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

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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you don't love tea, if you love refreshing, rejuvenating, refueling
sodas that are good for you, listen to this Radi
and I poured our hearts into creating Juny sparkling tea
with adaptogens for you because we believe in nurturing your

(00:21):
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(00:45):
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(01:07):
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Speaker 2 (01:27):
To be open to learning does mean, at least to
some degree, always asking 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 one of the most articulate men of
our time, clinical psychologists turned culture warrior, doctor Jordan Peterson.

(01:50):
The man who prefer short term mating opportunities are psychopathic, narcissistic,
acuabellion and sadistic. So one of the unintended consequences of
the sexual revolution is that the freed up women have
been delivered to the psychopathic men. Most people who have
post traumatic stress disorder don't have it because they were hurt.

(02:13):
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 afterwards. The dark te trad males are differentially
attractive to women, mostly younger and naive women.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
How does the woman even begin to detect or notice
the difference?

Speaker 2 (02:41):
The Number one health and Wellness podcast, Jay said.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Us, Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place
that you come to become the happier, healthier, and more healed.
Today's guest is someone that I've wanted to talk to
for over six 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

(03:07):
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. Dr Jordan B. Peterson, author, psychologist,
online educator and professor at the University of Toronto. The
Peterson podcast frequently tops the charts in the education category,

(03:29):
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 hands selected professors from top universities
around the world. It's received an incredible amount of acclaim already.
If you haven't checked it out, makes you check it
out after this episode. Jordan has written three books, Maps

(03:51):
of Meaning and academic work presenting a new, scientifically grounded
theory of religious and political belief, and the best selling
Twelve Rules for Life one of my favorite books, and
Beyond Order, which have sold more than seven million copies.
And Jordan's fourth book, We Who Wrestle with God, will
be released this November. Please welcome to On Purpose, Dr

(04:13):
Jordan B. Peterson. Jordan, it's great to honestly finally be
with you. As I was saying to you, I was
kindly introduced by my dear friend Lewis House to Michayla
around six years ago, and that's when this conversation started.
So I really appreciate you making the time and.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
I'm being forward to it. Yeah, and I appreciate the invitation.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
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 at work,
whether it's online, they feel like they're in a space
where they can't become more they at least from their perspective.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Well, I think some of that's actually a technical problem,
and 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 comments sections and

(05:19):
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

(05:43):
have free reign 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 a very toxic combination. And then the anonymity as well,
like we know perfectly well from a vast array of

(06:04):
psychological experiences that normal people anonymized are much more likely
to let the negative part of their character have free reign.
And so I really see this as a technical problem
is that societies and psyches are always threatened by what

(06:26):
they call the dark tetrad personality proclivities, narcissism, machiavelianism, 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

(06:49):
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

(07:13):
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

(07:35):
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

(07:59):
you might say, rather it was free. It's like HM
free A. If it's free, you're the product. And if
it's free, there's zero 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

(08:20):
psychopaths come to dominate because they can take it. It's
not free because you're devoting your attention A and attention
is valuable and the bad actors can take advantage of
your attention and pay zero price. Well, if you set
up a system where actors can take advantage of your
attention for zero price, the psychopaths are going to dominate.
So one of the things we might hypothesize, I don't

(08:42):
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 take the responsibility
of identifying the small number of people who will repetitively

(09:07):
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 immature psychopaths. Like,

(09:28):
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 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

(09:49):
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

(10:10):
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

(10:31):
in a negative direction by the predatory psychopaths.

Speaker 1 (10:34):
Do you believe that things are as divided as they see?

Speaker 2 (10:39):
No, I know they're not. They're speaking with one of
my friends today, 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 fifty that eighty
five percent of Americans agree on. They're very foundational things. No,
I don't believe it at all. I think that they're

(11:00):
is a fringe of the dark tet tread types who
are radically stirring the pot and that the algorithms and
the anonymity and the costless nature of the communication is
facility enabling them. Yeah, and it's extremely dangerous.

Speaker 1 (11:22):
How do we not let the average mind, how do
we not let ourselves become consumed by believing that is
reality when that's all we're explaining that.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
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'd be useful for
people to familiarize themselves with the symptoms of what's called
cluster B psychopathology, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, psychopathy, antisocial personality,

(11:56):
histrionic personality, to know who those people are 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.

(12:17):
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. So and that's a big problem because
the last thing you want to do if you're truly
empathic is enable the sadists, right, and there's no shortage

(12:39):
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 tetre traits.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
Is there a way that we can affect that at
more of a root level so that there's a oh.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
I think that one of the 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 want to click
on that and look through what the troll demons have

(13:17):
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

(13:40):
with that is that for every one in ten thousand
brave anonymous whistleblowers, there's nine nine hundred and ninety nine
sadistic macuabellions, 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 trouble maker.

