true, is that there should be a price barrier to all social media interactions. If it's free, the bad actors will dominate.

And then the other thing we're trying to do is to, well, encourage and reward positive interactions, but we're also going to have the take the responsibility of identifying the small number of people who will repetitively misbehave and just ask them to leave. Now, you know, that raises the specter of something approximating censorship, let's say, but I don't think it's reasonable to draw a direct line between censorship and not putting up with Mhmm. Immature psychopaths. Mhmm. Like, that's not the same thing.

It's not opinion based. I've been attacked by the psychopathic types on the left and on the right. It's it's politically agnostic, and so because the psychopathic manipulator types, they'll use whatever system of ideas is at hand to further their own machinations, and I think you can distinguish the psychopaths. I mean I use some rules online when I'm dealing with comments. If you're anonymous, you're questionable.

If you're anonymous with a demonic name, you're definitely questionable, and a lot of anonymous accounts have names that are Luciferian. You know? I guess that's part of the edginess. If you use LOL, LMFAO, if you use derisive names, those are all indications of bad actors. Like, I think you could characterize the bad actor space quite clearly.

You do that with diagnostic criteria. But we have this situation now where the social media spaces are overwhelmingly tilted in a negative direction by the predatory psychopaths.

Do do you believe that things are as divided as they seem?

No. I know they're not.

That's yeah. That's true.

I was speaking with 1 of my friends today

Yeah.

Greg Hurwitz, who has been doing polling, trying to identify statements of conception that Americans radically agree on, and he has a list of about 50 that 85% of Americans agree on. They're very foundational things. No. I don't believe it at all. I think that there's a a fringe of the dark tetrad types who are radically stirring the pot, and that the algorithms, and the anonymity, and the costless nature of the communication is facilitate enabling them.

Mhmm. Yeah. And it's extremely dangerous.

How do we not let the average mind, how do we not let ourselves become consumed by believing that is reality when that's what we're exposed to.

I don't know. I don't know how you do that. I mean, I think part of that might be realizing that that is happening. You know, it it'd be use useful for people to familiarize themselves with I

agree.

The symptoms of what's called cluster b psychopathology, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, psychopathy, antisocial personality, histrionic personality, to know who those people are. And so and to start to become aware of that. I think that's actually harder for people on the left. And the reason for that, I believe, is that agreeableness tilts people towards the radical left because agreeable people are highly empathic and they tend to think of anyone who's suffering as a victim. The problem with that attitude is that it doesn't arm you very well with an understanding of evil because truly malevolent people camouflage themselves as victims and they take advantage of the empathic.

And so and that's a big problem because the last thing you wanna do if you're truly empathic is enable the the sadists. Right? And there's no shortage of that. We know, for example, there's a developing psychological literature that shows that the active anonymous troll types are much more likely to be characterized by dark tetrad traits.

So Is there a way that we can affect that and more of a root level so that those are created in a fast pace?

Things that social media operators should do is they should separate the anonymous accounts from the verified accounts. So for example, I would like to see it on Twitter where the verified accounts, you see their comments, and then there's a hidden space underneath, which is anonymous accounts. And if you wanna click on that and look through what the troll demons have to say, you can. It's a little trip to hell. You're not required to do it.

And they're separated from the people who will stake their reputation on their words, which is what you do when you genuinely identify yourself, you know. Now the anonymous types like to say, well, you know, anonymity is necessary because in a tyrannical state, only the anonymous can tell the truth. And my experience with that is that for every 1 in 10,000 brave anonymous whistleblowers there's 9,999 sadistic Machiavellians. And so you might think that you're a brave truth teller in the confines of your anonymous demonically named account, but probably you're just a sadistic troublemaker. So I think that would the and then the other issue, it probably is cost.

Like, free first of all, free is an illusion because there is nothing that's free. At least you're paying with your attention and your time. It's not free. Your data. Yeah.

Abs and your well, that's the next thing. You're also paying with your identity and all your behavioral data. Right? And so none of that's free. And so that's an illusion.

And I think 1 of the things we have observed with Petersen Academy, because the social interactions there are very positive and pretty much universally so. It hopefully will establish that as a, what would you say, a cultural convention. Right? But I'm certain that a fair part of that is just that you can't produce a 100 troll accounts for nothing and do nothing but cause trouble because at minimum it's going to cost you some money. So I think we can probably dispense with maybe 80% of the bad actors just by not making it free.

So no 1 knows. Right? This is why I have sympathies, let's say, for people like Mark Zuckerberg and for Elon Musk sort of equally, even though they're not necessarily on the same side of the political spectrum. It's like Zuckerberg gets hauled to congress and raked over the coals, but it isn't like as if we can assume that he knows how to solve this problem because the psychopathic parasite problem is really, really old. And those sorts of people are very good at manipulating communication networks, and there's no reason to assume that some of them aren't equally good in the new technologies.

You know, and Musk is Musk's approach is something like a radical free speech approach. But, I I just sat with 1 of my friends here actually this morning, this Greg Hurwitz I was telling you about, and he's done some forensic investigations. First of all, indicating how much of the troll activity on social media networks is funded by international actors. Iran topping the list, let's say, which is you know unbelievably horrible. And then how much of the pathological content is generated by a very small number of bad actors with disproportionate influence?

You know 20 20 bad actors on Twitter, like seriously malevolent people who are working to cause trouble full time. They they can punch way above their weight. Way above their weight. Not good. And there's no Not good.

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Well, the cluster b psychopathologies are notoriously resistant to psychotherapeutic intervention. First of all, this kind of goes back to the discussion of pride. They're very unlikely to come for counseling because and if they do, they're the sort of people, and I'm I'm dead serious about this, they're likely to announce themselves as the sort of person that the therapist is very lucky to be interacting with. Right? That there's no doubt that this will be at least as advantageous for the therapist as for the client, and that they're the sort of special person who has graced this office with their presence.

And that's that's not not a word of exaggeration. I had some pretty pretty unpleasant child molesting psychopaths for example in my clinical practice, and the 1 that I remember most particularly was unbelievably good at putting himself forward as a pillar of the a devoted misunderstood pillar of the community. It was just his constant refrain, absolutely unteachable and antisocial personality is notoriously resistant to psychotherapeutic intervention. It's the same with histrionic, borderline, narcissistic. It's very it's unbelievably stable personality trait.

What's your aim and potential target with an individual like that? Like where could your practice even take

some time? Did try when I had those people and that was often court mandated and I would never I think court mandated psychotherapy is a contradiction in terms because you have to come there voluntarily for it to work. My approach with people like that was to appeal to something like their more extended self interest, which would be well, I I don't know if you noticed there, buddy, but, you know, your constant interference with children has decimated your marriage and your family, and you've been in prison for it and, you know, people are on to you. And so a wise narcissistic psychopath might tone it down a bit, but I wouldn't claim for a moment that that had any effect whatsoever. You know, the degree of cynicism that characterizes someone like that is almost it's almost it's very difficult to develop an appreciation for evil.

It's not a fun place to go. And to do it properly, you also have to start to recognize it in yourself, and that is not pleasant. And as I said, for example, the naive empathic types, they really do believe that most of the criminals are misunderstood victims. And, you know, what's terrible about that is that some of the criminals are misunderstood victims. You know, there are people in prison who under duress of various sorts made 1 extremely stupid mistake and ended up seriously punished for it.

Okay. So let's just put those people off the table. We can ignore them. 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes. Okay.

So those are the people that we're looking at. Recalcitrant repeat offenders with a proclivity for violence. Okay. Can you repair them? No.

