Jordan Peterson on Mythology, Fame, and Reading People

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Thank you, Jordan. I'd like to give the audience a kind of rapid-fire overview of your thought and also your life as a human being.

I'm looking forward to hearing that.

Let me start with a very lateral question: why do you collect old communist memorabilia and propaganda?

Well, part of it's dark comedy. Well, really, you know, I spent quite a bit of time on eBay for a number of years, and I had read this article by an by a psychologist named James Pennebaker, and he said that, uh, the past turned into history at about 15 years. That's when you start to see people commemorate events in the past. And at that point, it was 2004, and I thought, oh, that's interesting, it's 15 years since the Soviet Union collapsed. Maybe I can go online and see what historical memorabilia is left over. And so I went on eBay looking up Soviet artifacts And I thought that was so comical because there isn't anything more capitalistic than eBay. Right? I mean, seriously, that was completely unrestrained capitalism. And then all this Soviet-era stuff was for sale. And I thought it was absolutely comical that I could buy like paintings of Karl Marx discounted on the world's most intense capitalist platform. And I was, you know, I was interested. I'm really interested in the relationship between art and propaganda. And so I bought all these pieces. Some of them are very high quality because the Russians, they kept the intense training characteristic of late 19th century European art academies open throughout the entire 20th century. And so they had very high quality artists dedicated to producing Soviet realist propaganda. And some of it's intensely propagandistic, and I'm interested in that because I'm interested in propaganda. And some of it's actually quite high quality from a purely artistic perspective. And so it was interesting to surround myself with these works that were battlegrounds between art and propaganda.

What's the main thing you learned over the years living with those works, viewing the propaganda, thinking about it every day, every night? Art wins over propaganda.

Why? Yeah, well, nothing wins over art. Nothing is powerful enough to stand in, in the way of art. And so whatever artistic merit the canvases have stays as a permanent part of them, and the propagandistic aspect disappears as the context, the political context disappears. All that's left in some sense is the pure art and the craftsmanship. So at some point, some of the paintings I have are just very realistic renditions of working-class people, all the propaganda disappearing. And so it's very interesting to have those artifacts around. It was also a reminder to me, like, you know, I have studied totalitarianism for a very long time and you want to be— see, I've always tried to read history as a perpetrator rather than as a hero or a victim. And I'm very interested in trying to understand why these ideas have such a grip on people. And you have to allow them to exert that gripping force on you before you can understand it. Not think, well, I would have been immune to that. It's like, no, you wouldn't have. You wouldn't have been immune at all. And if you think that, then for sure you wouldn't have been immune. So—

Now, most of the classical liberals I know, they draw their inspiration from Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. And the major influence on you seems to be Carl Jung. When you have Jungian foundations for classical liberalism, in what way, for you, does that make liberalism stronger?

Well, you know, I am fundamentally a psychologist rather than a political theorist, and I've been very interested in how people build their models of the world. You know, you look at the world through a framework. You can't help it because the world is unbelievably complicated. And it's so complicated that technically you shouldn't even be able to perceive it. It's a real— perception is an unbelievably deep mystery. And you— so you interpose a very deep structure between you and the world, and that structure has, um, what would you call it? It— you can, you can differentiate it into its subcomponents. And what appears to me to be at the base of that structure conceptually is something approximating a narrative. There's various ways of looking at it. You could think about it as a shared game, but Narrative, I think, is the best way of thinking about it. And I don't— I never came across anybody who had a deeper understanding of narrative than Carl Jung. So his work was unbelievably influential for me, and partly because it was through Jung that I started to understand the metaphysics of the idea of the sovereignty of the individual, which I think is the great Western idea, that the fundamental perceptual— what would you say— the The most appropriate perceptual framework for social interaction at the familial and the community level is to view each individual as unique and sovereign. And see, when I wrote my first book, which was Maps of Meaning, I was very curious about whether the tension between the communist viewpoint and the Western viewpoint, roughly speaking, was merely a matter of opinion. Which is something you might think if you were a moral relativist or perhaps even a postmodernist, that there's multitude of ways that you can set up a society and they're equal— each equally arbitrarily valuable, and there's an infinite set of methods by which a society might be generated. That's one hypothesis. And as I got deeper and deeper into the analysis of both systems, I thought, no, that's just wrong. The way— there's some things that the West got— what we designed in the West is a playable game, technically speaking, and what was designed by the communists was a non-playable game. It was destined to degenerate across time. Because it didn't— it couldn't function in a real-world environment. It was an abstraction that couldn't maintain itself if it was iterated.

Now, you've done clinical work with patients for many years, right? From that clinical work, what have you learned about politics and also myth? This is a shaping of Jordan Peterson narrative we're building here, right?

What have I learned about politics and myth?

Hmm.

Well, see, my interest never was precisely political.

But it must have shaped how you now understand politics. It was such a formative experience in your career.