(14:03):
So I think that would be And then the other issue,
it probably is cost. Like free. First of all, freeze
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 and well that's the next thing. You're
also paying with your identity and all your behavioral data, right,

(14:26):
and so none of that's free, and so that's an illusion.
And I think one of the things we have observed
with Peterson Academy, because the social interactions there are very
positive and pretty much universally so 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

(14:50):
just that you can't produce one hundred 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 eighty percent of the
bad actors just by not making it free. So no
one knows, right. This is why I have sympathy, let's say,

(15:12):
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

(15:35):
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 just sat with
one of my friends here actually this morning. This is
Greg Hurwitz I was telling you about. And he's done
some forensic investigations, first of all, indicating how much of

(15:56):
the troll activity on social media networks is fine 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 twenty twenty bad

(16:18):
actors on Twitter like seriously malevolent people who are working
to cause trouble full time. They can punch way above
their weight, way above their weight.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Not good and good, There's no saving them. I couldn't
be more excited to share something truly special with all
you tea lovers out there. And even if you don't
love tea, if you love refreshing, rejuvenating, refueling sodas that
are good for you, listen to this RADI and I
poured our hearts into creating June Sparkling Tea with adaptogens

(16:51):
for you because we believe in nurturing your body and
with every sip you'll experience calmness of mind, a refreshing vitality,
and a burst of brightness to your day. Juni is
infused with adaptogens that are amazing natural substances that act
like superheroes for your body to help you adapt to
stress and find balance in your busy life. Our super

(17:13):
five blend of these powerful ingredients include green tea, ushwaganda, acirolla, cherry,
and Lion's made mushroom and these may help boost your metabolism,
give you a natural kick of caffeine, combat stress, pack
your body with antioxidants, and stimulate brain function even better.
Juni has zero sugar and only five calories per can.

(17:36):
We believe in nurturing and energizing your body while enjoying
a truly delicious and refreshing drink. So visit Drinkjuni dot
com today to elevate your wellness journey and use code
on Purpose to receive fifteen percent off your first order.
That's drink Jauni dot com and make sure you use

(17:56):
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Speaker 2 (18:35):
Well The CLUSTERB psychopathologies are notoriously resistant to psychotherapeutic intervention.
I mean, 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 dead serious about this, they're likely

(18:55):
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 not a word of exaggeration.

(19:16):
I had some pretty pretty unpleasant child molesting psychopaths, for example,
in my clinical practice, and the one that I remember
most particularly was unbelievably good at putting himself forward as
a pillar of the devoted, misunderstood pillar of the community.
It was just his constant refrain. Absolutely unteachable and antisocial

(19:39):
personality is notoriously resistant to psychotherapeutic intervention. It's the same
with histrionic, borderline, narcissistic, unbelievably stable personality trait.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
What's your aim and potential target with an individual like that,
like where could your practice even take.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Well, what I did try when I had those people well,
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 don't know if you noticed their buddy, but you know,

(20:18):
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

(20:39):
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

(21:02):
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 one extremely stupid mistake and ended
up seriously punished for it. Okay, so let's just put

(21:23):
those people off the table. We can ignore them. One
percent of the criminals commit sixty five percent 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? Know, the standard penelogical theory is that part

(21:46):
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 one 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

(22:06):
it has very little to do with rehabilitation and a
lot to do with age. You know, the male crime
curve spikes at fifteen, 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 return to something
approximating normal behavior, usually by the time of twenty four

(22:28):
or twenty five, 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.

(22:51):
I don't think so. And they're also generally a very, very,
very very You need a lot of very to make
that right, very difficult population to work with, and you
do that at your peril.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Well, we know this because one of the things we know,
for example, is so the dark tet trad males are
differentially attractive to women, but mostly younger and naive women. Okay,
So why Well, the typical dark tet trad type is
very confident and not anxious. Okay, So why would that

(23:39):
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 can be more attracted to
the dark TETDRAD types, especially when they're young. And then
there's the addition complication that the even more pathological dark

(24:04):
tetrat types are very good at appealing to empathy by
making claims of victimization. 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 Hey.
Robert hare was the first clinical psychologist who really delved
into psychopathy and non clinical psychopathy, and he recorded two

(24:27):
hundred conversations with 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,

(24:52):
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 I'd be thinking, Okay, well,
I'm going to get this guy to smile more right,
I'm going to see if I can I'm going to
see which lies I can get him to swallow, because
then i'd be testing you, let's say, for your gullibility.