The the standard penological theory is that part of their problem is actually delayed maturation for whatever reason. You just put them in prison till they're in their late twenties, and then they're much less likely to reoffend. Why? Did they learn? That's 1 way of thinking about it.

They're less impulsive and sensation seeking as a consequence of maturity, and likely some of it is just delayed maturity. But it has very little to do with rehabilitation and a lot to do with age. You know, the the male crime curve spikes at 15, And even among normal males, let's say, they're much more likely to misbehave as testosterone and maturation kick in, and then you see a a return to something approximating normal behavior usually by the time of 24 or 25 when men take on more of the mature responsibilities of life. And the criminal pattern is approximately equivalent to that although the lag to maturity is longer. But no.

It's there's no evidence that I find credible that the cluster b psychopathologies are amenable to psychotherapeutic intervention. I don't think so. Yeah. And and they're they're also generally a very, very, very, very, you need a lot of varies to make that right, very difficult population to work with. Mhmm.

Yeah. And you do that at your peril.

Yeah. I think listening to you, the idea of false compassion can be used so against us and an immature level of the development of empathy and compassion is easily taken advantage of. Well, we know this

because 1 of the things we know for example is so the dark tetrad males are differentially attractive to women. But mostly younger and naive women. Okay. So why? Well, the typical dark tetrad type is very confident and not anxious.

Okay. So why would that be attractive to women? Because men who are competent in their domain are confident and not anxious. What the predatory psychopaths do is mimic that, and naive women can't tell the difference, And so they're they can be more attracted to the dark tetrad types especially when they're young. And then there's the additional complication that the even more pathological dark tetrad types are very good at appealing to empathy by making claims of victimization.

Mhmm. It's a nasty game. And the people who are good at it, they're better at it than you are at detecting it. I knew Robert Hare. Robert Hare was the first clinical psychologist who really delved into psychopathy and non clinical psychopathy.

And he recorded 200 conversations with, like, brutal criminal psychopaths. And he was quite an agreeable person, Robert Hare. And he said invariably that while he was talking to them, they had him convinced. And it wasn't until afterwards when he was watching the videos that he could see the tricks, and that's because these people are watching you more than you're watching them, and they're seeing which tricks work on you. And that's the game of the that's the goal of the game.

Like, if I was doing that to you, I'd be thinking, okay. Well, I'm gonna get this guy to smile more. Right? I'm I'm I'm gonna see if I can I'm gonna see which lies I can get him to swallow because then be I'd be testing you, let's say, for your gullibility. And so I'd start out with a little lie and watch you.

And then if you swallowed it, I'd get a good boost of superiority, which is partly what I'm after. And then I'd try a, you know, another lie. And if you detected that, well, I'd move in another direction, sort of map you for your gullibility, and then I'd find out how you could be exploited. And that'd be the whole purpose of the conversation. Yeah.

And I then well, and then add to that the fact that I've practiced that for 30 years and that maybe I'm as smart as you are or possibly smarter. Right? I mean, depends on the situation, but

How does a woman even begin to detect or notice the difference? Well, part

of the way that women have done that historically is by not going out with people they don't know, right, that aren't part of their social network, you know. And 1 of the things about the psychopathic predators is that they're not very good at maintaining social connections. And so Wow. That's huge. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Well, the like the dating apps and that sort of thing, they're they're a complete open play playing ground for the psychopathic types. There there there's something even worse about this actually. So the sexual revolution was predicated on the idea that we could alter female reproduction patterns so that they could act like men, basically, because men are more likely to take a short term mating opportunity. And the promise of reliable birth control was that that avenue of possibility would be open to women.

Okay. And you might say well why not because you know sexuality is pleasurable and if you could reduce the cost why not do it? Alright. So that's what we've been experimenting with for 60 years. Okay.

Well 1 reason is that hormonal birth control alters females perceptions. So women on the pill don't like masculine men as much. And what that's done to us politically and sociologically no 1 knows. It's a big deal and we don't know. But the other thing that's happened is so imagine that there are you could imagine male reproductive strategies as being on a continuum.

There are men who are more inclined towards long term committed monogamous relationships, and there are men who are more committed to short term hedonistic pleasure seeking relationships. Alright. So now imagine you took these men and you analyze their personalities, and you took these men and analyze their personalities. Well, that's been done. The men who prefer short term mating opportunities are psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic.

Right. So 1 of the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution is that the freed up women have been delivered to the psychopathic men. Right. And what's the consequence of that? We don't know.

We don't know. We know that young people are less likely to have relationships. We know that the birth rate has plummeted. We know that people are much less likely to get married. How much of that is a consequence of the destabilization of of the reproductive pattern by by hormonal birth controls?

No 1 knows. It's not like it was a minor revolution. Right? It was a major technological revolution. But the terrifying thing is and women should know this is like the guys that are just out for a good time they're not much fun and they're a lot worse than you think and the worst of them are so much worse than you think that if you ever got to look inside your their mind you would never recover.

And I'm not saying that lightly. It's not pleasant. Like, the worst of terrible people are so bad. I'm I'm I'm not making this up. Most people who have post traumatic stress disorder don't have it because they were hurt.

They have it because they encountered someone who wanted to hurt them. Right? And so it was that glimpse of that malevolence that fractured them. It wasn't people can go through all sorts of horrible things and not be traumatized. You know, a terrible illness, terrible pain, an accident, You wait till you tangle with someone who's malevolent, boy.

You will not be the same person afterward, assuming you manage to put yourself back together at all. So this is not and it's many of those people too that have free rein online. It's not a

good thing. You brought up identity, and I feel that so much of our subscription to ideas of identity are somewhat subconscious. And I'm not sure anyone's ever, at least not that I know, the the scale of people who are thinking about their life in a logical way to say let me think about what my identity is. I think we join communities, we join groups, we leave communities, we leave groups, we sign up to this, we unsubscribe from that, we don't even recognize that we're subconsciously crafting an identity by the people we spend time with and the people we listen to. It often isn't as Precisely him.

Yeah, it isn't as, intentional. That's which

stories, by the way, that's that's a good observation. I mean, 1 of the things I've realized and 1 of the themes that is developed in this new book is the notion that so when when you're introduced to someone, you'll tell them a story about who you are. So you describe your identity. A story is a description of that implicit identity that you described. So you see the world through a structure of identity.

That doesn't mean you know what that is as you pointed out. When you tell a story about yourself, what you're trying to do is to approximate you're trying to encapsulate that implicit identity into something that's communicable. And then that something that also becomes explicitly understandable to you. This is partly what dreams do. So in the dream, your implicit identity reveals itself, but not entirely coherently and not entirely verbally.

If you take a dream and you you interpret it, if you have the the good fortune to be able to manage that and maybe some help, you're moving the information that's part of your implicit identity upward into something that's more explicitly recognized. Like, what you'd hope is that what you're actually pursuing preconsciously or unconsciously is mapped very well by your self description. Right? Because then you're a person that has a certain degree of integrity. Who you think you are and who you are are the same thing.

That's an optimal situation. That's the pursuit of something like integrity, say, in moral development, maybe in psychotherapy, in in a relationship that's positive and productive. It's all moving towards that end. And it's very useful to understand that what stories do is stories are the manner in which implicit identity makes itself explicit. And so the biblical stories, for example, are part of the process, the historical process by which the developing morality of individuals as they become more complexly civilized reveals itself to those cultures and to the participants.

