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 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 can 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 psychologist turned culture warrior, Dr.
Jordan Peterson. The men who prefer short-term mating opportunities are psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, 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 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 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 one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty.
Jay Shetty. The one, 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 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 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 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.
Dr. 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 three books, Maps of Meaning and Academic Work, presenting a new scientifically grounded theory of religious and political belief, and the best-selling 12 Rules for Life, one of my favorite books, and Beyond Order, which have sold more than 7 million copies. And Jordan's fourth book, We Who Wrestle With God, will be released this November.
Please welcome to On Purpose, Dr. 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 Howes to Michaela around six years ago, and that's when this conversation started. So I really appreciate you making the time.
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 at work, whether it's online.
They feel like they're in a space where they can't become more, at least from their perspective?

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 seemed 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 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 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 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 hmm free eh 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 psychopaths come to dominate because they can take 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 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 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 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 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 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. I was 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 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 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 enabling them.
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 all 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'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, histrionic personality, to know who those people are. 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

want to do if you're truly empathic is enable the theists, 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 tetra traits.
Is there a way that we can affect that at more of a root level so that those well 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 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 one 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 be, 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.
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 one of the things we have observed with Peterson Academy, because the social interactions there are very positive and pretty much universally so, hopefully we'll 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 hundred troll accounts for nothing and do 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 one 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's approach is something like a radical free speech approach. But like 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 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 there's no saving them i couldn't be more excited to share something

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Head to jshetty.me and get yours today. Well, the cluster B 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 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. I had some 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, a devoted, misunderstood pillar of the community. 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 unbelievably stable personality trait. What's your aim and potential target with an individual like that? Like where could your practice even take? Well, what I 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 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 one extremely stupid mistake

Thank you. 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 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 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 20s and then they're less likely to re-offend. 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 it has very little to do with rehabilitation and a lot to do with age.
You know, 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 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 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. 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 one 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 can be more attracted to the dark tetra types, especially when they're young. And then there's the additional complication that the even more pathological dark tetra 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. 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 goal of the game. Like if I was doing that to you, 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. 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.
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 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, they're a complete open 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 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 60 years okay well one reason is that hormonal birth control alters females perception

Thank you. All right, so that's what we've been experimenting with for 60 years.
Okay, well, one 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 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 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 analyzed their personalities and you took these men and analyzed their personalities.

Well, that's been done.

The men who prefer short-term mating opportunities are psychopathic, narcissistic, Machiavellian, and sadistic.

Right.

So one 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 the reproductive pattern by hormonal birth control, 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 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 a look inside their mind, you would never recover. And I'm not saying that lightly.
It's not pleasant. The worst of terrible people are so bad.
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're, you will not be the same person afterward, assuming you managed to put yourself back together at all.
So this is not, and it's, it's many of those people too that have free reign 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 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... Implic isn't implicitly yeah it isn't as uh that's what stories by the way that's that's a good observation i mean one of the things i've realized and 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 impel you out into the world and why bother? Well, God 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 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 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.
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 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 That's the offer.
That's part two. So you're a 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 will you have those first two things, but it'll propagate across time. 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 of benefit to everyone else.
So there's 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'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 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 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 social 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 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 Abraham decides to do, this is so cool when you understand it, is that, so imagine, you know this in your own life, eh? 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 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. And it's an exciting thing to exciting thing to understand because it's, the Abrahamic story is the template for individual development.
That's a good way of thinking. But Abraham is the first real individual 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.
We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.
I would love to see that. We're on our way.
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Listen to Math & Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No, 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 Bhagavad Gita, which is the 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. You know, sin means to miss the target.
Oh, wow. Yeah, it's an archery term.
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 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.
And in the beginning of the text, his bow is slipping from his hands because 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, okay.

So, 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, 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 and anxious.
And that's technically the case. And so you might say, well, then what's the medication 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 it's not about you. It's about the dynamic of the conversation and you can 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.