(25:13):
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, 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 then well, and

(25:36):
then add to that the fact that I've practiced that
for thirty years and that maybe I'm as smart as
you are, or possibly smarter, right, I mean, it depends
on the situation.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
But how does a woman even begin to detect or
notice the difference.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
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
one 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 like the dating apps
and that sort of thing, there are there are complete

(26:11):
open play playing ground for the psychopathic types. 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

(26:38):
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? All right, So that's what we've been
experimenting with for sixty years. Okay. Well, one reason is
that hormonal birth control alters female's perceptions. So women on

(27:00):
the pill don't like masculine men as much. And what
that's done to us politically and sociologically, no one 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,

(27:21):
monogamous relationships, and there are men who are more committed
to short term, hedonistic, pleasure seeking relationships. All right, 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, machiavelian, and sadistic. Right, So, one

(27:50):
of the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution is that
the freed up women have been delivered to the psychopathic men, right,
And it'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 is plummeted.
We know that people are much less likely to get married.

(28:11):
How much of that is a consequence of the destabilization
of the reproductive pattern by hormone birth controls. No one 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

(28:32):
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 their mind,
you would never recover. And I'm not saying that lightly.
It's not pleasant, Like the worst of terrible people are

(28:53):
so bad. I'm not making this up. Most people who
have most 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

(29:15):
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 afterwards, assuming you
managed to put yourself back together at all. So this
is not and it's many of those people too that
have free reign online. It's not a good thing.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
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 have a at least not
that I know 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

(29:59):
join community, 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 acidly. Yeah, it isn't as
a which stories. By the way, that's a good observation.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
I mean. One of the things I've realized in one
of the themes that is developed in this new book
is the notion that so 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

(30:41):
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.

(31:02):
So in the dream, your implicit identity reveals itself, but
not entirely coherently and not entirely verbally. If you take
a dream and you interpret it, if you have 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

(31:27):
what you'd hope is that what you're actually pursuing pre
consciously 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 the same thing. That's an optimal situation, that's the

(31:49):
pursuit of something like integrity, say in moral development, maybe
in psychotherapy, 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

(32:09):
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,

(32:30):
the atheist types tend to belief in God says, 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 used. But that's
a very it's a dismissive parody of the phenomena. It's

(32:51):
not a reasonable approach because the realm of religious conceptualization
is far more sophisticated than that parody would indicate. Like
I mean, 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

(33:13):
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 Yahwa, and it's a very interesting offer. And I

(33:36):
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

(33:57):
he could want is already at hand. And it actually
takes Abraham seventy 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.

(34:20):
So it's like a quest story. 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

(34:44):
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 impel you out into
the world and why bother? Well, God tells Abraham something
very specific. He says, if you abide by the voice

(35:06):
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 self contemptuous, they're vicious. There's all sorts

(35:29):
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 that was true, that might be
good enough to motivate you right to think that's okay,

(35:50):
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 clambering for status, or you can be less cynical

(36:14):
and you could say, well, we're wired such that we appreciate,
do 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 two.

(36:35):
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 two 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

(36:57):
will you have those first two 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 nothing selfish

(37:18):
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'll have a reputation that's esteemed and deserved.

(37:39):
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 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,

(38:04):
I think that's right. 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

(38:26):
there be some intrinsic conflict between the force that moves
us forward, and the force that brings people together, why
not assume that they exist together in a kind of harmony.
I mean, we're adapted to the social world anyways. That's
one 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

(38:48):
Abraham decides to do this is so cool when you
understand it, is that So imagine you know this in
your own life. Ame 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

(39:09):
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

(39:31):
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 him upward towards a
higher and higher and more integrated form of being. Right,
he's the redeemer of cities at one point, and there's
nothing in that that doesn't seem accurate to me psychologically. So,

(39:53):
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 things. Abraham is the first real individual
in the Western canon, and the stories very it's very
psychologically astute once you understand the basic reference, once you understand,
for example, that sacrifice at least in part, means dispensing

(40:15):
with something you once valued but has now, say, become
an impediment, and so well. So that's a little bit
more a description of the domains of thought that I've
been wandering in. No.