It's a dynamic process, and it's much better to understand the stories that way. You know, the atheist types tend to parody belief in God, say, as belief in something like the great genie in the sky, the sky daddy, I think the benevolent sky daddy, which is the terminology that people like Richard Dawkins use. But that's a very it's a dismissive parody of the phenomena. It's not a reasonable approach because the the realm of religious conceptualization is far more sophisticated than that parody would indicate. Like, I mean, let's let's take the idea that the divine reveals itself as the call of adventure.

Well, this is a serious idea to contend with. So what it implies is that there's a spirit, so to speak, a process, a dynamic that reveals itself within us, that captures what interests us and compels us forward in consequence and that following that so when God comes to Abraham, he makes Abraham an offer, like a very explicit offer. This is the covenant of Yahweh, and it's a very interesting offer. It's and I read it from a psychological perspective, even from an evolutionary biological perspective. God this is how God is defined, by the way.

So God makes Abraham an offer. So Abraham comes from rich parents, and there's no reason for him to do anything from the purely material perspective. Everything that he could want is is already at hand, and it actually takes Abraham 70 years to get moving. Right? Because he's an old man by modern standards when the voice of adventure comes to him.

And it says something very, very specific to him. It's not vague at all. It says, you need to leave the comforts of your land and home, and you need to voyage out into the great unknown. So it's like a quest story, like like the hobbits say. Away you go from comfort.

Well, then the first question you might ask if you had that impulse is, well, why? I have everything that I would need, assuming life is based on that kind of need, right at hand. So what's the benefit to me of moving beyond the zone of infantile dependence and comfort? That's a question everybody faces always, especially if they're provided for adequately or even excellently by their parents. What should impal you out into the world and why bother?

Well, god tells Mo tells Abraham something very specific. He says if you abide by the voice of adventure, you'll be a blessing to yourself. Okay. That's a good deal because it's very frequently the case that people's people don't have an existence that's a blessing to them. They suffer a lot.

They're anxious. They're grief stricken. They're resentful. They're angry. They're they're self contemptuous.

They're vicious. There's all sorts of ways that their existence is not a blessing to them. So the offer that the voice of God as adventure makes to Abraham is that if you follow this pathway of adventure, your life will actually you'll start to experience your life as a blessing. So that's a good deal. Just that alone, if with that was true, that might be good enough to motivate you.

You're right. Think that's okay. That's the pathway forward to self acceptance, let's say, or something like a sophisticated self esteem, but that's not the whole offer. The second offer is you'll become known among your peers and validly. And that's very interesting because, you know, you can think about people as corrupt power seekers who are clamoring for status, or you can be less cynical and you could say, well, we're wired such that we appreciate due consideration for our genuine efforts.

Okay. So if my reputation is established on valid basis, that means that I'm appreciated by the people around me, but that there's a valid basis for that. That's the offer. That's part 2. So you're blessing to yourself in a manner that enhances your reputation, and you deserve it.

That's a good deal if you could have that. Then there's another offer, which is you'll get those 2 things, plus you'll establish something of lasting significance because Abraham is the father of nations, like he's the founder of a dynasty. So not only will you have those first 2 things, but it'll propagate across time. You know? And it's often the case when people are looking for something meaningful that they think, well, I'd like to do something of lasting value.

Right? There seems to be something intrinsically motivating about that. And so you think, well, that's a good deal. And then the fourth thing is you'll do it in a way that'll be a benefit to everyone else. So there's no nothing selfish or narcissistic about it.

So you think about what that means. It implies that the instinct of adventure that compels you beyond your zone of comfort is allied psychologically and socially so that if you follow it, you'll be a blessing to yourself. You're you'll have a reputation that's esteemed and deserved. You'll conduct yourself so that you produce things of lasting value, and it will be good for everyone else. Well that's an excellent deal and it it speaks of a harmony between the advanced psychological motivation that pulls you forward and your emotional states plus productivity and integration into the broader social community.

Well, I think that's right. I I can't see how it can be otherwise because the counter hypothesis would be the force that motivates you forward acts at cross purposes to say sociological stability. And I can't see how we could be genuinely social animals, productively socially animals, which we are, and there be some intrinsic conflict between the force that moves us forward and the force that brings people together. Right? Why not assume that they exist together in a kind of harmony?

I mean, we're adapted to the social world. Anyways, that's 1 of the avenues that I had explored in we who wrestle with God. And there's more in the Abrahamic story that's quite remarkable too because the other thing that Abraham decides to do this is so cool when you understand it is that so imagine you know this in your own life. You move towards a new destination, and that requires a kind of growth. So you might ask, well, what does that growth consist of?

And in the Abrahamic story, it consists of sacrifice. So every time Abraham makes a transformation in identity, he makes a sacrifice. Well, that is what happens when you make a transformation of identity because as you grow and mature, you have to shed those traits, people, even situations, material possessions, geographic locale, whatever. You have to shed all of that if it's interfering with your progress forward. And so what you see in Abraham's life is a series of adventures each of which are marked by a sacrifice that move them upward towards a higher and higher and more integrated form of being.

Right? He's the redeemer of cities at 1 point. And there's nothing in that that doesn't seem accurate to me psychologically. And so and it's an exciting thing to understand because it's the Abrahamic story is the template for individual development. That's a good way of thinking.

Abraham is the first real individual in the in the western canon. And the stories vary. It's very psychologically astute. Once you understand the basic reference, once you understand for example that sacrifice at least in part means dispensing with something you once valued but has now say become an impediment. And so well, so that's a little bit more of a description of the domains of thought that I've been wandering in.

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No. I I deeply appreciate the way you are analyzing and observing a religious text that can often be seen as a story, a, a lesson, a message, and actually looking at it as closely linked to human development. And part of my training, I did something similar with the Bhagavad Gita, which is the Mhmm. Text of the east and it's similar. There's a conversation between the divine Krishna or God with Arjun who's an archer who has lost all self belief and self esteem because he's having to fight his family.

He's an archer.

Yes. He's an archer.

Sin means to miss the target. Oh, wow. Yeah. It's a it's a an archery term. Yeah.

And and and that notion of sin has that archery connection in multiple different languages. Mhmm. And so it's the same theme that you're describing. And the reason for that is an archer hits the target. Right?

Mhmm. So to hit the target accurately is to pursue the divine most appropriately. So there's a metaphysics of archery. So that's definitely not a that's not that's a good example of how there's that's right. There's no mistake in that.

Right? There's no mistake in that. You wanna hit the target dead center.

Absolutely. Right? Yeah. And in the beginning of the text, his bow is slipping from his hands because his he's feeling sweaty. He's feeling nervous.

He's feeling anxiety. Right. And therefore, he turns to God for instruction and guidance.

Okay. So so okay. So there's a there's a meaning there too. So psychologists have demonstrated convincingly, mostly statistically, that there's no difference between being self conscious and being miserable. Right?

They're so tightly associated. So for example, in the big 5, in 1 of the classic big 5, personality descriptive processes, tests, Self consciousness is a facet of neuroticism. Mhmm. So it's actually a sub element of suffering. Okay.

So what does that mean? It means that if you're focused on your narrow self, what you want now, you're going to become both aimless and anxious. And that's technically the case. And so you might say, well, then what's the medication for that? And the medication isn't exactly to stop thinking about yourself because, well, then what do you think about?

And and exactly how do you continue to maintain your care for yourself? The medication to that is to aim higher. For example, in our conversation, and you're obviously good at this because your podcast wouldn't work, you can't sit in a conversation like this and do nothing but aim at the enhancement of your own status, let's say, in the eyes of your audience or at the expense of your guest. First of all, if you do that, you won't have guests for long and their quality will disintegrate, but also people will see through you eventually and see you as self serving. If by contrast, you aim the conversation at the expansion, let's say, of your own understanding and wisdom, then you're not it's not about you.