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 because I just don't see it. And see is the right metaphor there.
So the ancient Egyptians, one 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 one of the things I try to do in this new technology we're developing with Essay, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 same is 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 so he had to watch and so and if you watch you see you can you can rectify your aim 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 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 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 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 start to come to understand that by understanding your own temperament. So for example, if you're high in neuroticism, 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 conscience that 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, to sophisticated religious systems of thought

worldwide, is that there's an autonomy in what calls you and 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 interesting conceptualization.
You see that implicitly in quest stories like The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. You have this ordinary guy who's protected, that would be the hobbit in the first book of Tolkien's 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, with the divine.
That's not a superstitious conceptualization. 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 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.
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 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 very good question. Well, I think conscience is a big part of that, 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 want to be alone? You want to be a parasitical psychopath? Like, what's your goal here? And so the 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 even adventurous that violate what? The propagation of the adventure across time. You know, 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 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.

Well,

you do that 20 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 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, 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 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 one of the things you can think about for example there's this game that economists play behavioral 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 a 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 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 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 take $99 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 50-50.
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 you and they see that 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 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 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 say to them, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose.
It matters how you play the game. And the kid thinks, what the hell do you mean? Of course it matters if I win.
Parents are usually not sophisticated enough to pursue that philosophically, but the right answer is, what good is there winning one game when you never get invited to play again? It's much better to be invited to play 100 hundred games and that means you're going to 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 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 and more mature ethic.
And it's real. It's super real.
We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill. PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one.
That's terrifying. That's fair.
Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E. We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down.
I would love to see that. We're on our way.
I hope so. PG&E electricity rates are now lower than they were last year.
Hear what other customers have to say and what PG&E is doing about it at pge.com slash open dash lines. Hey, y'all.
It's your girl, Cheekies, and I'm back with a brand new season of your favorite podcast, Cheekies and Chill. I'll be sharing even more personal stories with you guys.
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I'm going to tell you guys right now, I know my mother. And I know my mom had a very forgiving heart.
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Listen to Cheekies and Chill season four as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kristen Davis, host of the podcast, Are You a Charlotte? The incredible Cynthia Nixon joins me this week for a conversation filled with memories, lots of laughs, and even unexpected revelations and stories I didn't even know.
Like, Cynthia could have been Carrie? When I first read the script, they asked me to read for Carrie, as I think they asked you to read for Carrie. I did not know this.
Yes, they asked me to read for Carrie, right? And did you? I did. And they were like, yeah, not so much.
How that short hair came to be. So I was blonde, Kim was blonde, Sarah was blonde.
You were the only non-blonde. Right.
So they came to me and they said, we got too many blondes. Would you dye your hair red? Also, is she a Miranda? People would ask me, you know, are you, how are you like Miranda? And I would always say, we both feel confident about our brains.
But that's kind of where it ends. You can't miss this.
Listen to Are You a Charlotte on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, 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 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 two humans in history are Cain and Abel.
It's a story of resentment and envy. Right, and 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. So, that's another of the consequences, let's say, of non-existent adventure or false adventure, is 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 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? Right. one paragraph that story right it's like 12 lines long it's a stunning miracle of of uh compression yeah yeah how does 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? What does one do with envy? Well, part of what has historically constituted religious practice is an answer to that question.
the first would be uh 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 when people who have passed through extremely harrowing experiences they often learn It's like, oh, the sorts of things that I thought were terrible 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 the practice of gratitude, that's a standard religious exercise, I would say, across the domains of valid religious systems. What else? Humility.
So the thing about, 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 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 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. And it really does depend on your initial stance with regard to the situation.
One of the things 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. 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'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? That also gives you something to do because man, trying to rectify your own insufficiency, 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 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 one that stands above all elders? Pride. That's the classical answer from the Judeo-Christian perspective anyways.
Pride and arrogance, you know, that would be something like the presumption that you're right and that you're above it all, that you're on top. 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. So pride, that's one.
That's a major one. 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 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 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 a very complicated process of integration and self-regulation. And it is upward.
Why? Why is it better? Well, even if the goal is gratification, if one strategy allows 20 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. 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 good ethical question.
It's also extremely practically valuable. You were talking before this began 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 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 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. 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 those are quite immature, superficial. They're 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 one of which you pointed out earlier which was like i'm right you're wrong and this show up on a daily basis, whether it's a comment section, a chat room, 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 yours.
Yeah, 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 i mean 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 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 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 there okay so often what women find 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 when 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 implement it but that's that's the case for well 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. And then you might say, well, why bother? And the answer to that is 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 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 going to have to undergo a partial 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 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, 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 in a, I don't mean in a watered down way.
I mean, in a way that is not agitating, but truly impactful. 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've 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 nominally 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 the sadist.
And so, there are technical approaches to 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 want to deliver a corrective message in the most constrained possible manner there's there's doing this. So, for example, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 your company standards. So 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 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, a rectification. And I love that because we're allowed people to rise to high standards as opposed to hold them to them.
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 in this conversation with Abraham is like encouraging Abraham to rise, not just pointing at a standard that should be held.
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 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 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 going to 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 want to communicate 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 going to accept everything you do.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to 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 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? Is there anything that makes you feel optimistic? Oh, 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 1960s.
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 five years the u.n projections was were that we could eradicate absolute poverty by 2035 that's i mean that's a huge improvement i I mean, technologies they enable well with peterson academy for example we figure we can offer people a high quality university level education for under two thousand dollars and everywhere so like that's a 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 Uzbekistan. That was extremely interesting.
I met a man there who's an industrialist. His enterprises comprise 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, microwavesaves air conditioners golf carts hospitals hotels high