Well, it shaped how I understand responsibility, I would say. You know, I mean, one of the things— I was trained as a behavioral psychologist, and, and although I have familiarized myself with all sorts of other schools of psychotherapeutic endeavor, and I've used techniques from other schools substantially when that was necessary, but one of the things you do as a behavioral psychologist is you always break You take problems and you break them down into their smallest solvable units. That's actually your job. It's like, okay, well, you come to me and you have a problem. Well, we don't know what the problem is. So the first thing we're going to do is have a very long discussion about what the problem might be. And we'll go through all sorts of blind alleys, but hopefully, we'll end up with a description of what it is that's wrong. And then we'll have another discussion about how it is that it could conceivably be set right. And then we'll have another discussion about how to strategize with regards to implementing how it might be set right at a level of resolution that's sufficiently differentiated so that you have a very high probability of succeeding when you implement it. And I think that that's useful with regards to understanding political problems. I mean, the first question is, well, what's the problem? And, and the second is, well, what's the solution? And like, it's a technique. And so I suppose what's happened to me from participating, from doing so much therapy, is that I've learned how to take complex problems and decompose them down into, into solvable processes.

In your talks and writings, you've explored many avenues of personality psychology. It feels to me as an outside observer that our politics is much higher in neuroticism than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Do you agree, and if so, why has this happened?

Well, I think partly it's happened because there's an insistence that it must be that way. I mean, you, you, many of you are probably familiar with Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's book, The Coddling of the American Mind. I mean, one of the points that they make, which shouldn't have been up to them to make, was that if you set out to design a conceptual system to make weak and timid people who can't operate in the world, you couldn't do a better job than to create what constitutes the safe space culture that, that currently permeates university campuses. I mean, they do absolutely everything wrong from a psychological perspective. And because the fundamental rule, if you're a psychologist who's interested in increasing resilience, is that you help people identify what they're afraid of and what they would like to avoid that's standing in the way of their movement forward. And then you design techniques to help them voluntarily confront that and learn how to to withstand it or to cope with it. That's standard exposure therapy, and it's the bedrock of virtually every therapeutic system. That and getting your story straight, let's say. Those would be the two, the two most— well, that, that's it. Those are the two most important elements of any psychotherapeutic process. And so when you, when you insist that the right way to view the world is victim versus victimizer, and then you coddle people into exaggeration of their own negative emotion-centered pathology, you're going to ensure that the political structure becomes more and more neurotic. If you're aiming at something and you're moving rapidly towards it, you're likely to hit it. And that's exactly what's happening on the campuses.

How have your own views changed since you were 30? Political views, view of the world, metaphysical view, the nature of reality.

Well, I think the primary I think the primary transformation is my ever-expanding knowledge of exactly how much I don't know about everything, and even how many layers there are underneath the things that I know something about. You know, I've become almost overwhelmed with the chronic knowledge of how little we really understand the structure of the world. So, and that's been an unfolding revelation in some sense. And I would say that's accelerated to a substantial degree in the last 5 years, but it was certainly there before that.

Let's say I'm a secular thinker, and you're trying to explain the value of the Book of Exodus to me.

Yeah.

Some of your most successful talks have been about the Hebrew Bible.

Yeah.

Where would you start using the Book of Exodus to explain the predicament of the modern world?

Well, the Book of Exodus is a story about— I would say it's a story about many things. It's a story about social and psychological transformation, and I would start by reading it primarily psychologically, which is reasonable if you think about it as a spiritual story. There's not much difference between spirit and psyche.

You mean transformation of Moses as a leader?

No, no, I mean that the entire story is a metaphor for psychological transformation. It's— I mean, look, the story is basically the movement from a too tyrannical state of being symbolized by stone, essentially, because the Egyptian state is essentially symbolized by stone in Exodus. And Moses is a master of water, and water is something that flows and isn't static, unlike stone, which is rigid and has the advantage, let's say, of permanency, along with those disadvantages. But what you see in the book of Exodus is something that's very akin to a Piagetian stage transition. You know, Piaget's idea— he's a great developmental psychologist— was that people organized their perceptions into, into structures that had a certain amount of internal coherence. You have a structure that's internally coherent, and it accounts for a set of phenomena in the world. But then there are phenomena that don't fit into the structure, and they aggregate. And then now and then there's like a process of punctuated equilibrium. Your, your old theory is no longer sufficient to account in a practical way for for the array of phenomena that you're now confronted with. And as a consequence, there's a dissolution of the previous system, and then a state of uncertainty and chaos, and then a reconstruction. And that's exactly what happens in the book of Exodus. You move from a tyranny— and it's brilliant, it's brilliant just on the surface, and I mean, it's brilliant in the depths, but just on the surface it's brilliant. It's like, well, if you're in a state that's too tyrannical, you need to escape from it. And that sounds all well and good. You should escape from the tyrannical conditions that hold you back. It's like, that's fine. So do you escape from the tyrannical conditions and enter the promised land? It's like, no, you end up in the desert for 40 years. And that's, you know, and it's a mystery, practically speaking, why it took Moses 40 years to wander through the desert, you know, because it wasn't that big a desert. But, you know, if you've ever popped out of a system that was maybe somewhat tyrannical, but that provided you with structure, you might think long and hard about the fact that you can spend 40 years in the desert. You know, if you have a bad marriage, or if you have a bad job for that matter, and that comes to an end, that doesn't mean that you're immediately where you want to be. You may end up— you may certainly end up pining for the good old days when the tyrannical structure that you once inhabited gave your life structure and meaning. And I mean, you see this on the broad political scale. There's tremendous pining for the past. What's the word for that? Nostalgia. Nostalgia. For the former Soviet Union in Russia, you know, and you see that in Eastern Europe as well. Well, the good old days were much better than what we have now. It's like, well, yeah, the tyranny had its advantages, and now you're cast out into horrible, horrible freedom, and that is a desert through which you wander. And then the other thing you see that's so lovely in the Book of Exodus, it's so accurate, is that, well, what happens when you're a fractious group of people who've been freed from the previous tyranny? And the answer is, well, you immediately turn to the worship of false idols. And that's part of the fragmentation process that characterizes people who are no longer united by an overarching narrative. It's like, that's the chaotic element. And of course, that's happening in our society. That would be reflected in the consequences that both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky prophesied when they talked about the death of God.