It's about the dynamic of the conversation and you can bring everybody along for the ride. But 1 of the benefits of that is you won't be self conscious. So your hands won't sweat. You won't you won't miss your grip on the bow. You won't aim wrong.

I guess it comes back down to in the same way that you talked about the call to adventure. Almost feeling like the first step, at least from what I observed from what you were sharing. Maybe there are a lot of people listening today who may feel Jordan Jay, I've never had the call to adventure. Like I've missed it. I haven't seen it.

Even if it's there, I don't know where it is in my life and that's why my life feels meaningless. I feel lost. I feel stuck. Yeah. Because I just don't see it.

That's well, that's and see is the right metaphor there. So the ancient Egyptians, 1 of their gods, Horus, was the god of the open eye. And the Mesopotamian god, Marduk, who was a savior figure whom the emperor should model himself after was also he had eyes all the way around his head so he could see. That's not the same as thinking. So to have an open eye is to attend.

And so you might say, well, if you've missed your adventure, Carl Jung said, modern man doesn't see God because he doesn't look low enough, which is a very interesting way of conceptualizing. It's like 1 of the things I try to do in this new technology we're developing with SA, but also as a theme in we who wrestle with God is to point out that you can learn to watch. So for example, when I was dealing with depressed people in my clinical practice, and this is a pretty standard behavioral approach is 1 of the things you do with depressed people is you have them track their mood, say maybe every hour during the day. Because a depressed person will assume that they're very unhappy and that that's always there. But if you get them to track it, what you find is they may be comparatively unhappy, but there is variation.

So there'll be times when they're much more miserable than usual, but also times when they're less miserable. And they may not even really know when those times are without tracking it. So 1 of the things typically is depressed people will isolate themselves because they think they don't wanna see anyone. But if you have them track their emotions, you find that when they're with other people, they're almost invariably less depressed. Okay.

So imagine now I had you make a map of your emotions across a week and we associated the emotions with what you were doing. What we'd find is some of the things you were doing were making you much more depressed and some of the things less. And so then your goal so the first goal is see that, attend to that as if you're ignorant even with regards to your own nature. And then the next thing would be, well, how about you do a little bit more of the things that are positive and a little bit less of the things that are negative. Right?

And then we will remap that and see if you've moved your average mood, you know, up the up the distribution. And so this is what they call the beginner's mind at least in part in Buddhism. You want to look at the situation, which might be your own situation, as if you don't know yourself. It's like okay well what am I interested in? People are often loathed to even ask that question because they may find, for example, that the thing that compels them forward isn't the thing their father or mother wanted them to do.

That's a very common familial story. You know, you might be shocked at who you are. It's highly probable just like you're shocked when you start to get to know someone else. It's the same as gonna apply to you. And the rule there is something like watch, don't assume.

Right? Don't put your presuppositions before the realities of your experience. Alright? So he had to watch. And so and if you watch you see you can you can rectify your aim.

Right? Right. And so that's the difference between attention and thought. You know, Luciferian intelligences worship their own presuppositions. Someone who's active and attentive watches.

They're alert. Meditation can foster that. Right? Because it teaches you to be present and awake. And so I would say to people who haven't found their calling is that they're not noticing it in its micromanifestations.

You know, it it's not going to necessarily announce itself like Gandalf announced himself to the hobbit. It's gonna be subtle. Things bother you. That's part of your adventure. Like, there's gonna be certain things that grip you and disturb you, and those are the problems that you're destined to have to contend with.

And you might be annoyed about that because you think I don't wanna have any problems. It's like, no. You actually probably wanna have some serious problems that you can contend with that are going to occupy you, some responsibilities. And then there'll be the things that clearly motivate your movement forward. And it's very good to start to understand what those are.

To to understand that that's how it works first, but then also to understand them in more detail. You can under you can start to come to understand that by understanding your own temperament. So for example, if you're high in neuroticism, you're gonna be more concerned with safety and security. If you're agreeable, you're gonna be relationship focused. If you're disagreeable, you're gonna be competitive.

If you're conscientious, you're gonna be interested in order and productivity. If you're open, you're going to be interested in esthetics and ideas. Well right there you've got a bit of a map of the territory of calling and conscience that you're going to occupy. And so you have a nature, you know, and it's it's it's given to you and it manifests itself in what interests you and what bothers you. And the biblical insistence, at least in part, and this is common I think to sophisticated religious systems of thought worldwide is that there's an autonomy in what calls you and what calls to your conscience.

Right? It's you have a relationship with your conscience. You have a relationship with what interests you. It's not exactly under your control. It's something that can guide you and that you can follow.

And that's portrayed in these well, in the story of Abraham, for example, as god is the call to adventure. And so it's extremely interesting conceptualization, you know, you you see that implicitly in quest stories like the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit, you know, you have this ordinary guy who's protected that would be the Hobbit in in, in the first book book of Tolkien series. Or even Harry Potter who unbeknownst to him is magical and has ordinary parents, right? So there's this call out of ordinariness and the voice of that call is associated with as definition and with the divine. That's not a superstitious conceptualization, and it's not something like an abdication of responsibility in favor of superstition.

You know, it's a terrifying idea. It's also predicated to some degree on the idea that the the purpose of life isn't something like secure comfort. That's partly why people make so much trouble. So we're not wired for infantile secure comfort. And if we don't have a real adventure we'll find a false 1 and we'll cause a lot of trouble in that false adventure.

A lot. Alcoholism, that's a false adventure. Drug abuse, that's a false adventure. You know, sequential parasitical love affairs, that's a false adventure. Political activism of a destructive sort.

The false adventure seems to be so alluring and intoxicating in so many ways. And naturally in in the case that you're sharing distracting as well. How does 1 avoid the allurements of a false adventure while they're still pursuing an unconscious?

That's that's a very good that's a very good question. Well, I think conscience is a big part of that, you know, because it's very frequent that people will be visited by their conscience when they do something that's hedonistically valuable in the short term. But then they think, oh, you know, I shouldn't have done that. It's like, well, why shouldn't have you done that? Well, I cheated on my girlfriend.

All right, well, you got to cheat. There's the benefit. What's the downfall? Well, I can't trust myself. I'm a liar.

She can't trust me. Okay. So what's the problem with that? You wanna be alone? You wanna be a parasitical psychopath?

Like what's your goal here? And so the problem part of the problem with just calling, let's say, is it can become short term and it can to entice you into false micro adventures that don't propagate well across time and that disturb other people. You know, you said something when we were talking just before the interview started about because I was asking you what you thought you might be doing right with regard to your podcast say that would account for its popularity. And you said, well, you're in it for the long run. Well, a fundamental part of cortical maturation from a biological perspective is that you start to see things in the long run, and then you don't do things in the short term that are exciting and and even adventurous that violate what the propagation of the adventure across time, you know, and you can, you can envision it this way socially.

If you and I have an honest conversation. Okay. Imagine that you have a guest who uses your podcast in a manipulative way. Okay. They could gain some short term advantage putting you down, let's say playing a power game, using the podcast as a a means to enhance their economic standing or their social standing.

Well, what's the problem with that? Well, they're not gonna get invited back. Well, you do that 20 times, you're done. Right? Okay.

So 1 of the ways of thinking about this, if you're trying to understand what constitutes morality, technically, is that the moral pathway, if I'm interacting with you morally, assuming you're treating yourself properly, our interactions are going to have to be of the kind that you want to voluntarily repeat.