rises uzbekistan under the soviets was uh was barely functional everyone was raising cotton

they drained lake bakel 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

Thank you. the cotton fields, that was the only industrial development.
They got themselves 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 see no reason at all that the future couldn't be one 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 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.
Do you believe that that, is that going to be something you're teaching at the peterson academy that primary thing that definitely definitely yeah because to me i i agree with you that that i always wondered how at business schools across the world how at colleges how at universities there was no class on proper character it just it bem, no. It just, it bemuses me that.

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, it's a high trust society.
No one 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 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 one 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? 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? Like, who says no to that? No one. But no one, 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 one place to another.'re going to 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 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 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. We're trying to encourage to take maximal responsibility, to have an adventurous life, to pursue an ethical pathway, to tell the truth, and to educate themselves broadly and aesthetically.
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 to hand it to my daughter and 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 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 going to 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, one course, something like a minimum of one 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 want to 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.
Yeah, fun. It's fantastic.
I've been tweeting out funny ads about being 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 no one 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 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, 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.
It 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 to think. 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.
It's fun and I think we'll be able to do it. I mean, you're already doing it.
We've got 30,000 students and the system seems to be working. So we've got good proof of concept now.
Absolutely. Well, congratulations, Jordan.
It's honestly brilliant. And I 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 five. And these questions have to be answered in a one word to one sentence.
Oh, no. Maximum.
How long a sentence? You define it. You're teaching everyone how to write and think.
I'll put a lot of comments in.

I'll go with your definition.

All right, all right.

Question one, what is the best life advice

you've ever heard or received?

Tell the truth, or at least don't lie.

Number two, what is the worst advice

you've ever heard or received?

It's all about you.

Number three, how would you define your current purpose?

I think I'm doing, in my way, 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.
They say every treasure has a dragon. 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.
It might not be the kind of opportunity you would have wished for, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. So that's a good thing to know.
Have you spent a significant of time with Elon Musk or has it been more? I've 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 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 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.
Beautiful. Okay, question number four.
How do we scale trust 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 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.

Fifth and final question. We ask 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? Don't follow stupid rules. What constitutes a stupid rule? 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 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 subscribed 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.
Dr. 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 three hours about Eastern and Western religion and ideologies and the amount of stories that I had coming up in my mind to share back and forth. But we can just save that for another time.
Yeah, that would be good. I'd love to do that.
It'd be, we did a little bit of that. We got into the overlap between the narrative domains.
That would be good. I'd love to do that.
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, the narrative domains.
That would be really useful. And I loved it.
Yeah, I really loved it too. 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 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 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. Thank you so much.
Good to talk to you. Fantastic.
Such a pleasure, honestly. You bet.
If you love this episode, you'll love my interview with Dr. 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.