Speaker 1 (40:29):
I deeply appreciate the way you're analyzing and observing a
religious text that can often be seen as a story,
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 bugger Ghita, which is
the text of the East, and it's similar. There's a

(40:50):
conversation between the divine Krishna or God with Argin, who's
an archer who has lost all self belief and self
esteem because he's had to fight his family.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
He's an archer. Yes, you know, sin means to miss
the target. Oh yeah, it's a it's an archery term.
And and and that notion of sin has that archery
connection in multiple different languages. And so it's the same
theme that you're describing. And the reason for that is
an archer hits the target right, So to hit the
target accurately is to pursue the divine most appropriately. So

(41:23):
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 want to hit the target dead center. Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
And in the beginning of the text, his bo is
slipping from his hands because he's he's feeling sweaty, he's
feeling nervous, he's feeling anxiety. Right, and therefore he turns
to God for instruction and guidance.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
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 Five,

(42:07):
in one of the classic Big five personality descriptive processes tests,
self consciousness is a facet of neuroticism. 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

(42:30):
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 exactly how do
you continue to maintain your care for yourself. The medication

(42:52):
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

(43:14):
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 it's not about you.
It's about the dynamic of the conversation, and you can

(43:34):
bring everybody along for the ride. But one of the
benefits of that is you won't be self conscious, so
your hands won't sweat, you won't miss your grip on
the bow, you won't aim wrong.

Speaker 1 (43:45):
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 a 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

(44:07):
my life feels meaningless. I feel lost. I've v stopped.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
Yeah, because I just don't see it. That's well, that's
and see is the right metaphor there. So the ancient Egyptians,
one of their God's Horus was the god of the
open eye, and the Mesopotamian god Marduk, who is a
savior figure whom the emperor should model himself after, was
also he had eyes all the way around his head,

(44:31):
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 one of the things I try
to do in this new technology we're developing with essay,

(44:53):
but also as a theme in We Who Wrestle with
God is to point out that you can learn to
wor So, for example, when I was dealing with depressed
people in my clinical practice, and this is a pretty
standard behavioral approach, is one 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

(45:17):
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 one of the things typically
is depressed people will isolate themselves because they think they

(45:39):
don't want to 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

(46:01):
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

(46:24):
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 loath
to even ask that question because they may find, for example,
that the thing that compels them forward isn't the thing

(46:46):
their father, 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 going to 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, all right,

(47:09):
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 act of
and attentive watches they're alert. Meditation can foster that, right

(47:30):
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 micro manifestations.
You know, it's not going to necessarily announce itself like
Gandalf announced himself to the Hobbit. It's going to be
subtle things bother you. That's part of your adventure. Like

(47:55):
there's going to 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 want to have
any problems. It's like, no, you actually probably want to
have some serious problems that you can contend with that

(48:16):
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 understand that that's how it works first, but then
also to understand them in more detail you can understand.
You can start to come to understand that by understanding
your own temperament. So for example, if you're high in neuroticism,

(48:39):
you're going to be more concerned with safety and security.
If you're agreeable, you're going to be relationship focused. If
you're disagreeable, you're going to be competitive. If you're conscientious,
you're going to be interested in order and productivity. If
you're open, you're going to be interested in aesthetics and
ideas well. Right there, you've got a bit of a
map of the territory of calling and call conscience that

(49:00):
you're going to occupy. And so you have a nature,
you know, and 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 too sophisticated religious systems of thought worldwide,
is that there's an autonomy in what calls you and

(49:24):
what calls to your conscience. Right 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. It's an extremely

(49:46):
interesting conceptualization, you know, and you see that implicitly in
quest stories like The Lord of the Rings of the Hobbit.
You know, you have this ordinary guy who's protected. That
would be the Hobbit 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

(50:08):
call out of ordinariness, and the voice of that call
is associated with as definition, 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 purpose of life isn't something like secure comfort.

(50:34):
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 one 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

(50:57):
a false adventure, political activist of a destructive sort.

Speaker 1 (51:01):
The false adventure seems to be so alluring and intoxicating
in so many ways, and naturally, in the case that
you're sharing distracting as well. How does one avoid the
allurements of a false adventure while they're still pursuing that's a.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
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,

(51:41):
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 want to be alone,
you want to be a parasitical psychopath, Like, what's your
goal here? And so the problem, part of the problem
with just call, let's say, is it can become short

(52:01):
term and it can to entice you into false microadventures
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 woul account for its popularity

(52:22):
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 even adventurous that violate what the
propagation of the adventure across time, you know, And you

(52:45):
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

(53:06):
a means to enhance their economic standing or their social standing. Well,
what's the problem with that, Well, they're not going to
get invited back. While you do that twenty times, you're
done right, Okay. So one of the ways of thinking
about this, if you're trying to understand what constitutes morality technically,

(53:26):
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. That's what you have with a friend, and
there's a pattern to that obviously, a pattern of reciprocity,
a pattern of mutual aid, unless it's a pathological friendship,