Mhmm.

That's what you have with a friend. Mhmm. And there's a pattern to that, obviously, a pattern of reciprocity, a pattern of mutual aid, unless it's a pathological friendship, in which case it's likely to collapse anyways. But that's a constraint. Repeatability, voluntary repeatability across time is a real constraint.

And it's something like the future because it's across time, but it's also something like the constraint on your actions by the necessity for you to be embedded in a voluntary social framework. Right? And that's a huge advantage. You know? Like, 1 of the things you could think about, for example, there's this game that economists play, behavioral economists.

So this is how the game works. You pick 2 people and you say to 1 of them, I'm gonna give you a $100 and you have to split it with this person. If they accept the offer, then you get the 100 and you pay them. But if they refuse the offer, neither of you get anything. So that's the game.

Now if you play that across cultures, what you find is that regardless of socioeconomic status, people offer 50%. Okay. Now this violates the tenants of classical economic economics, which views people as self maximizers. Because if I'm only gonna play a game with you once, I should take $99 and give you 1. And you should take 1 because what do you want?

0 or do you want 1? But that isn't what people do. They split it 5050. Mhmm. Now then you might ask why?

Well, you don't play 1 off games with people. So imagine you're doing this publicly. Mhmm. Okay. Now everyone watches you, and they see that you you're a fair player.

Well, then they're gonna play with you if they get an opportunity. You could even say, I don't know if this has ever been tested, but you could even say, well, maybe you do a 60 40 split and you offer the person that's playing slightly more than you get. Well, you lose in that game, but if you get a reputation, that's part of that Abrahamic adventure. If you get a reputation for bending over backwards to be reciprocal, people are gonna line up to play with you. And so that's why you try to teach your children to be good sports because, you know, you say to them, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose.

It matters how you play the game. And the kids thinks, what the hell do you mean? Of course, it matters if I win. You know, parents are usually not sophisticated enough to pursue that philosophically, but the right answer is what good is their winning 1 game when you never get invited to play again? It's much better to be invited to play a 100 games, and that means you're gonna have to be the sort of person that other people are lining up to play with.

And that's that's the basis. That's part of the basis of a genuine ethic. And I think raised to raised to the philosophical level, you get something like a transcendent ethic out of that. It's biologically predicated, but it's a higher order it's a higher order and more mature ethic, and it's real. It's super real.

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Yeah. It that reminds me of the kind of insidious traits that we also see present. So if you look at the examples of the ones that you just gave of the Hobbit, like Frodo Baggins, or you look at Harry Potter. Both of them also experience the envy of their call to adventure. So there are others who envy their call to adventure and often you find that again while we don't have our call to adventure we may envy someone else's.

Yeah. Well, that's also a very, central observation, I would say. So the first story in the Genesis in the in the Old Testament, the first story about actual human beings that are in history is the story of Cain and Abel because Adam and Eve are well, they're made directly by God. So the first 2 humans in history are Cain and Abel. It's a story of resentment and envy.

Right? And it's exactly it's exactly what you just laid out is that Abel aims up and makes the proper sacrifices. Right? Say in the Abrahamic sense. And because of that, everything he does works.

And Cain makes second rate sacrifices and deceives himself and other people and God and fails. And instead of learning from his failure, he becomes bitter. He shakes his fist at God and complains about the structure of reality itself, and then he becomes murderous and kills his own ideal, and then his descendants become genocidal, and then you have the flood. It's like so that that's another of the consequences, let's say of false of non existent adventure or false adventure is the those who took the adventurous path become the targets of envy. There's destruction that's then aimed at them and that can propagate so widely through a society that it does itself in.

That's happened over and over in human history. Yeah. It's really it's it's brutal and it's so terrifying that that's the you know, you could argue that that Cain versus Abel narrative is in many ways the fundamental narrative of what would you say? It's the fundamental battle of the most likely attitudes of each individual. Right?

You can maintain faith and courage. You can make the proper sacrifices. You can aim up. You can be a benefit to yourself and others, or you can hold back what's best. You can try to manipulate the system.

You can degenerate into bitterness and envy and then look the hell out. Right?

Mhmm.

Right? Yeah. And and this is 1 paragraph, that story. Right? It's like 12 lines long.

It's a stunning miracle of of, compression. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How does

how does 1 transform that if 1 is experiencing envy of another's call to adventure or envy of another one's path or success or reward from from God, the universe, wherever it's coming from, how does 1 transform, purify, and rid themselves of that envy? What does 1 do with envy?

Well, there are part of what has historically constituted religious practice is an answer to that question. So the first would be, you could practice gratitude. You know? And you could make the case that if you're not screaming in agony because you're on fire right now, you have lots of things to be fortunate about. You know, and people who have passed through extremely harrowing experiences, they often learn that.

It's like, oh, the sorts of things that I thought were terrible are are almost negligible, and there's so many good things happening to me all the time around me that that are invisible to me maybe because of my arrogance that I'm just blind to them. So the practice of gratitude, that's a standard religious exercise, I would say, across the domains of hell and religious systems. What else? Humility? So the thing about 1 of the things that distinguishes Cain from Abel is that when Cain fails, he thinks it's God's fault or society or other people or it's externalized blame.

When Abel fails, he learns. And that's the proper sacrificial attitude because you might so for example, if you're a man and you're getting nowhere with women, it's very easy for you to become extremely hostile to women, which is not going to help you out much, generally speaking, in the relationship market. And you can certainly understand why that might be because if you've had 50 encounters with women you're attracted to and every single 1 of them resulted in maybe not only rejection but contemptuous rejection, you can certainly understand why you might conclude from that that there's something seriously wrong with women. But you could flip that and you could presume that by definition, if you're failing in that regard, there's some changes that should be made. You know?

And and it it really does depend on your initial stance with regard to the situation. 1 of the things that comes very that comes through very clearly with regards to the upward aiming Israelites, they're not all upward aiming, but the upward aiming ones in the old testament is whenever a cataclysm visits them, they assume it's their fault. And that's a hell of a thing to take onto yourself. Right? It's if I'm failing, it's my fault.

And you can certainly understand why that's difficult because a certain amount of misery seems to visit people arbitrarily. Mhmm. But there's almost no failure regardless of how arbitrary that you can't learn from. And there isn't anything better that you can do with failure, no matter how unjust, than to learn from it. And so as a general attitude, how did I go wrong here is a hyper useful existential stance.

Right? And it it's also a bulwark against hopelessness because, you know, even if it was 95% situational and 5% you, if you adjusted that 5%, maybe that'd be enough so that the next time that situation arises, you'd come out on the positive side of it. You know? And you're also not a torment to other people then because your general question is, how am I insufficient? And that also gives you something to do because, man, trying to rectify your own insufficiency, that's that'll keep you busy for the rest of your life.

And that's a good thing. Right? That's a meaningful pursuit, and you will experience it that way.

Working on your own insufficiencies. Yeah.

Well, it's an inexhaustible source of possibility. Right? Because there's always you could be better at something than you are no matter how good you are at something and no matter how many dimensions you're doing that analysis in simultaneously. Right? It's like a horizon of opportunity in some in some ways.

That's the flip side of it. Your insufficiencies the flip side of your insufficiencies are the opportunities that growth in those dimensions would represent. That's a good way of looking at the world.

What's the insufficiency that lets us down the most? Is there 1 that stands above all all this?

Pride. That's that's the classical answer from the Judeo Christian perspective anyways. Pride and arrogance, you know, that would be something like the presumption that that you're that you're right and that and that you're above it all, that you're on top. And so and you could see that as a well, first of all, something very annoying to other people. So that's a problem given that you have to put up with them, and it's also an impediment to learning.