The Koran has a take on the Exodus story, right? What can we learn from comparing the Koranic take on Exodus and Moses to the take of the Hebrew Bible?

I don't know enough about the Quranic take to make any intelligent commentary on that. And that's one of the places where I'm staggeringly ignorant and hoping to do something about that over the next 5 or 10 years.

If you're thinking about our current situation in terms of some sort of universal myth or archetypical story, what comes to mind from the history of mythology? 2019.

Oh, I think the Exodus story is a good one.

You think it's a good one?

Yeah, because we're definitely in a period of chaos. And a tremendous amount of that is a consequence of the fact that we keep upsetting our previous useful tyrannies with technological transformation. Like one of the things I think, who knows if this is true because things are changing so rapidly, I'm not sure that we are more polarized than we were 5 years ago, but I think that one of the things that's happening is that the illusion of polarization is being driven by the death of the mainstream media. Because these new media forms have emerged, video killing television, podcast killing radio, the net for written content killing print journalism. That's a massive, that's 3 massive sets of technological transformation. As the mainstream media institutions disappear, they're increasingly desperate for attention. And of course they're going to be because that is what happens when your system starts to come apart. And so I think they're concentrating on the extremes to a much greater degree than they were 10 years ago. And that all of that might be a secondary consequence of technological transformation. And that's chaos, you know, and that's only a tiny bit of the chaos that's coming because we're in a condition now where technological transformation is so rapid that we can't even tell what the revolutionary transformations are. You know, like I look at an app like Tinder, for example, you know, Tinder is that app where you can rate people and swipe them. And, you know, Tinder, Tinder is an app that reduces the degree to which males are rejected in their attempt to find sexual gratification. That's never happened in the history of mankind. Like, I'm dead serious about that. And it's just, it's just one thing that happened, and people don't even pay much attention to it. But it's an absolutely revolutionary technology, and it's one of God only knows how many revolutionary technologies that are— there's so many revolutionary technologies being produced right now, you can't even tell which ones pose the worst threat to civilization.

Here's a reader request question. What is it like being married to you?

Oh, it's dreadful. Yeah. What's it like?

But you tour a lot, right? You give talks.

Yeah.

There can be a hall of 2,000 people.

Yeah.

It will sell out. The tickets can go for goodness how much.

Yeah.

Scalped for $2,000.

Yeah.

You're married. What's that like for you?

Well, I really like my wife and she's so far, so far she seems to like me. She's been unbelievably helpful. She's really good at touring, better at it than me. She really enjoys it. She's been an absolute rock through this last tumultuous 2 years. We were able to collaborate very carefully and negotiate very well with regards to the raising of our kids, which was unbelievably gratifying for both of us. She's incredibly trustworthy. And so, we have a good relationship. I think she has to put up with a lot because my life has always been strange. I mean, first of all, she had to put up with the fact that I bought 300 pieces of Soviet-era art. Well, really. I mean, you know, and people were calling her and saying, you know, what's up with Jordan? It's like he's bought 300 pieces of Soviet art. There's something that's a bit off about that. And which was definitely true. And, but, you know, she's willing to take the risks and she trusts what I'm doing. And so, you know, and I think I do what I can to listen to her and to make sure that she gets what she needs and wants. That we have a good vision together, a joint vision together. And so, you know, and we do have fun together too. So that's a plus as well.

So the extreme celebrity of your last 3 or so years, how has it changed you?

It's made me way more careful.

About what?

Everything. Everything.

Careful in what you say?

Yes. Yeah, I've always been careful in what I said, but I'm way more attentive to what I say now than I was. Because, well, for about a year and a half, I was one slip away from disaster. And there were more than— there were a perfectly large number of people who were combing through absolutely everything I ever said and recorded to find exactly that one slip. And it came close a couple of times. So, more than a couple of times. And so, I've always watched what I said, but I really watch it now. And now, also when I'm in public, I'm very, very careful about how I conduct myself. So increased self-surveillance is probably the biggest difference.

Your peers in the intellectual dark web, the best of them, what is it they're wrong about?