(53:48):
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,

(54:11):
Like one of the things you can think about. For example,
there's this game that economists play behavior economists. So this
is how the game works. You pick two people and
you say to one of them, I'm going to give
you one hundred dollars and you have to split it
with this person. If they accept the offer, then you
get the hundred and you pay them. But if they
refuse the offer, neither of you get anything. So that's

(54:33):
the game. Now, if you play that across cultures, what
you find is that regardless of socioeconomic status, people offer
fifty percent. Okay, now this violates the tenets of classical economics,
which views people as self maximizers, because if I'm only
going to play a game with you once, I should

(54:55):
take ninety nine dollars and give you one, and you
should take one, because what do you want zero or
do you want one? But that isn't what people do.
They split it fifty to fifty. Now then you might
ask why, well, you don't play one off games with people.
So imagine you're doing this publicly. Okay, Now everyone watches

(55:16):
you and they see that you you're a fair player, Well,
then they're going to 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 sixty forty 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,

(55:37):
that's part of that abrahamic adventure. If you get a
reputation for bending over backwards to be reciprocal, people are
going to 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

(55:58):
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
they're winning one game when you never get invited to
play again. It's much better to be invited to play
one hundred games. And that means you're going to have

(56:19):
to be the sort of person that other people are
lining up to play with. And that's the basis. That's
part of the basis of a genuine ethic. And I
think raise to a 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

(56:42):
order and more mature ethic, and it's real, it's super real.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
Yeah. That reminds me of the kind of insidious traits
that we also see presence. If you look at the
examples of the ones that you just gave of the Hobbit,
like photo bag ins or you look at Harry Potter,
both of them also experience the envy of their call
to adventure. So there are others who envied their call

(57:07):
to adventure. And often you find that again, while we
don't have all call to adventure, we may envy someone else's.

Speaker 2 (57:13):
Yeah, well, that's also a very central observation, I would say.
So the first story in the Genesis, in the Old Testament,
the first story about actual human beings that are in
history is the story of canaan Abel. Because Adam and
Eve or well, they're made directly by God. So the

(57:34):
first two humans in history are canaan Abel. It's a
story of resentment and envy, right, And it's exactly It's
exactly what you just laid out. Is that Able aims
up and makes the proper sacrifices, right say, in the
Abrahamic sense, and because of that, everything he does works

(57:58):
and 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

(58:21):
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 a false of non existent adventure or false adventures.
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

(58:45):
in and that's happened over and over in human history. Yeah,
it's really it's brutal, and it's so terrifying that that's
the you know, you could argue that that Cain versus
Able narrative is in many ways the fundamental narrative of
what would you say? It's the fundamental battle of the

(59:06):
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, right,

(59:29):
and this is one paragraph that story, right, It's like
twelve lines long. It's a stunning miracle of compression.

Speaker 1 (59:38):
Yeah, how does one transform that? If one is experiencing
envy of another's call to adventure or envy of another
one's path or success or reward from God, the universe,
wherever it's coming from, how does one transform, purify and
rid themselves of that envy?

Speaker 2 (59:58):
What does one doing well? 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

(01:00:20):
have lots of things to be fortunate about.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
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 or are almost negligible, and
there's so many good things happening to me all the
time around me that are invisible to me, maybe because
of my arrogance that I'm just blind to them. So

(01:00:44):
the practice of gratitude, that's a standard religious exercise, I
would say, across the domains of felid religious systems. What
else humility? So the thing about that one 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 Able fails, he learns, And

(01:01:06):
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 fifty encounters with

(01:01:26):
women you're attracted to, and every single one 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,

(01:01:51):
you know, and it really does depend on your initial
stance with regard to the situation. One 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.

(01:02:14):
And that's a hell of a thing to take on
to 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. But
there's almost no failure, regardless of how arbitrary, that you
can't learn from. And there isn't anything better that you

(01:02:34):
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's also a bulwark against hopelessness, because you know,
even if it was ninety five percent situational and five

(01:02:57):
percent you, if you adjusted that five percent, 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

(01:03:18):
that also gives you something to do, because man trying
to rectify your own insufficiency. That's a 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.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
It that way working on your own insufficiencies.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
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

(01:03:54):
side of your insufficiencies are the opportunities that growth in
those dimensions would represent. That's a good way of looking
at the world.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
What's the insufficiency that lets us down the most? Is
there one that stands above all all?

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
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.