Right? Because to be open to learning does mean at least to some degree, always asking, well, what am I doing wrong? What do I have to give up? What do I have to let go of? What do I have to transform?

That can be very painful. But so pride, that's 1. That's that's a major 1. Heden hedonism, that's a problem, and that's a kind of immaturity. So that's that desire for immediate gratification at the expense of other people, at the expense of you in the long run.

Right? At so at the expense of the general future. And so that's a very difficult thing to overcome. I mean, a lot of what you do when you're socializing children is you're trying to encourage them to become capable of integrating their various hedonistic desires so they don't conflict with 1 another, so that they can be they can find their gratification in the long run-in a manner that's commensurate with the needs and wants of other people. And it takes 20 years to socialize a child to become a full fledged adult, and it's not like the process ends there.

It's very complicated process of integration and self regulation. And it is it is Upwork. And why? Why is it better? Well, even if the goal is gratification, if 1 strategy allows 20 repetitions of gratification and the other strategy offers 1 gratification followed by regret and catastrophic failure, it seems pretty obvious even by the standards of gratification that the first strategy is better than the second.

Absolutely. Yeah. Right. Right. Right.

Right. So the iteration element of it is crucial. Now is this a long term playable game? Better. Is this the kind of long term playable sustainable game that I would like to engage in voluntarily and maybe bring others aboard equally voluntarily?

That's a that's a good ethical question. It's also extremely practically valuable. You know, we were talking before this began about the this about the utility that you found in putting together around you a very functional team. Well, a functional team is composed of people playing the same game and all doing it full heartedly and voluntarily. Yeah.

Well, so that's a that's an optimal solution. Even if even if the goal is, say, the maximization of your success, your success success that comes at the expense of other people, that's not that means that your definition of success is thoroughly flawed. That's all it means. That's especially true if the world isn't a 0 sum game, and I don't see any evidence that it is. There's no reason that your victory, unless you're envious and spiteful, sadistic even, there's absolutely no reason that your victory has to come at the expense of someone else.

Mhmm.

I feel often, going back to your point on pride, I feel often our views of how pride shows its face are quite superficial in that we think of things like ego and pride as bravado and arrogance and showing off and Mhmm. That and those are quite immature, superficial Or they're true but they're You get what I'm saying? They're incomplete aspects. And I think today in the world we see far more subdued, nuanced, hidden ways of how pride shows up in all of us and around us. 1 of which you pointed out earlier which was like, I'm right, you're wrong.

And this can show up on a daily basis whether it's a comment section, a chat room, an an online place, whatever it may be. That there's a feeling that ego rules us not in the I'm the boss and you're lower down but in I'm right and you're wrong and my way is the best way and my political party, my God, my whatever it may be, is better than yours.

Well, some of that is the attempt to obtain status. And sometimes that's predicated on the erroneous assumption that if you defeat someone, let's say, in an argument, that you're right. Now there's a certain amount of truth in that because you can evaluate ideas in the ideational space, but you can be intelligent and unwise and defeat someone wise and less articulate in an argument and still be profoundly wrong. What you should be trying to do, and this is especially true in the confines, let's say, of a marital relationship, is you should be trying to listen. It's like and maybe you're trying to help your partner formulate their argument more accurately so that you both can get to the root of the problem.

And Oh, I love that.

The cheap way. Oh, it's very useful. It's like, well, you might have a point. Yeah. You know, I mean, this is actually 1 of the things that can help men in their understanding of women.

So women on average are more sensitive to negative emotion. So you could think of them as having a lower threshold for alarm. Okay. Now what that implies is that there'll be times when the alarm bell goes off when it doesn't have to, but there'll be other times when the alarm bell is going off to signify something that is barely detectable but is there. Okay.

So often what women finds frustrating in speaking to men is the men they'll start the women will start to lay out the problem and the men will offer a solution. And the men think, well, don't you want a solution? And the women who often can't articulate this think, well, yeah, but neither of us know what the problem is yet. And so the initial stages in much couple communication are the woman bringing up a problem, but not knowing what it is. And so making all sorts of wandering attempts to specify the problem and hoping, even implicitly, that she'll have enough space, enough scaffolding so that that investigative process can come to focus on the actual problem.

Well, once you've got the problem identified, it's a lot simpler to put forward a solution and to implement it. But that's that's the case for well, that's the case often for yourself if you're upset or any dialog. It's like you want to listen long enough so you actually understand what the problem is. And that's of great benefit to you because now the cost is if you're wrong, you're gonna have to give something up and that's annoying and difficult and complicated and can be humiliating. And then you might say, well, why bother?

And the answer to that's straightforward. It's so you don't make the same stupid mistake again. Mhmm. And that comes at a cost. This is why there's this dawning insistence, arising insistence in our culture that you shouldn't be able to be offensive in your speech, which sort of means you shouldn't be allowed to upset anyone emotionally.

Well, if you're speaking about something that's foundational and you're pointing out an error, that's going to be upsetting to the person you're talking to because it means they're going to have to do a fair bit of cognitive retooling. They're gonna have to undergo a partial death and rebirth. Well, that's can be terribly painful, but it's better than actually failing cataclysmically repeatedly in the world. You know? So we substitute death in argumentation for death in actuality.

That doesn't mean that death in argumentation is nothing. And because there is an emotional burden and an effort that has to be made, people are resistant to that. I'd rather show that I'm right so that you have to change. Fair enough. But but you might be the 1 with the problem.

I mean, that's a terrible thing to contemplate. But

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People that I admire.

When we say listen to your body, really tune in to what's

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Authors of books that have changed my life.

Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy. Right?

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I find that don't you think there's a need for both the delivery and the receptor to upgrade themselves? Because there's a sense that even the deliverer of a message, no matter how true it may be, If they're able to make it not more digestible in a I don't mean in a watered down way. Mhmm. I mean in a way that is not agitating but truly impactful. Right.

Well, definitely. I mean you don't wanna wield the truth as a weapon more than necessary, you know, and people might say, well, I hurt your feelings, but I was only telling you the truth. It's like you might have been telling the truth at 1 level of analysis and lying like mad at another because maybe your motivation was to hurt and you figured out how to use something that was normally true as your weapon. And so at the very narrow level of analysis, semantically, what you said was true. But in the broader context, no, you're just a sadist.

And so there are technical approaches that to some degree that are coded in the law. So for example, if you're defending yourself, you're entitled to use something approximating minimal necessary force, and that's a good maxim for communication. You know, you you wanna deliver a corrective message in the most constrained possible manner. There's there's ways of doing this. So for example, if you if you have an employee and they've made a mistake, you wanna bring up the mistake primarily, so it's not repeated.

And so 1 of the ways of buffering that is to bring the person in and to say, look, here's a bunch of things you're doing right. And we don't have a global problem. But in this specific case, here's what you did. This was the consequence, and this is what you could have done to do it differently. And then you close it by reiterating the fact that, you know, having said that I have confidence, for example, that you'll rectify this error and people make mistakes.

And it the real issue here is whether you take responsibility for it and rectify it, and then the person can learn without being demolished, without being demoralized. And that's also a very good thing to do to yourself. Like, if you see that you've made a mistake and you're guilty as hell and tearing yourself apart, you want to approach it with the presumption of innocence. It's like don't assume you're any more terrible than you have to assume. Okay.

