In this Mentor Me episode, host Evan Carmichael introduces Jordan Peterson as a source of high‑impact mindsets. Peterson delivers a wide‑ranging talk that begins with a stark quantification of how much time most people waste—four to six hours a day, equating to roughly $50,000 a year in lost earnings. He argues that eliminating wasted time could make individuals ten‑ to twenty‑fold more efficient, and that collective restraint from destructive behavior would amplify societal gains. He then outlines a practical exposure‑therapy method: rank personal fears, confront them incrementally (illustrated with the elevator example), and repeat until the fear’s physiological impact diminishes, leading to greater confidence. Peterson stresses the necessity of a daily routine and proper nutrition, noting that irregular sleep and inadequate food exacerbate anxiety. He explores a philosophical view of virtue, contrasting harmlessness with the idea that true virtue may require embracing a “controlled monster” archetype, citing heroes like Harry Potter and Batman. Finally, he describes an internal split he experiences while speaking— a critical observer versus the expressive self— and argues for aligning speech with one’s deepest truth, drawing on Carl Rogers’ concept of psychological coherence. The episode closes with Evan prompting viewers to reflect on the lessons and apply them to their lives.
Chapters
What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe that you have the ability to create something special that will change the planet. So to help you on your journey, I started the Mentor Me series, and the goal here is to try to hang around people who've done a lot more than us, who've achieved massive success, and hopefully by hanging around them a little bit longer, some of their mindsets, their attitudes, their beliefs, the way they see the world will seep into us to help us become the best version of ourselves. So today we're gonna learn from Jordan Peterson and some of his most amazing moments. Mentor me, Jordan.
My experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51% of our capacity. Something— I mean, you can think about this yourselves. I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste, or how many hours a week you waste. And the classic answer is something like 4 to 6 hours a day. You know, inefficient studying, watching things on YouTube that not only do you not wanna watch, that you don't even care about, that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done. That's probably 4 hours right there. Now, you think, well, that's 20, 25 hours a week, it's 100 hours a month, that's 2.5 full work weeks. It's half a year of work weeks per year. And if your time is worth $20 an hour, which is a radical underestimate, it's probably more like $50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages. If you're wasting 20 hours a week, you're wasting $50,000 a year. And you are doing that right now. And it's— because you're young, wasting $50,000 a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it, because I'm not gonna last nearly as long. And so if your life isn't everything it could be, you could ask yourself, well, what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you? You'd be who knows how much more efficient. 10 times more efficient. 20 times more efficient. That's the Pareto distribution. You have no idea how efficient efficient people get. It's completely— it's off the charts. Well, and if we all got our act together collectively, and stop making things worse, because that's another thing people do all the time. Not only do they not do what they should to make things better, they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or, or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package. If people stopped really, really trying just to make things worse, we We have no idea how much better they would get just because of that. You're actually tougher than you think. You never knew that. And maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility, because, you know, people play a role in their own demise, so to speak. When you had opportunity to go out and explore, or withdraw because you were afraid, you chose to withdraw because you were afraid. So it's not only that you were overprotected often, it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fa— fact that you were overprotected, and run back there whenever you had the opportunity. You know, so maybe you're a kid in the playground, right, and you're having some trouble with other kids, and you know in the back of your mind, "I should deal this with— deal with this myself," but you go and tell your mom, and get her to intervene. And you know that that's not right, you know that you're breaking the social contract, but it's easier, and so that's what you do. You run off to an authority figure, and hide behind the great father, right? Roughly speaking. Well, the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself. So then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40. So then you take people out, you say, well, what are you afraid of? Rank it from 1 to 10. So 10 is— make a list of 10 things you're afraid of. The least— the thing you're least afraid of, we'll call number 10. So we'll start with that. Okay, well, I'm afraid of elevators. Okay, well, let's, let's look at a picture of an elevator. "Let's have you imagine being in an elevator. Let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open." Because that's how you're responding to it, symbolically. Right? And you're gonna do that at the closest proximity you can manage. You find out, you go do that, it works. You're nervous as hell, especially from an anticipatory perspective. Shaking. You go out, you stop, you watch it happen. —and you actually calm down. You do that 10 times and it no longer bothers you. Well, what you've learned is that you didn't die. But more importantly than that, you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death. That's what you've learned. And then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and then you move a little closer, and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator from a symbolic perspective. It's a tomb, right? It's— it's— it's a place of enclosure and isolation. And you learn, "Hmm, turns out I can withstand that." And then you're much more together, much more confident. And that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that. I've seen this multiple times, is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and toughen them up, they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before. Stop doing the things that you know are wrong. That you could stop doing. Right? So it's a fairly— it's a fairly limited attempt. First of all, we're not gonna say that you know what the good is, or what the truth is, in any ultimate sense. But we will presume that there are things that you're doing, that for one reason or another, you know are not in your best interests. There's something about them, that you just know you should stop. They're kinda self-evident to you. Other things you're gonna be doubtful about. You're not gonna know which way is up, and which way is down. But there are things that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do. Now, some of those you won't stop doing, for whatever reason. You don't have the discipline, or maybe