Oh, they're wrong about all sorts of things, but at least they're wrong in all sorts of interesting ways. You know, I mean, like, I don't— I think Sam Harris, for example, I don't think that he's given sufficient credence to the role that religious thinking plays in human cognition. And I think that's a huge mistake for someone who's an evolutionary biologist. Because human religious thinking is a human universal. It's built into our biology. It's there for a reason. And although Sam Harris is an evolutionary biologist, at least in principle, with regards to his thinking, he's an Enlightenment rationalist when it comes to discussing the biology of religion. And that's not acceptable. It's the wrong time frame. You don't criticize religious thinking over a time frame of 200 years. You think about religious thinking over a time frame of 50,000 years, but probably far over a far greater time span than that.

So that's what Sam Harris doesn't get. Yeah. If we turn to senior management of large American companies as a class of people, and I know it's hard to generalize, but what do you see them as just not getting?

Well, I would caution them not to underestimate the danger of their human resources departments.

Say more.

Yeah, well, because I see that the social justice ideology that's destroyed a huge swath of academia is on the march in a major way through corporate America. And if the corporate people think they're immune to it, they've got another thing coming. It's not like they're any smarter than the universities.

So who gave the HR department so much power? How did that happen?

That's a good question because they had virtually no power to begin with, right? I mean, HR departments have always been underpowered, so to speak.

Sure, of course.

Yeah, well, all of a sudden now they've become ethics departments, and people who take to themselves the right to determine the propriety of ethical conduct end up with a lot more power, especially if you cede it to them, than you think. And that's happening at a very rapid rate. And, you know, there's very, very— the doctrines that are driving Hiring decisions, for example, any emphasis, for example, on equity or equality of outcome is like, it's unbelievably dangerous. You don't just pull that in and signal to society that you're now acting virtuously without bringing in the whole pathological ideology. And look out when you do, because it's like, I mean, there are elements of it that are extraordinarily old, and that would be the resentful element in terms of patterns of thinking. But the collectivist ethos is very, very attractive to people. And so you have to be very careful of it.

Let's say one is of the view that men and women are intrinsically different on average, but one still recognizes there's a great deal of unjust discrimination against women.

Yeah, I don't recognize that. I don't think there is a great deal of unjust discrimination against women in comparison to the degree of unjust discrimination against men. I think that hasn't really been true for probably at least 10 years, and I know that's not very long. But, and I also don't buy the argument that throughout history men have, you know, what would you say, singularly oppressed women. I think that's absolute bloody nonsense. I think that nature has oppressed men and women terribly, and that men and women have struggled together valiantly to scrape out some possibility of security and happiness from that. And mostly they've done that cooperatively, under unbelievably— under conditions of privation that were so extreme that modern people like us, who are fortunate beyond belief, can't even begin to fathom. So I think all of that's just complete bloody nonsense. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who still make stupid decisions about how to promote based on, what would you call, qualities that have nothing to do with competence. But that brings with it its own punishment. So—

Do you think we are underrating or overrating America's ability to assimilate its immigrants? And what would a Jungian perspective bring to bear on that question?

Oh, I don't see— I don't really see In the United States, I don't really see that there is a problem with immigration policy. You guys haven't had to face the same sort of crisis over the last 5 years that Europe has as a consequence of the trouble in the Middle East. It isn't obvious to me at all that you have an immigration problem in the United States, not as far as I can tell. We don't really seem to have an immigration problem in Canada. Although our immigration policy is somewhat looser than your immigration policy is. I mean, Toronto, for example, the city I'm from, is— I don't know what the stats are. I think 40% of the people who live in Toronto were foreign-born, and the city is doing extraordinarily well. Like, I think it's a better place than it was 20 years ago. And for some reason, the, the immigration policy in Canada seems to be working. And I, I think the same thing in the United States. That doesn't— just doesn't seem to me to be one of your problems. Isn't obvious exactly what your problems are. You know, I was at a dinner— well, I was at a dinner a while back with a variety of people who were interested in political issues. And so, the first thing I wanted to know is, well, okay, what's your problems? It's like nobody could agree on what the problems were. Well, it's hard to formulate a problem statement properly, right? I mean, if you're looking at what constitutes difficult cognitive work, Answering a question is difficult, but formulating the question properly is even more difficult. And I've been working with Democrats, at least to some degree, trying to formulate policy that would constitute an alternative to the idiot radical leftist ideology that seems to have— that dominates most of the discourse with regards to Democratic politics and the politics of the Democrats. And it's not obvious what the rank order of the problems might be, but I certainly wouldn't say that immigration is like top of the list.

Will anti-immigrant populism come to Canada at the national level? And if Canada has populism at the national rather than provincial level, what will that look like?

Well, it will. It will come to Canada if we insist upon, what would you call, gerrymandering our immigration rules. I mean, our current Prime Minister has made a huge mistake by not putting down firm policies about what happens when you cross the border illegally. And all that does is mess things up. But there wasn't anti-immigration sentiment in Canada before that. Even though, as I said, there's tremendous amount of immigration into Canada. I mean, there's some destabilization. The real estate market in Vancouver has become completely overheated because of all the money coming in from, well, essentially coming in from, first of all, Hong Kong and then China. And that's more of a globalization problem than an immigrant problem. But I'm not worried about anti-immigration populism in Canada. I think the probability that's gonna become troublesome is like, it's extraordinarily low.