Then do the analysis and figure out what's the minimal transformation you can make that will suffice. This is also a good principle when you're arguing with, maybe you're upset with your partner your wife or your husband It's incumbent on you to figure out what you want like what would satisfy you Okay, so you have a problem with me I didn't I wasn't properly appreciative for the efforts you made when you were preparing dinner. I was dismissive of it. It's like, okay. What is it that you wish I would have said?

The person might say, well, if you love me, you'd know that. It's like, yeah, but I'm stupid. So I need to know what word should have I used that would have encouraged your efforts in that regard? And then the person can tell you and then you can say the words and you have to understand that there's gonna be a certain falseness about that the first time that it happens, but it's something you can get good at over time. You may have to teach your partner how to reward you properly, and there may be be pretty bad at it the first 10 times, and that might be annoying to you and them, and even false.

But you can practice it, and it's worth practicing.

Yes. Yeah. I read I read something similar to what you're saying in terms of how to give proper feedback. And it was in a book called The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. And he talks about a 3 step method that the first thing you do is you share that we have high standards here.

Mhmm. Because you don't wanna live in a world of low standards. Yep. You don't wanna drop your company's standards. Right.

Right.

You remind the person you're speaking to we have high standards here. We have high goals. And the second thing you do is you say to that person and I believe you can get there. Yeah. I believe it.

I see it for you because of course they're still at the company.

Throwing some evidence in their Correct. In their direction would be useful in that. Here's some things, you know, that I remember that you really did well.

Correct. That show me you can get there. And then the third is here are that what you were saying. Here's that area. Here are the steps that you can take.

Here was the consequences, rectification. And I love that because we allow people to rise to high standards as opposed to hold them to them. Yeah. And I think there's a difference between that and how society is functioning right now where we want to hold people to certain standards but we're not willing to help them rise towards them. And it seems like God and this conversation with Abraham is, like, encouraging Abraham to rise

Mhmm.

Not just pointing at a a standard that should

be held.

This is 1 of the things that you see repeated in the biblical stories is that this is why there's insistence in those stories that whatever the divine is, it's something that you actually enter into a relationship with because there is this element of, let's say, tolerance for failure combined with encouragement. Right? It's not merely that what constitutes the divine is this unattainable infinite standard against which you're always going to fall short. That sort of that's what a tyrant does falsely. It's more like the spirit of encouragement that a good father would put into play with his kids.

You know, you wanna set a standard that pulls the child upward towards further development, but you wanna put it within the range of their grasp. And so and, you know, is does that characterize your interaction with the world? Well, I think it's fair to say that it is because, you know, we can fail without dying and we can improve. And so the notion that ideals can exist in concert with encouragement isn't an unreasonable proposition, and it is I mean, I think part of the reason that God is represented, let's say, in the biblical text as a wise father is because that element of the divine that's discriminating but encouraging is paramount, and that is what you want in a father for sure. You want someone who says, I think you're capable of being great.

I really think that. And here's some evidence that you've provided that that might be the case. But given that I believe that you're capable of that, I'm not gonna let you get away with any deviation from that that would be finally counterproductive. That's not care. Right?

That's the devouring mother who says whatever you do is fine, dear. It's like that's not love. Right? That's actually the desire on the part of the person who's delivering that message to keep the person being communicated with in a continually infantile and dependent state. Right?

So it's a weird thing, because you need that discriminating judgment, which can be quite harsh. It's like, no. That wasn't up to standards there, buddy. But that failure isn't emblematic of your core self. Right?

The part of you that I really wanna communicate is the with is the part that's aiming up. That was sort of the agreement I had with my clients in my clinical practice. Like, I'm on the side of you that's aiming up, and that's an interesting basis for a relationship. It's like, I'm not gonna accept everything you do. Now that doesn't mean I'm gonna arbitrage arbitrarily judge it or dispense with you in the case of failure, but our deal has gotta be something like we're trying to make things better.

And so I'm gonna be on the side of you that's trying to make things better and help you discriminate that part within you from the part that might be envious and aiming down and and being destructive.

What still gives you hope, Jordan, in all of this that we're discussing today? Is there anything that makes you feel up to

what you're

There's lots of things to be hopeful for. I mean, we're feeding twice as many people regularly as even the most wild optimists imagined in the late 19 sixties. Absolute poverty is being restricted around the world at a rate that's miraculously inconceivable? I mean, before things destabilized to some degree over the last 5 years, the UN projections was were that we could eradicate absolute poverty by 2,035. That's, I mean, that's a huge improvement.

I mean, these communication technologies, they enable well, with Petersen Academy, for example, we figure we can offer people a high quality university level education for under $2,000 and everywhere. So, like, that's a major improvement. I think that things are actually somewhat less polarized on the political side than they were 2 years ago. I mean, there's tendencies in both directions, but I see I was just in Uzbekistan. That was extremely interesting.

I met a man there who's an industrialist. His enterprises comprised 15% of Uzbekistan's GDP. He refurbished 400,000 square meters of post Soviet factory, floor space, and they're manufacturing everything you can possibly imagine. Marble tiles, building materials, fridges, microwaves, air conditioners, golf carts, hospitals, hotels, high rises. Uzbekistan under the Soviets was, was barely functional.

Everyone was raising cotton. They drained Lake Baikal to to irrigate the cotton fields. That was the only industrial development. They got themselves out of the out from underneath the boot of the Soviet totalitarians, and the society is becoming wealthy and opportunity rich at an insane level, and that's happening all over the world. Mhmm.

I mean, endless numbers of reasons to assume that everybody could thrive. That's what people like Musk are trying to aim at. You know? However imperfectly, I see no reason at all that the future couldn't be 1 of unlimited abundance. There's going to have to be a transformation in ethical orientation to go along with that because there's no difference between the ability to generate genuine wealth and ethical conduct.

Those are the same thing. That's the life more abundant that's promised by the divine in the in the Old Testament stories, for example. You have to conduct yourself honorably so that you can trust each other so that you can cooperate to be productive. Mhmm. Right?

Right? So, yeah, I'm optimistic fundamentally.

Do you believe that that is that gonna be something you're teaching at the Peterson Academy, that primary thing that

you Definitely. Yeah.

Yeah. Because to me, I I agree with you that that I always wondered how, business schools across the world, how at colleges, how at universities, there was no class on proper character. It just No. No. No.

It amuses me that

Well, and there's no classes even on the relationship between character and and economic progress. I read a great book once called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. And it was a study of, really, it's a study of the role that honesty and trust plays in the generation of wealth. Japan's a really good example of that. Japan has, like, no natural resources, and it's an extremely wealthy country.

Why? Well, it's a high trust society. No 1 steals, and envy is looked down upon. Right? Ambition is fostered and so is conscientious hard work and maybe even to a fault in Japan, but it's a high trust society.

In high trust societies, everybody can become rich, but it means that everybody has to conduct themselves ethically. And that is a precondition for anything approximating a I hate to word use the word sustainable, but an iterable capitalism. Right? Because people, the leftist critics in particular, like to think of capitalism as a rapacious enterprise, but that's a well, first of all, compared to what? You know, dynastic poverty?

Because that's generally the alternative, and it's not like that's not rapacious. And most enterprises that orient themselves too much to the short term fail. So it's important to teach people we do this so badly. You know? I mean, even the word capitalism isn't 1 that should be used because really what we're talking about is free exchange of goods and services.

I mean, who's opposed to that? Do you wanna be able to have a different job? Do you wanna have some choice? Do you wanna actually be able to own the things you purchase? Do you wanna be able to purchase things?

Do you wanna have a choice? Like who says no to that? No 1. And but no 1, young people in particular aren't taught that well, that's the capitalism that you're criticizing. The fact you get to own something and move your labor voluntarily from 1 place to another.

