[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] [Applause] 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 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 by a psychologist named James pennebaker and he said that the past turned into history at about a at 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 that's cap 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 um platform and I was you know I 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 of very high quality because the Russians they kept the intense training characteristic of late 19th century
European art academy 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 art wins over propaganda time 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 the pure art and the craftsmanship so at some point some of some of the paintings I have are just very realistic Renditions of working-class people all the propagandists disappearing and so it's very interesting to have those artifacts around it was also a reminder to me like you know I I've 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 you have to allow them to exert that gripping force on you before you can understand it not think well I would 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 then for sure you wouldn't have
been immune so now most of the the classical liberals I know they draw their inspiration from Milton Friedman or friedr ah Hayek and the major influence on you seems to be Carl Jung when you have yungi and 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 I've been very interested
in how people build their models of the world you know you 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 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 of thinking about it and I don't I never came across anybody who had a deeper understanding of narrative than Carl Yung so he his work
was was unbelievably influential for me and partly because it was through young that I started to understand the metaphysics of the idea of the of the sovereignty of the individual which I think is the Great Western idea that that that the fundamental perceptual what would you say the the most appropriate perceptual framework for for social interaction at the familial and the Comm Community level is to 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 mely 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 W 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 unplayable game it was destined to degenerate across time because it didn't
it it couldn't function in a real world environment it was an abstraction that couldn't 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 hm well see my my interest never was
precisely political but it must 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 the 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 you know and we'll go through all sorts of blind alleys but hopefully you
know 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 regard 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 five 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 many of you are probably familiar with Jonathan heighton and Greg Lugano'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 the fundamental rule if you're uh
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 withstand it or to cope with it that's standard exposure therapy and it 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 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 you if you're going to 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 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 um knowledge of exactly how much I don't
know about everything and and even how many layers there are underneath the things that I know something about you know I've become almost overwhelmed with 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 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 um no no I mean I mean that the entire story is a metaphor for psychological transformation it's I mean look the story is basically uh the movement from from a two tyrannical state of being symbolized by Stone essentially because
the the the the Egyptian state is essentially symbolized by Stone in in Exodus and Moses is a master of water and water is is something that flows and isn't static unlike Stone which is rigid and and and and has the advantage let's say of permanency along with those disadvantages but what what what you see in in the book of Exodus is something that's very akin to a pedian stage transition you know P's idea he's a
great developmental psychologist was that people 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 a process of punctuated equilibrium your your old theory is no longer sufficient
to account in a practical way 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 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 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 the the but you know if you've if you've ever popped out of a A system that that that was maybe somewhat tyrannical but that provided you with structure you 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 you may end up you you 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 in the broad political scale there's tremendous there's tremendous pining for the past what's the word for that Nostalgia Nostalgia for for the former Soviet
Union in in in Russia you know and you see that in Eastern Europe as well well that 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 in the 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 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 n and doeski prophesied when they talked
about the death of God the Quran has a Take On The Exodus story right what can we learn from comparing the quranic 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 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 is is a good one you think it's a good one yeah because we are definitely in a period of chaos you know and a tremendous amount of that is a consequence of the fact that we keep upsetting our previous useful tyrannies with technological transformation you
know like one of the things I think who knows if this is true because things are changing so rapidly you know I I'm not sure that we are more polarized than we were 5 years ago but but it's 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 these New Media forms have emerged video killing television podcast killing radio
um the the net for for written content killing print journalism that's a massive that's three 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 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 that's chaos you know and that's only a tiny bit of the chaos that's coming because we're in a 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
you can you can rate people and swipe them and you know t t 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 I'm dead serious about that and it's just it's just one thing that happened and and people don't even pay much attention to it but it's an absolutely revolutionary techn 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 it's it's Dreadful what what's but you tour a lot right you give talks there can be a hall of 2,000 people it will sell out the tickets can go for goodness how much
scalps for $2,000 married what's that like for well I I really like my wife and she 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 uh she really enjoys it she's been a an absolute Rock through this last tumultuous 2 years um we were able to collaborate very carefully and and and negotiate very well with regards to the raising of our kids which was
unbelievably gratifying for both of us um she's incredibly trustworthy um and so we have a we have a good relationship I think she has to put up with a lot because my life has always been strange I would 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 it what what's up with Jordan is like he's he's bought
300 pieces of Soviet art there's something that's a bit off about that and which was definitely true and um but you know she's she's willing to take the risks and and she trusts what I'm doing and so you know and and I think I'm I do what I can to to listen to her and to make sure that she gets what she needs and wants and that we have a good Vision together a joint Vision together and so you know and we do have fun together too