What's the role of exercise and weightlifting in your view of the good life? Hahaha.

Well, um, now I didn't expect that as a segue.

Well, you know, there's a manliness movement which stresses the importance of a certain kind of physical activity.

Well, it is unbelievably important. I mean, one of the things I was interested in for the longest period of time was in Processes whereby you might maintain your cognitive function, because I don't know if you know this, but your, your fluid intelligence declines linearly from the age of 20 onward, and it's a pretty vicious curve, you know, and it hits zero, by the way, when you die. And but your, your crystallized intelligence, which is a measure of how much wisdom you've accumulated, how much knowledge rises, but it doesn't rise as much as your, as your fluid intelligence declines. And so that's a rather unhappy proposition. And so I was interested for a long time in technologies that would enable people to maintain their cognitive function. And you know, there were those companies like Lumosity that promised that if you did their exercises, that you would maintain your cognitive function. That's wrong, by the way. That doesn't work at all. One of the things that we found in the literature on cognitive function is that if you practice cognitive exercises and you get very good at them, there's no crossover effect to other cognitive exercises. We don't know a set of cognitive exercises that you can do that make your cognitive function better generally. No one's been able to find that. It's like the Holy Grail for intelligence researchers, and no one's had any, uh, success with it. But one thing we do know is that if you exercise— and weightlifting and, and anaerobic exercise both work— that you can restore your cognitive abilities at age 50 to approximately what they were at age 30. And that's almost all a consequence of increased physical fitness. And it's because your brain is an incredibly demanding organ. And so if your cardiovascular system is in good shape, then it works better. And so it's so cool that the best way to keep yourself smart is to keep yourself strong and fit. And so that's really worth knowing because you don't want that cognitive decline if you can, if you can stave it off.

You've spoken several times online about having had a tendency toward depression. Earlier in your life. Looking back, do you feel that gave you insight you wouldn't have had otherwise, or it motivated you, or how has it shaped—

that's a good question—

the last 3 years?

A lot of it was mere impediment, like, because I, I've had— I think that there's lots of forms of depression, right? I mean, it's, it's a catch-all condition, and we've known for a long time that there are endogenous forms, so let's say biological, and exogenous forms, and those would be crisis-initiated. And there's some interplay between them, and, and so there's association to some degree too with, uh, You know, seasonal affective disorder is another biological variant, and there is evidence that various forms of depression are associated with autoimmune dysfunction and inflammation. And it looks to me like the variant of depression that's characterized my family is an autoimmune variant. And it's had some extraordinarily detrimental effects, I would say, in some ways, because I've had periods in my life where I couldn't do what I'm doing tonight. Like, I couldn't lay out a large, a long string of of associations and then come back and continue making the point. Made it very difficult to lecture. I thought made it very difficult for me to move physically. Like, I felt many times in my life that I was sort of embedded in molasses, which is a— I wouldn't recommend that, by the way. It's very, very annoying and was very difficult to move. And but that's the downside. And the downs— and apart from the fact that— so that's the downside, apart from the fact that it's also very bitter, that kind of depression. So My daughter had a very serious autoimmune condition that destroyed 2 of her joints and affected 40 others. And she was in extreme pain as a consequence of that for many years and also had this proclivity towards depression. And so her arthritis destroyed her hip when she was 16 and her ankle at about the same time. And so she basically walked around on 2 broken legs for 2 years. And so it was unbelievably painful. And I asked her one day, it's like, okay, kid, like, Here's a choice. You can either have the arthritis or the depression. Which would you pick? And she said she'd pick the arthritis.

Here's another question from a reader. Are you Christian? And if it takes you a long time to answer that question, doesn't it mean you are a postmodern Christian?

Well, no, I don't think that you can do a pause analysis and come up with a definitive reason for that. Look, I think that— I don't think that we, from a narrative perspective, let's say, I don't think that the West has formulated a higher value than the idea that the imitation of Christ is associated with divine value. I think that's true. Now, what it means that that's true is unbelievably complicated. So people— the thing about these questions is that You know, you can embed an unbelievably complex idea in a very simple question. And then you can presume that the person that you're talking to is going to produce a low-resolution answer to that question that actually suffices. It's like, it's not that straightforward when you're thinking about things in a sophisticated manner. You know, like if you ask me, am I a Catholic? No, I'm not a Catholic. I'm not a Protestant in any straightforward manner either. I can answer that question, yes or no. The whole Christian thing, you know, my attitude is that it's something I told Sam Harris. He thinks, well, if you ask Sam if he's religious, he'd say no. I'd say, well, yes, you are. You just don't know it. So, you know, and I actually believe that's the case because I don't think that you have the option of being not religious. You might think that you're not religious. It just means that you don't understand how your cognitive structures work very well. And so people say, well, are you Christian? It's like, well, I don't know what you mean by that. And I don't think you do either. So I'm Christian in a way that's very— I don't mean you personally, but you know, I would say that I am Christian in the deepest sense that I can manage. But I would also say that isn't what people would typically— that isn't what people would typically expect. The way that I think about that isn't what people would typically expect when they're answering that question. And mostly the reason people ask me that, damn question is because they want to put me in a box and then they don't have to think about what I'm saying. It's like, I'm not hopping in that box for your bloody convenience.