You're gonna oppose that, are you? In favor, what, of top down authoritarian planning where everyone starves miserably. So and, you know, a lot of that's been removed from the world since the since the wall fell, and people are much richer than they've ever been, and and and and not in an entirely pathological manner. So, yeah, there's lots of reason to be optimistic. I actually think we're on the cusp of something like an ethical revolution because I I tried to outline in this in this new book is that I think that we're at the point where our scientific discoveries in fields like cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary biology can be seen to dovetail with our traditional understanding of high order ethics.

That's partly the case I tried to make in this book. And it's certainly the ethos that saturates the course offerings in Peterson Academy. You know, we're we're trying to encourage people to take maximal responsibility, to have an adventurous life, to pursue an ethical pathway, to tell the truth, and to educate themselves broadly and esthetically. And so far, it seems to be working. You know?

People are pleased with, I'm so excited about this. I mean, I gotta hand it to my daughter and her husband. They've done a bang up job of of putting this together. The courses are really beautiful. They're very they're they're compelling.

They're very well produced, and, the technology works like a charm. And the social media network so far is behaving exactly how we hoped it would behave when we were feeling particularly optimistic. And so and we now have the capital to put all the things that we wanted to build into the system into place. So translation into multiple languages, that'll be on the table very soon. A radical expansion of the curriculum.

We're gonna predicate it on, I think, something approximating the Chicago great books tradition. So we're imagining something like the selection of great books that would characterize a high quality education in the humanities, 1 course, something like a minimum of 1 course per great book.

That's beautiful.

I can't see any reason we can't do that. We have an excellent stable of professors. All of them wanna continue working with us. I think that's true without exception so far. And I'm able to make contact with great lecturers all the time and to keep discovering them.

That's beautiful. Congratulations. Fun. Fantastic.

I've been tweeting out funny ads about being at the most progressive university in the world because, well, the progressives hope for universal education at something approximating 0 cost. Well, that's what we've got. It's open to anyone, and it's no 1 comes out with debt. So that seems pretty progressive to me. Absolutely.

So and I'm very excited about the translation possibilities because AI systems are getting pretty good at that. So we'll have our lecturers be able to lecture in other languages using their own voice and modify the video so that it appears that they're speaking that language. So god only knows how many languages we'll be able to translate our material into, you know, as the AI systems develop and it gets cheaper and cheaper. So, yeah, exciting. It's exciting.

And the essay app, you know, that teaches people to write, it works, helps people figure out what they wanna write about. It runs them through the process of generating their ideas, and then it teaches them how to edit. And so and there's no difference between doing that and teaching people to think. Absolutely. Hopefully, we can provide people with content, and we can teach them the mechanics of thinking and writing.

It's fantastic. Yeah. That's fun. That's fun.

And I think we'll be able to do it.

I I mean, you're already doing it. So

We've got 30,000 students and the system seems to be working. So we've got proof of we've got good proof of concept now.

Absolutely. Yep. Well, congratulations, Jordan. It's brilliant, honestly brilliant, and, can't wait to enroll myself. I'll be doing that straight after this.

Good. And, Jordan, we end every on purpose episode with the final 5. Yeah. And these questions have to be answered in a 1 word to 1 sentence

Oh, no.

Maximum. So How

long a sentence?

You you define it. You're teaching everyone how to write and things. Yeah.

I've got a

lot of confidence.

I'll go with your definition. Alright. Question 1, what is the best life advice you've ever heard or received?

Tell the truth,

or at least don't lie. Number 2, what is the worst advice you ever heard or received? It's all about you. Number 3, how would you define your current purpose?

I think I'm doing, in my way, the same thing the same thing that Elon Musk said that he was doing when I interviewed him, which is to continue exploring the limits of possibility. That's an adventure. Right? To explore the limits of possibility. A lot of times possibility comes to you as tragedy.

That's a good thing to understand. You know, they say every treasure has a dragon. Right? But you can reverse that. And that's worth knowing too.

If something terrible comes your way, it's like there's an opportunity there. Like it might not be the kind of opportunity you would have wished for, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. Yeah. So that's a good thing to know.

Have have you spent a significant of time with Elon Musk, or is it has it been more intimate?

I've met him 4 times, so we've probably spent a total of about 7 hours together. Mhmm. Yeah. And I would say I've walked away from each encounter more impressed with him as a character. In in terms of his character, I mean, you have to be mouth open in amazement with regards to his technological and managerial entrepreneurial prowess.

I mean, it's just it's ridiculous. But I believe that he's doing his best to aim up. Thank god. And I think that's what the Mars voyages symbolize. Right?

He's it's a mythological adventure to aim up in that manner, and he's it's part of his story. Right? It's the mythological dimension of his story, and it's not practical, right, except insofar as a great story is practical. So I remember the Apollo voyages. They were very motivating to people, you know, as an indication of what humanity was capable of doing.

And certainly, Musk is playing that out on the technological side. So

Beautiful. Okay. Question number 4. How do we scale trust?

By attempting to practice honesty in your own life. Mhmm. Yeah. And by rewarding it among the people that you interact with. Mhmm.

It's very useful to understand that you have the opportunity to point out to other people who you interact with regularly what they're doing that is positive and good, and that that there's nothing in that that isn't productive.

Yeah. Well said. Absolutely. 5th and final question, we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show. If you could create 1 law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?

Don't follow stupid rules.

What what constitutes a stupid rule?

That's the that's the hard part of the problem, isn't it? I think well, I I had that conversation with my kids because it is something I told them when they went to school. I said, look. There's gonna be reasonable rules at your school, and there are gonna be unreasonable rules. And I don't require you to follow the unreasonable rules, but you have to be willing to bear the consequences.

Right. So you're morally obliged to object to foolish restrictions, but you have to be willing to pay the price for that. And there will be a price, and it has to be you that pays it. Right? And that's hard.

Yes. Yes. It's also the difference between activism, let's say, and civil disobedience because if it's civil disobedience, you pay the price. If it's activism, someone else does.

Powerful. Well, I hope everyone subscribe to the podcast if you don't already. Check out Peterson Academy if you haven't already. New book out in November, We Who Wrestle With God. We got glimpses into it today.

Doctor Jordan B Peterson, thank you so much for your time and energy. I hope we get to do this again. Extremely grateful for your time and energy. And, I learned a lot today. And, actually, I feel I could have talked to you for another 3 hours about eastern and western religion and ideologies and the amount of stories that I had coming up in my mind to to share back and forth.

But we can just save that for another time. That would be good. That would be good.

Be it'd be it'd be we did a little bit of that. Yes. We got we got into the overlap between the the the narrative domains. That would be really beautiful.

And I loved it. Yeah. I really loved it. True. It's really beautiful.

I don't I don't know nearly as much about Hindu religious thought as I should. I know a little bit about Buddhism and and a moderate amount about Taoism, and that's been extremely useful to me. But, I'm less conversant with with the Hindu tradition of thought, and it would be very interesting to I mean, I've never delved deeply, almost without exception, into a religious tradition without finding stories that were Mhmm. Like of incalculable value.

Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I'm happy to serve wherever possible.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, yeah. That would be a good thing to do.

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. Good to talk to you.

Fantastic. Such a pleasure. Honestly. You bet. If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with doctor Gabor Mate on understanding your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start moving on from the past.

Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable. So a tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it? It grows where it's soft and green and vulnerable.

Hey. I'm Jackie Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, y'all? This is Questlove. And, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Fontigolo, unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like to nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives and people that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes.

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