so so that's that's a plus as well so the extreme celebrity of your last three or so years how has it changed you It's Made Me way more careful about what everything everything careful in what you say very yes yeah I've always been careful in what I said but i' I'm way more attentive to what I say now than I was um because well for for about a year and a half I was one slip away from disaster and and there were more than
there were a a perfectly large number of people who were combing through absolutely everything I ever said and recorded to find exactly that one slip you know and it came close a couple of times so more than a couple of times and so I've 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 they're wrong in all sorts of interesting ways you know I mean like I don't I think 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 UN Human Universal it's built into our biology it's there for a reason and although Sam 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 if that's what Sam Harris doesn't get 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 department ments say more yeah well because I see that the the the social justice ideology that's destroyed a huge swath of the of the Academia 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 who gave the HR department
so much power how did that happen question they had virtually no power to begin with right I mean HR departments have always been underpowered so to speak yeah well all of a sudden now they've become ethics departments and
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 seed 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 d dangerous you don't just 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 CU 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 the collectivist ethos is very very attractive to people and 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 recog izes 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 well at least 10 years and and I know that's not very long but and I also don't buy the I 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 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 youngan perspective bring to bear on that question oh I I don't see I don't really see in the United States I don't really see that there is a a problem with with immigration policy
like it's not it's not you you guys haven't had to face the same sort of what crisis over the last five years that that that Europe has as a consequence of the of the trouble in the Middle East I don't it isn't it isn't obvious to me at all that you have a 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 uh 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 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 I was I was at a dinner well I was at a dinner a while back with a with a variety of people who were interested in political issues and and and 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 it if you're looking at what constitutes difficult cognitive work answering a 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 it the I of the Democrats and it's not obvious what the rank order of the problems might be but I 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 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 but there wasn't an anti- there wasn't anti-immigration sentiment in Canada before that and and even though even though as I said there's tremendous amount of immigration into Canada I mean there's some
destabilization the real EST 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 I don't I not worried about anti-immigration populism in Canada I think the probability that's going to become Troublesome is like it's extraordinarily low what's the role of
exercise and weightlifting in your view of the good life well um now I didn't expect that as a segue um well you 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 and it's a pretty vicious curve you know and it hits zero by the way when you die um 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 you know um 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 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 as 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 an aerobic exercise both work that you can restore
your Cog 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 org and so if your cardiovascular system is in good shape then it works better and so it's so cool that this 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 is it shaped that's a good question last years A lot of it was mere impediment like because I I I've had I think that there's lots of forms of depression
right I mean it's it's a catchall condition and we've known for a long time that they're EXO 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 there's Association to some degree too with uh you know Seasonal effective disorder is is is another biological variant and 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 an extraordinarily detrimental effects I would say in some ways because i' I've had periods in my life where I couldn't I couldn't do what I'm doing tonight like I couldn't lay out a large a long string of of of associations and then come back and continue making the
point made it very difficult to lecture and found I made it very difficult for me to move physically like I felt at 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 it was very difficult to move and but that's the downside and and the down 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 had a very serious autoimmune condition that destroyed two 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 I 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 two broken legs for two years
and so it was unbelievably painful and I asked her one day it's like hey 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 post-modern Christian well no I don't think that you can do a pause analysis and and and and come up
with a definitive reason for that um look I think that I I don't I don't think that we from a 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 it's something I told Sam Sam think 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 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 I'm Christian in a way that's very I I don't I don't mean you personally but you know I would say that 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 T typically expect when they're ask answering that question and mostly the reason people ask me that damn question is because they want to put me in a box and 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 I don't I don't think that people are want to understand the the role of of raw Co General cognitive ility and because it's such a determining factor and it 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 a 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 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 in meaningful productive and engaging work in in in a modern society and that and that that that proportion is probably although not inevitably expanding and that's a huge 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 and and how different temperaments really do predispose people to different areas of skill JRR Tolkien do his Works interest you uh yes and so does his thinking um I just read his translation of B wolf about 2third of the way through it and 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 toia 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 Pot the Harry Potter series it's like well people aren't religious it's like yeah well that's why how 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 you can't ignore those sorts of things and and and she has an unbelievably accurate mythological imagination that what should we learn from tlan 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 simple question well I think a lot of it'll be I think a lot of it's going to be a consequence of of supplanting it this is my hope anyways I mean I've hired some people to start an online education project and which is you know a project likely doomed to failure because it's unbelievably a complicated thing to do but we're trying to figure