What do most other smart people not understand about talent search that you do having done psychological research work and talent search work for decades?

Well, I don't think that people want to understand the role of raw general cognitive ability. And because it's such a determining factor, and it's hard for people on the right and the left to, to accept it. I mean, people on the right think there's a job for everyone if they just get off their lazy ass and do it, and people on the left think anybody can be trained to do anything. And both of those things are seriously wrong. So because— well, one example that I often use is that the American military decided a couple of decades ago that it was illegal to induct anybody into the armed forces who had an IQ of less than 83. And like, that's an unbelievably important thing to know because that's about 10% of the population. So, so you got to understand what this means. It means that a very large organization that's desperately hungry for manpower, especially under circumstances of extreme crisis, is unwilling to accept 10% of the population because they have determined after 100 years of doing absolutely everything they possibly could to the contrary, that there isn't a single thing that they can train someone like that to do that's not counterproductive, right? That's terrible. It's terrible because it— if, if the armed forces is approximately as complex as general society is, which I think is a reasonable supposition, it means that 10% of the population cannot find meaningful meaningful, productive, and engaging work in, you know, in a modern society. And that proportion is probably, although not inevitably, expanding. And that's a huge problem. That's a huge underclass problem. And so, and they all hire people who hire also don't understand the role of temperament and how that can be assessed and measured, and how different temperaments really do predispose people to different areas of skill.

J.R.R. Tolkien. Do his works interest you?

Yes, and so does his thinking. I just read his translation of Beowulf. I'm about two-thirds of the way through it, and I know that he was very influenced by that document when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. And so, and The Lord of the Rings is obviously, it's a quasi-religious document. Now, Tolkien knew that perfectly well, and but it's, it's one of those quasi-religious documents that's so, that's so interesting. It's like Harry Potter, the Harry Potter series. It's like, well, people aren't religious. It's like, yeah, well, that's why. How many Tens of millions of copies of the Harry Potter series sold. I mean, that woman could pack stadiums of young people to listen to her read. And it was an absolute— I mean, and she went from welfare mother to like richer than the Queen. You know, you can't ignore those sorts of things. And she has an unbelievably accurate mythological imagination.

What should we learn from Tolkien?

Go out and confront your dragons.

What should we learn from Harry Potter?

Voluntary death and rebirth redeems.

If we're going to fix higher education, what is actually the point we should start at? Ha ha. Simple question.

Well, I think a lot of it will be— I think a lot of it's going to be a consequence of supplanting it. This is my hope anyways. I mean, I've hired some people to start an online education project, which is, you know, a project likely doomed to failure because it's unbelievably complicated thing to do. But we're trying to figure out what it is that an education system should do and then and then make that accessible to the largest number of people possible. I think the way to fix higher education is just to build a better system. I think that's the way to fix most things. I think that's—

But certification seems to be a kind of natural monopoly. A list of the best schools in 1920 looks remarkably like one today.

Yeah, but they're doing everything they can to destroy their brand as rapidly as they possibly can, and that's going to have an effect over time, and it already is.

So in which year is Harvard not Harvard anymore?

2013.

And what does that process look like?

Gerrymandering the curriculum and the grading criteria. I mean, Harvard's still Harvard because they have extremely stringent acceptance criteria.

But doesn't that keep all the rest in place? Employers are not turning away from Harvard grads, as far as I can tell.

No, no, no, they're not. And, you know, look, you don't want to sound the death knell for the universities. They've been thriving institutions for 1,000 years, and so, you know, they may have more life in them than might be expected. But, you know, they are contending with an unbelievably rapid technological— technologically transforming world, and it isn't clear to me that they're doing a very good job of keeping up with that. So, but I think, like, I think generally speaking, if you want to improve something rather than criticize and change what already exists, it's easier especially now it's easier just to build a parallel system and see if you can put something in that's a competitor. I mean, the Khan people did that with the Khan Academy, you know, and they ended up actually not supplanting the, the standard education system so much as augmenting it.

Sure.

And so, so that would be a lovely thing. And so, you know, I just put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. And if I'm not happy with what the universities are doing, I'm going to go try to figure out if I can figure out a way of doing it better. And if I can't, well, then tough luck for me. And if I can, well, that would be That would be a good thing.

The alternative vision, is there anything to that you would care to describe, or are your thoughts too preliminary?