(01:04:30):
First of all, it's 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 could be very painful. But so pride,

(01:04:55):
that's one that's that's a major one. He 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,
so at the expense of the general future. And so

(01:05:16):
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 one another,
so that they can be they can find their gratification

(01:05:37):
in the long run in a manner that's commensurate with
the needs and wants of other people. And it takes
twenty 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 upward? And why why is it better? Well,

(01:06:01):
even if the goal is gratification, if one strategy allows
twenty repetitions of gratification and the other strategy offers one
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. Yeah, right, right, right, right,

(01:06:25):
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

(01:06:45):
also extremely practically valuable. You know, we were talking before
this began about theness about the utility that you found
in putting together around you a very functional team. Well,
a functional team is composed of people playing this game
and all doing it fuleheartedly and voluntarily. Yeah, Well, so

(01:07:06):
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

(01:07:27):
it means. That's especially true if the world isn't a
zero 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.

Speaker 1 (01:07:45):
I feel often, going back to your point on pride,
I feel often our views of how pride shows its
face quite superficial, in that we think of things like
ego and pride as bravado and arrogance and showing off,
and those are quite immature, superficial. They're true, but there

(01:08:10):
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, one 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,

(01:08:30):
a chat rumor, and 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, whatever it
may be, is better than Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
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, 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

(01:09:17):
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 the cheap way. Oh, it's

(01:09:38):
very useful. It's like, well, you might have a point,
you know, I mean this is actually one 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

(01:09:59):
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 find frustrating and 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,

(01:10:19):
don't you want a solution, And the women, who often
can't articulate this, think, well, yeah, but will neither of
us know what the problem is yet? And so the
initial stages in much coupled 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

(01:10:44):
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 implement it. But that's the case for well,

(01:11:06):
that's the case often for yourself. If you're upset or
any dialogue, it's like you want to listen long enough
so you actually understand what the problem is. And that's
a great benefit to you, because now the cost is,
if you're wrong, you're going to have to give something up,
and that's annoying and difficult and complicated and can be humiliating.

(01:11:30):
And then you might say, well, why bother. An answer
to that's straightforward. It's so you don't make the same
stupid mistake again, 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

(01:11:51):
to upset anyone emotionally. Well, if you're speaking about something
that's foundational, 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 going to have to undergo a partial

(01:12:11):
death and rebirth. Well, that 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

(01:12:34):
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 you might be the one
with the problem. I mean, that's a terrible thing to contemplate.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
But 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 than a I don't

(01:13:08):
mean in a watered down way. I mean in a
way that is not agitating but true, right impact.

Speaker 2 (01:13:15):
Well, definitely. I mean you don't want to 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 one 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

(01:13:36):
at the very narrow level of analysis, semantically what you
said was true. But in the broader context, now you're
just this sadist. And so there are technical approaches that
to some degree that are coded in the laws. So,
for example, if you're defending yourself, you're entitled to use
something approximating minimal necessary force, and that's a good maxim

(01:13:58):
for communication. Know, you want to deliver a corrective message
in the most constrained possible manner. There's ways of doing this.
So for example, if you if you have an employee
and they've made a mistake, you want to bring up
the mistake primarily so it's not repeated. And so one

(01:14:19):
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,

(01:14:42):
I have confidence, for example, that you'll rectify this error.
And people make mistakes, and 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 you've made a mistake
and you're guilty as hell and tearing yourself apart, you

(01:15:03):
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

(01:15:25):
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

(01:15:46):
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 words 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 going to be a certain falseness about that the

(01:16:06):
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 ten times,
and that might be annoying to you and them and
even false, but you can practice it and it's worth practicing.

Speaker 1 (01:16:26):
Yes, Yeah, 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 three step method that the
first thing you do is you share that we have
high standards here because you don't want to live in
a world of low standards. You don't want to drop

(01:16:47):
your company's standards. Right, you're a mind. 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.

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
Yeah, I believe it.

Speaker 1 (01:16:58):
I see it for you, because of course still at
the company.

Speaker 2 (01:17:01):
Throwing some evidence in their direction would be useful in
that here's some things you know that I remember that
you really did well.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
Correct that showed me you can get 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 consequence, here's a rectification. And I love
that because we allow people to rise to high standards
as opposed to hold them to them. And I think
there's a difference between that in how society is functioning

(01:17:28):
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 in this conversation with Abraham,
is like encouraging Abraham to rise, not just pointing at
a standard that'shu well.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
This is one 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

(01:18:06):
the divine is this unattainable, infinite standard against which you're
always going to fall short. That's 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 want to set a standard
that pulls the child upward towards further development, but you
want to put it within the range of their grasp

(01:18:29):
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

(01:18:52):
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.