out what it is that an education system should do and then 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 I think that's certification seems to be a kind of natural monopoly a list of the best school in 1920 looks remarkably like 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 uh gerrymandering the curriculum and the grading criteria I mean Harvard's still Harvard because they have extremely stringent um acceptance criteria but doesn't that keep all the rest in place employers are not turning away from harv grads as far as I can
tell no no no they're not and and you know the look you don't want to sound the death no for the universities they've been thriving institutions for a thousand years and so you know they may have more life in them than 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 they're doing a very good job of keeping up with that so but
I think like I 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 con people did that with the Con Academy you know and and they ended up actually not supplanting the the the standard education system so much as
augmenting it and so so that would be a lovely thing and so you know I just soon 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 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 I I would 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 and 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 what does the
University do and the answer to that was well we don't know you know you you might say well University educates people in a crits people it's it's not that obvious that it educates people it is obvious that it accredits and that
the accreditation has some value and and it might be that the primary goal of university is in fact accreditation but you know universities give young people a 4-year socially sanctioned identity that they can adopt while they're
experimenting and trying to mature and and so that's a that's a big function universities give students young people something to do when they leave home first while they grow up right young universities give people a chance to reconstitute their peer Network and 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 almost none of that has to do with content provision because you might think well how do you do duplicated University online is why 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 150th 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 really like to crack how can you teach people to to speak and can can you do that in a scalable manner as well and then we're all and then we're trying to figure out how we 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 a introductory overview of like it's we're going to start by concentrating on humanities courses and our vision at the moment is that we're going to make a hum's a history hum's timeline something like that maybe that might Encompass somewhere between a 50 and 100 topics so
we start 10,000 years ago and and move forward up to the present time and I we're going to commission contests to have people generate 3 to five minute videos for all 500 topics and that would give people a walk through the entire course of Western civilization and the people that were going the people that we're aiming at my my target market would be intelligent workingclass people that's the target market Market that's
the that's the right level of 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 I can't see at the moment any any particular reason for for virtual reality but I mean the guy the dividing line between animation say and
and virtual reality is is somewhat blurred you know I mean we use virtu 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 then that's 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 of of live interaction that can't be fully duplicated online and 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 and for for peer assessment and for and for what what what we
envision is that your power as a operator in the online education system will increase in proportion to the amount of the material that you've mastered and we we want to make people responsible for the education of others as rapidly as possible now 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 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 who are ambitious who 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 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 for their sources yeah well that was unbelievably useful I rad some young to have this talk with youuh yeah and and so and so you know when you go to university you can pick your peers and you can pick peers throughout history and that's that's or mentors let's say
because they're certainly not peers but they 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 and that's one of the things that I think the universities have fallen down on in a in a terrible way because they they're
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 and to lecture the way I do is because I spend a tremendous amount of
time writing and so that's given me me a corpus of knowledge that I have at hand it's not just recognition knowledge right it's a 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 I 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 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 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 community Communicator
someone who can really formulate an argument and who can really who can who can do that in writing and who can do that in speaking and and that makes you well it makes you in powerful isn't the right word it it makes you authoritative
and competent and that's 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 three minutes to answer and then you must leave for your plane but say you're speaking to outside parties and they want support the creation production finding of more disruptive public intellectuals in a positive way what is your advice for them oh man you you don't want to do
that I mean how many of those people do you want I I don't 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 and and 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 discuss ing them I mean all of the 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 that's good enough that that's that's working out just fine I mean i' 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's stuck and 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 and the podcast world it's like you need no bureaucratic intermediary so that's some that's really something right that you can you have a television station at your disposal with no bureaucratic intermediation and and people have barely begun to take advantage of this I I've talked to politicians in Canada and
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 there slow I would say they're slow on the uptake and that that's actually not a 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 this that'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 and 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 highlevel production values all to people on YouTube and they're very s 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 edit it so that it's smoother because that just looks like you're spinning the content and 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 the classic tele ision 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 10p part series from the beginning you
weren't going to get to well that problem solved so now now you can assume that your audience is up to speed with whatever you're talking about so that's pretty cool and 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 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 that 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 well they're the puppet of the news organization and and they 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 free and so now all of a sudden it turns out that people will watch 3-hour podcasts or 50h 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 use a new technology early before when 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 [Music] show