No, there's some things I would like to describe. I mean, I can tell you the problems that we're trying to solve. I mean, the first problem we ran into was that, because the original idea was to build an online university, and then, but as soon as we started thinking about that deeply, we thought, well, that's like building a horseless carriage, you know, because when cars first came out, that's how people conceptualized them. But They weren't horseless carriages. They were something else, right? And whatever you do online to educate people isn't going to be a university because you don't know what a university is, and it isn't obvious that it can be duplicated in the virtual world. I mean, one of the things we immediately ran into was the problem of, okay, well, what does the university do? And the answer to that was Well, we don't know. You might say, well, university educates people and accredits people. It's not that obvious that it educates people. It is obvious that it accredits and that the accreditation has some value. And it might be that the primary goal of university is in fact accreditation. But universities give young people a 4-year socially sanctioned identity that they can adopt while they're experimenting and trying to mature. And so, that's a big function. Universities give students, young people, something to do when they leave home first while they grow up, right? Universities give people a chance to reconstitute their peer network and emerge as different people. Universities give people a chance to contend with the great thought of the past. That would be the educational element. To find mentors, right? To become disciplined, to work towards a single goal. And all of— very— almost none of that has to do with content provision. Because you might think, well, how do you duplicate a university online? Is, well, you take lectures and, and you put them online and you, and you deliver multiple choice questions. It's like, yeah, but that's like 1/50th of what a university is doing. And so we're trying to— so we've just scrapped that idea. And so what we're trying to do instead is to figure out How can you teach people to write in a manner that's scalable? That's a big problem because teaching people to write is very, very difficult and it's very labor-intensive and expensive. So, that's one problem we'd really like to crack. How can you teach people to speak? And can you do that in a scalable manner as well? And then, we're trying to figure out how we could bring content to the largest number of people in the most efficient manner possible. And so one of the projects that we're working on right now is we'd like to do an introductory overview of— like, we're going to start by concentrating on humanities courses. And our vision at the moment is that we're going to make a humanities history, humanities timeline, something like that. Maybe that might encompass somewhere between 50 and 100 topics. So we start 10,000 years ago and move forward up to the present time. And I were going to commission contests to have people generate 3 to 5 minute videos for all 500 topics, and that would give people a walk through the entire course of Western civilization. And the people that we're going— the people that we're aiming at, my target market, would be intelligent working-class people. That's the target market. That's the right level of focus as far as I'm concerned.

Does this online university, does it need virtual reality? After all, we're here talking to people live. We're not doing this by Skype. Will online education solve that problem? Are we waiting for the tech world to solve it for us?

No, I can't see at the moment any particular reason for virtual reality. But I mean, the dividing line between animation, say, and virtual reality is somewhat blurred. You know, I mean, we use virtual or artificial realities all the time.

But it's very important to meet people, right? You give live talks all around the world. They see you maybe from some distance. Yeah, they would have a clearer view of you on YouTube, but there's something emotionally vivid about the imprinting, psychologically speaking.

Yeah, there is. Well, that's right. And that's one of the things that's hard to duplicate in a virtual world. I don't know the degree to which, you know, occurrences like this are necessary. There's something about the personal immediacy of live interaction that can't be fully duplicated online. And we're not exactly sure what to do about that. But you know, we might be able to solve 90% of the problem of educating people in a virtual environment. And—

Will the role of personal tutors go up or down in your vision?

Oh, I think it'll go up.

It'll go up.

I think so. I mean, one of the things that we want to do is accredit people for serving as tutors. You know, because part of the process of getting educated in our online system will be educating other people. So we want to give people credit for doing things like grading and for peer assessment and for— what we envision is that your power as an operator in the online education system will increase in proportion to the amount of the material that you've mastered. And we want to make people responsible for the education of others as rapidly as possible. I mean, that happens in the universities too. Right? Slightly slower. Once you're an undergraduate, you're a graduate student, and then you're immediately involved in teaching. We'd like to speed that process along. So—

Two final questions. Let's say a young person comes to you and says something like, "I'd like to be Jordan Peterson of the next generation." Not doing exactly what you've done, but something broadly analogous. I'm sure this happens to you. What advice do you give that person? Let's say you think they're quite smart. Maybe there's some chance they could aspire to this. What do you say?

Well, don't underestimate the utility of reading. Look, I mean, one of the things I did when I was— when I went to university was I kind of chose my peer group, and partly that was a network of friends, you know, and I picked people who were ambitious, who wanted to become educated, you know, and who felt that was important. And so that was very helpful, and it was very liberating to me to have that happen. But then I started reading people. Every time I read something that I thought was great, I tried to read as much as I could of everything that person had read. Like, I'd read everything they wrote, and then I looked at their sources. Yeah, well, that was unbelievably useful.

I reread Samyong to have this talk with you.