(01:19:13):
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 going to let you get away with any deviation
from that. That would be finally counterproductive. That's not care, right,

(01:19:35):
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

(01:19:56):
because you need that discriminating judgment, which can be quite harsh.
It's like, no, that up to standards there, buddy, But
that failure isn't emblematic of your core self. Right. The
part of you that I really want to communicate is
with is the part that's saving 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

(01:20:16):
aiming up, and that's an interesting basis for a relationship.
It's like, I'm not going to accept everything you do
now that doesn't mean I'm going to arbitrary arbitrarily judge
it or dispense with you in the case of failure.
But our deal has got to be something like, we're
trying to make things better, and so I'm going to
be on the side of you that's trying to make
things better and help you discriminate that part within you

(01:20:39):
from the part that might be envious and aiming down
and being destructive.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
What still gives you hope? Jordan, and all of this
that we're discussing today, is there anything that makes you
feel up?

Speaker 2 (01:20:50):
Oh? Well, 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 nineteen sixties.
Absolute poverty is being restricted around the world at a
rate that's miraculously inconceivable. I mean, before things destabilized to

(01:21:15):
some degree over the last five years, the un projections
was or that we could eradicate absolute poverty by twenty
thirty five. That's I mean, that's a huge improvement. I mean,
these communication technologies they enable well. With Peterson Academy, for example,
we figure we can offer people a high quality university

(01:21:38):
level education for under two thousand dollars 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 two years ago. I mean, there's tendencies in both directions,
but I see, I was just in Newzbekistan that was

(01:22:01):
extremely interesting. I met a man there who's an industrialist.
His enterprises comprised fifteen percent of Uzbekistan's GDP. He refurbished
four hundred thousand square meters of post Soviet factory floor space,
and they're manufacturing everything you can possibly imagine, marble tiles,

(01:22:23):
building materials, fridges, microwaves, air conditioners, golf carts, hospitals, hotels,
high rises. Uzbekistan under the Soviets was barely functional. Everyone
was raising cotton. They drained Lake Bakal to irrigate the
cotton fields. That was the only industrial development they got

(01:22:45):
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. 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

(01:23:11):
see no reason at all that the future couldn't be
one of unlimited abundance. There's going to have to be
a transformation and 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

(01:23:33):
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, right right,
So yeah, I'm optimistic fundamentally.

Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
Do you believe that that is that going to be
something you're teaching at the Pizzason Academy, that primary thing? That?

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
Definitely? Yeah, definitely yeaheah Because to me, I agree with
you that that.

Speaker 1 (01:23:56):
I always wondered how business school was across the world.
College is how at universities there was no class on
proper character. It just it amuses me that.

Speaker 2 (01:24:07):
Well, and there's no classes even on the relationship between
character 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,

(01:24:30):
it's a high trust society. No one steals, an envy
is looked down upon, right, ambition is fostered, and so
it's 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

(01:24:52):
precondition for anything approximating I hate to use the words
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 well, first of all, compared to
what you know, dynastic poverty, because that's generally the alternative,

(01:25:16):
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 one
that should be used because really what we're talking about

(01:25:38):
is free exchange of goods and services. Who's opposed to that?
You want to be able to have a different job,
You want to have some choice? Do you want to
actually be able to own the things you purchase? Do
you want to be able to purchase things? Do you
want to have a choice? Who says no to that?
No one, but no one. Young people in particular aren't

(01:25:59):
taught that. Well, that's the capitalism that you're criticizing. The
fact you get to own something and move your labor
voluntarily from one place to another. You're going to oppose that?
Are you in favor of? What of top down authoritarian
planning where everyone starves miserably? So, and you know, a
lot of that's we've been removed from the world since

(01:26:20):
the since the wall fell, and people are much richer
than they've ever been, 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 tried to outline in this in
this new book, is that I think that we're at

(01:26:42):
the point where are scientific discoveries and feels 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.

(01:27:05):
You know, 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 the I'm so excited about this.
I mean, I got a hand to my daughter and

(01:27:26):
her husband. They've done a bang up job of putting
this together. The courses are really beautiful, they're very 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

(01:27:49):
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 table very soon. A radical expansion of
the curriculum. We're going to predicate it on I think
something approximating the Chicago Great Books tradition. So we're imagining

(01:28:09):
something like the selection of great books that would characterize
a high quality education in the humanities one course, something
like a minimum of one course per great book. I
can't see any reason we can't do that. We have
an excellent stable of professors, all of them want to
continue working with us. I think that's true without exception

(01:28:30):
so far. And I'm able to make contact with great
lectures all the time and to keep discovering them, and
so yeah, I've been tweeting out funny ads about being
at the most progressive university in the world. Well, the
progressives hope for universal education at something approximating zero cost.
Well that's what we've got. It's open to anyone, and

(01:28:55):
it's no one comes out with debt. So that's seems
pretty progressive to me.