there's a secondary payoff, or you don't believe it's necessary, or it's too much of a sacrifice, or you're angry, or resentful, or, or afraid. Who knows? So forget about those for now. But there's another subset that you could stop doing. It might be a little thing. Well, that's fine. Stop doing it, and see what happens. And what'll happen is, your vision will clear a little bit. And then something else will pop up, in your field of apprehension, that you will also know you should stop doing, and that you could stop doing, 'cause you strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you were doing before. That just puts you together a little bit more. And you could do that, repeatedly, for an indefinite period of time, and— you know, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear, and final picture of what constitutes the truth and the good. But it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad. And, you know, that's not a bad start. No one can live without a routine. You just forget that. If you guys don't have a routine, I would recommend, like, you get one going, because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine. You need to pick a time to get up, Whatever time you want, but pick one and stick to it, 'cause otherwise you dysregulate your circadian rhythms, and they regulate your mood. And eat something in the morning! I had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders. I had one client who was literally starving. Very smart girl. She— there's very little that she liked. She kinda tried to subsist on, like, half a cup of rice a day. She came to me and said, I have no energy, I come home, all I wanna do is watch the same movie over and over. What, like, is that weird? And I thought, well, it depends on how hard you work, you know, it's a little weird, but whatever. It's familiar, you're looking for comfort. So, I did an analysis of her diet, it's like, 3/4 of a cup of rice. It's like, you're starving! Eat something! You know? You'll feel better! So, she modified her diet, and all her anxiety went away, and she had some energy. It's like, yeah! You gotta eat! So, a schedule. That's a good thing, man. Your brain will thank you for it. It will stabilize your nervous system. With a bit of a plan, that's a good thing. Well, if you're harmless, you're not virtuous. You're just harmless. You're like a rabbit. A rabbit isn't virtuous. It just can't do anything except get eaten. It's not virtuous. If you're a monster and you don't act monstrously, then you're virtuous. But you also have to be a monster. Well, you see this all the time. Harry Potter's like that too. It's like he's flawed, he's hurt, he's got evil in him. He can talk to snakes, man. He breaks rules all the time. All the time. He's not obedient at all. But, you know, he has a good reason for breaking the rules. And if he couldn't break the rules, him and his little clique of rule-breaking, you know, troublemakers, if they didn't break the rules, they wouldn't attain the highest goal. So it's very peculiar, but it's very, very, it's a very, very, very, very common mythological notion. You know, the hero has to be The hero has to be a monster, but a controlled monster. Batman is like that, you know. I mean, it's everywhere. It's the story you always hear. I started to pay very careful attention to what I was saying. I don't know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily, but I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche. And the split— and I've actually had students tell me the same thing has happened to them after they've listen to some of the material that, that I've been describing to all of you. But I split into two, let's say. And one part was the, let's say, the old me that was talking a lot, and that liked to argue, and that liked ideas. And there was another part that was watching that part, like, just with its eyes open and neutrally judging. And the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going, "That isn't your idea. You don't really believe that. You don't really know what you're talking about. That isn't true." And I thought, "Hmm, that's really interesting." So now I've— and that was happening to like 95% of what I was saying. And so then I didn't really know what to do. I thought, "Okay, this is strange. So maybe I've fragmented, and that's just not a good thing at all." I mean, it wasn't like I was hearing voices or anything like that. I mean, it wasn't like that. It was— well, people have multiple parts. So then I had this weird conundrum. It was like, "Well, which of these two things are me? Is it the part that's listening and saying, 'No, that's rubbish. That's a lie. That's— you're doing that to impress people. You're just trying to win the argument, you know?'" Was that me, or was the part that was going about my normal verbal business me? And I didn't know, but I decided I would go with the critic. And then what I tried to do, what I learned to do, I think, was to stop saying things that made me weak. And now that— I mean, I'm still trying to do that, because I'm always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I'm saying are either making me align, or making me come apart. And I think the alignment— I really do think the alignment is— I think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it, because I think if you say things that are as true as you can say them, let's say, then they come up— they come out of the depths inside of you. Because we don't know where thoughts come from. We don't know how far down into your substructure the thoughts emerge. We don't know what processes of physiological alignment are necessary. For you to speak from the core of your being. We don't understand any of that, we don't even conceptualize that, but I believe that you can feel that. And I learned some of that from reading Carl Rogers, by the way, who's a great clinician, because he talked about mental health in part as a coherence between the spiritual, or the abstract, and the physical, that the two things were aligned. And there's a lot of idea of alignment in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking. But anyways, I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak. And what happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying. I would say 95% of it. It's a hell of a shock to wake up and— I mean, this was over a few months, but it's a hell of a shock to wake up and realize that you're mostly dead wood. It's a shock, you know, and you might think, well, do you really want all of that to burn off? It's like, well, there's nothing left but a little husk, 5% of you. It's like, well, if that 5% percent is solid, then maybe that's exactly what you want to have happen.
Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know, what did you learn from this video that you're going to immediately apply somehow to your life or your business? What was the single most important lesson that you learned? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really curious to find out. I also want to give a quick shout out to Serge Wisdom. Thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word, and for doing multiple reviews on the book for each chapter. You can go check it out on his channel. I really, I really appreciate the support, and I'm so glad you enjoyed the book. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.