Yeah, and so, you know, when you go to university, you can pick your peers, and you can pick peers throughout history, and that's— or mentors, let's say, because they're certainly not peers. But they at least serve as a peer group. And so I would say you go to university to familiarize yourself with what's great about the past, and maybe you go to university with the attitude that there was something great about the past too. That'd be, that'd be a good start. And that's one of the things that I think the universities have fallen down on in a terrible way, because they don't separate the wheat from the chaff, and they make the presumption that the past is nothing but brutality. And believe me, the past is brutal, there's no doubt about it. But to think about it as nothing but brutality is a major error. I think it's unbelievably useful to take time to write, you know. I mean, the reason that I'm able to speak fluently, I would say, and to lecture the way I do is because I spent a tremendous amount of time writing. And so that's given me a corpus of knowledge that I have at hand. It's not just recognition knowledge, right? It's recall. I know the stories, and then of course I've practiced that a lot. So I would say if you want to become a good educator, I guess, which perhaps might mean that you were following in my footsteps for better or worse, is like, well, you have to learn to read and you have to learn to think critically and you have to learn to write and then you have to learn to speak. You have to get good at all those things and they're all worth getting good at. They're unbelievably powerful skills. I mean, this is one of the things that's so sad in some sense about the degeneration of the humanities is that, you know, pragmatic people, practical people think that there's nothing more useless in some sense than a Bachelor of Arts degree, and that's exactly wrong. I mean, you are— if you can communicate, there's nothing more powerful than the ability to communicate, period. And so what a Bachelor of Arts degree should do is make you a great communicator, someone who can really formulate an argument and who can really who can do that in writing and who can do that in speaking. And that makes you— well, it makes you— powerful isn't the right word. It makes you authoritative and competent. And that's a good thing to be. You know, I mean, how is that going to not work out well?

Final question, and you have 3 minutes to answer, and then you must leave for your plane. But say you're speaking to outside parties and they want to support the creation, production, finding of more disruptive public intellectuals in a positive way. What is your advice for them?

Oh man, you don't want to do that. I mean, how many of those people do you want? I don't know if that is something that— I guess the answer to that would be, well, watch the people who you find compelling and find out whatever avenues might be available to support them. But just watching them is a big part of it. And sharing their ideas and discussing them. I mean, all of this so-called intellectual dark web, that's all come about organically in that manner. These are people who are putting forward ideas that they believe to be useful, and, you know, people are paying attention. That's good enough. That's working out just fine. I mean, I've tried to figure out why that nomenclature came about. I mean, Eric Weinstein came up with that term, and obviously he's pretty good at coining a term because it stuck. And that, you know, it's not easy to formulate a word. Um, well, it is, but it's very difficult to get other people to use it. And that, that has worked. And I've, I've spent some time with some of the people who are in that putative group trying to figure out why that term stuck and what everybody in that group had in common. And I think that, um, the first is, is that everyone in that group is independent. They all have their own independent source of funding, so there's no There's no bureaucratic master at all, which is one of the things that's extraordinarily interesting about YouTube and the podcast world. It's like you need no bureaucratic intermediary. So that's really something, right? That you have a television station at your disposal with no bureaucratic intermediation. And people have barely begun to take advantage of this. I mean, I've talked to politicians in Canada and said to them, You guys, you just don't have to talk to the press anymore. You can just go right on YouTube and tell people what you're up to. And there's no reason not to do it. Now, you know, they're very— they're slow. I would say they're slow on the uptake. And that's actually not an insult. I mean, it's not that easy to note that that sort of technological transformation has taken place. But I would say that it's the same for all of you. If you have something to say and you think it's useful, you can just tell people on YouTube. One of the things that's so cool about the new media technology is that people want— they just want direct communication. They don't like high-level production values. All to people on YouTube, and they're very savvy media consumers, a highly produced television show just looks like a lie. They just want, like, if you got something to say, they just want you to sit down and say it. They don't even want you to edit it so that it's smoother. Because that just looks like you're spinning the content, and you probably are. So, and then the other thing that characterizes the people in the IDW is that none of them think their audience is stupid. And I've thought a lot about that too. I mean, the reason that television, the classic television stations, thought that their audience was stupid— and I'm being a little harsh there because that's not universally true— was because the technology made the audience look stupid. And here's why. If you were making a series of shows, you could never assume that your audience had watched any of the previous series. And if they hadn't, they didn't get to because there was no archive. So if you hadn't watched the 10-part series from the beginning, you weren't going to get to. Well, that problem solved. So now you can assume that your audience is up to speed with whatever you're talking about. So that's pretty cool.. And so, you don't have to think of your audience as devoid of knowledge or memory. You don't have a bandwidth restriction anymore. So, for a long time, television bandwidth was unbelievably expensive. And it's really interesting now going into a classic television studio and being interviewed by an old-school television journalist. It feels like stepping back into 1975. Because the journalist isn't actually there. Because the bandwidth is so expensive that everything they do is scripted. And so, you're not talking to a person, you're talking to a puppet. You know, and it's that, well, they're the puppet of the news organization and almost by necessity, right? They have to stay on script because they can't afford to make a mistake. And so, and they're scripted by their crew. And if they're not the sort of people that accept scripting by their crew, then they don't succeed in the job. But that's all gone too because you just don't need it because bandwidth is free. And so now all of a sudden it turns out that people will watch 3-hour podcasts or 50-hour epics like Game of Thrones, which is way more than 50 hours now. It's like, it turns out that people are way smarter than we thought because the bandwidth restrictions are gone and, and we're not viewing them through this tiny, tiny narrow portal that was characteristic of both radio and TV. And so the IDW types figured this out first, you know, that we're, we're a fortunate group of people who managed to what would you say, used a new technology early before when people still thought it was mostly a place for like cute cat videos.

Jordan Peterson, thank you very much. Big round of applause.

Thank you. Thank you. It's been very nice to be here and very good to talk to all of you.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.