Speaker 1 (01:29:01):
Absolutely so.

Speaker 2 (01:29:02):
And I'm very excited about the translation possibilities because AI
systems are getting pretty good at that. So we'll have
our lectures be able to lecture in other languages using
their own voice and modify the videos 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,

(01:29:23):
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 want to 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

(01:29:43):
to think. I'm so 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. Looks fun, and
I think were able to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:29:57):
I mean, you're already doing it.

Speaker 2 (01:29:58):
So we've got thirty thousand students and the system seems
to be working, so we've got proof of We've got
good proof of concept.

Speaker 1 (01:30:05):
Now absolutely or congratulations Jordan. It's brilly honestly brilliant and
can't wait to enroll myself? Are they doing that? Straight
after this?

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
Good?

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
And Jordan. We end every on Purpose episode with a
final five and these questions have to be answered in
a one word to one sentence.

Speaker 2 (01:30:21):
Oh no, maximum, So how long.

Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
A sentence you you define it? You're teaching everyone how
to write and think. I'll go with your definition. Question one,
what is the best life advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 2 (01:30:34):
How the truth or at least don't lie?

Speaker 1 (01:30:36):
Number two? What is the worst advice you ever heard
or received? It's all about you? Number three? How would
you define your current purpose?

Speaker 2 (01:30:49):
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.

(01:31:11):
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, not 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.

Speaker 1 (01:31:31):
Have you spent a significant time with Ilo Moscow. Has
it been more time?

Speaker 2 (01:31:35):
I met him four times, so we've probably spent a
total of about seven hours together. Yeah, and I would
say I've walked away from each encounter more impressed with
him as a character. In terms of his character, I
mean you have to be mouth open and amazement with

(01:31:56):
regards to his technological and managerial entrepreneur 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 voyage is symbolize, right, He's it's

(01:32:18):
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
in so far as a great story is practical. So
I remember the Apollo voyages. They were very motivating to people,

(01:32:41):
you know, as an indication of what humanity was capable
of doing. And certainly Musk is playing that out on
the technological side.

Speaker 1 (01:32:49):
So beautiful, Okay, Question of a four, how do we
scale trust.

Speaker 2 (01:32:55):
By attempting to practice honesty in your own life? Yeah,
and by rewarding it among the people that you interact with.
It's very useful to understand that you have the opportunity
to point out other people who you interact with regularly
what they're doing that is positive and good, and that

(01:33:17):
that there's nothing in that that isn't productive.

Speaker 1 (01:33:22):
Yeah, well, said absolutely. Fifth and final question, we asked
this to every guest who's ever been on the show.
If you could create one law that everyone in the
world had to follow, what would it be?

Speaker 2 (01:33:33):
Don't follow stupid rules? What constitutes a stupid rule? Now
that's the hard part of the problem, isn't it. I think? Well,
I had that conversation with my kids because it is
something I told them when they went to school. I said, look,
there's going to be reasonable rules at your school, and
there are going to be unreasonable rules, and I don't

(01:33:55):
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 hot. Yes, Yes,

(01:34:18):
it's also the difference between activism, let's say, in civil disobedience,
because if it's civil disobedience, you pay the price. If
it's activism, someone else does. Ohful WHOA.

Speaker 1 (01:34:28):
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 BPCE, And 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

(01:34:50):
I feel I could have talked to you for another
three 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 Yeah, that would be good.

Speaker 2 (01:35:03):
I'd love to do. It'd be, it'd be, it'd be.
We did a little bit of that, we got we
got into the overlap between the narrative domains. That would
be 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

(01:35:25):
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 too. I mean, I've never
delved deeply, almost without exception, into a religious tradition without
finding stories that were like of incalculable value.

Speaker 1 (01:35:45):
Absolutely. Yeah, well I'm happy to save wherever possible.

Speaker 2 (01:35:48):
Yeah, yeah, well so yeah, that would be a good
thing to thank you, thank you so much. Good to
talk past.

Speaker 1 (01:35:53):
Such a pleasure. Honestly, if you love this episode, you
love my interview with doctor Gabo Matte on under standing
your trauma and how to heal emotional wounds to start
moving on from the past.

Speaker 2 (01:36:06):
Everything in nature grows only where it's vulnerable. So a
tree doesn't grow where it's hard and thick, does it.
It goes where it's soft and green and vulnerable.

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