Jordan Peterson Emotional Interview with Patrick Bet-David

the American working class paid a very large price for enriching the rest of the world is there such a thing as a hundred percent truth you can get a bloody long ways by being honest we really have no idea what they're doing to us these aren't trivial technologies you know some of the belief system that we have politically liberal or conservative we're born with it's not the fact that the Conservatives are right or that the Liberals are right they're both necessary annoying as that is trigger warnings clearly make things worse there's a lot of Latinos under one view were you trying to encourage us to go out there and have ten babies who try to have it they won't make ten babies in a heartbeat if you say that who had an absolutely dreadful morning in this just as bitchy as can possibly be imagined that's kind of what Twitter's like I'm not really accustomed to being slower than someone else in the room can't believe I said that actually I actually can't believe I said you know you ain't seen nothing yet [Applause] [Music] [Music] please stand up and put your hands together and welcome to the stage Patrick Beth Davis in Georgia visitor [Applause] [Music] [Applause] how you feeling her stuff all how you doing not bad that's an impressive sound system can oppress the south if you're up here it's a lot louder than you think I know it's also loud on the other side so how many of you here have read the book read Jordan Peterson's book crazy and if you've read as well okay we made it the book of the month last month so we had a lot of our guys read the book but before we get into it obviously a lot of people know because they've read about your watch new in different places 12 rules you have your rule number one is stand up straight with your shoulders straight number two is treat yourself like someone you're responsible for helping three is befriend people who want the best for you Forest compare yourself to who you were yesterday not the useless person you are today do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them set your house in order before you criticize the world pursue what is meaningful now what is expedient tell the truth or at least don't lie that's number eight assume the person you're listening to know something you don't be precise in your speech do not bother children while they're skateboarding kanda last but not least pet a cat when you encounter one in the street I heard somewhere you said it was 40 rules and you narrowed it down to 12 it was originally 42 and I'm working on another set of 12 so what was the cutoff like what was number 13 that missed out it was it was like a battle for a number I'm here so know what number 13 was for you well I tried to pick a set that would make a coherent narrative mm-hmm and so it wasn't like the rules differed in quality particularly I think they were all worth writing about but when you write a book you wanted to have a certain internal consistency and so I went for that a couple of the rules that didn't make it were be careful who you share good news with that's a good one because you want to share good news with people who are going to be genuinely happy for you and that's one way that you can identify those people who are on your side Wow there's a it's powerful there was a corollary to that which was be careful who you share bad news with because that's equally tricky you know you you you want someone who will listen to you when you're having trouble and allow you your grief especially if it's a consequence of something tragic and who won't try to one-up you you know because often when you're talking to people they'll be thinking about what they have to say that's worse and that's not helpful if you need a listening ear make one room in your house as beautiful as possible that's that's what I'm writing about now I talked a lot about already about the necessity of cleaning your room which is you know in some sense a foolish piece of advice because it seems so obvious but it's not obvious at all and you'll find if you try it especially if you're in a household that's not very functional that you'll encounter obstacles that you couldn't imagine existed while you're trying to put your life in order and you can take your surroundings beyond order and and and move towards beauty and that's unbelievably useful because well Beauty calls people to their higher being I would say and to make friends with Beauty is to introduce yourself and introduce yourself very carefully to one of the mysteries of life that make it worth living and so those are a few of them rules that didn't make the original cut but that I'm still working on and still thinking about I'm definitely looking forward to reading the next book that you come out with those were very interesting rules appreciate you for sharing it with us thank you for sharing good with that so so you know there's the same there's the saying that says tough times produce strong men strong men produce good times good times produce weak men weak men produce tough times yes if that's the truth which phase are we in today well if you think about it historically you have to say that we're in good times I mean that doesn't mean everything about the current times are good and of course life is always tenuous and and and difficult but it's 1919 if you go back a hundred years ago imagine what the last five years would have been like right you would have been the entire world was encapsulated in a terrible war the trench warfare was absolutely brutal and that was a five year period and then that was followed by the Spanish Influenza which killed 120 million people and you know so I'd rather be here now than there then by a substantial margin and I think life is never easy even under relatively positive conditions but I would say that it's very difficult to make the case that we're not in good times and I especially think that's true if you look at the world globally the American working class and maybe the Western working class in general paid a very large price for enriching the rest of the world you know I mean China's come up in a miraculous way in the last 40 years South Korea India while the entire so in all of South East Asia and increasingly Africa - because the fastest-growing economies in the world are now in sub-saharan Africa and that's produced a tremendous competition for working-class people in the West but speaking on a global level there has never been a better time for the majority of people to be alive and the future although we're vulnerable and terrible things can always happen to us it's hard to make a case that the future doesn't look comparatively positive we're becoming extremely technologically sophisticated and the world is changing at an incredibly rapid rate and the only way we're going to be able to manage that in a positive way is if each of us or as many of us as possible are capable of making wise and careful and truthful decisions and if we do that then you know maybe things can continue to improve the rate of absolute poverty in the world has fell fell by 50 percent between the year 2000 and the year 2012 you know that's the fastest rate of economic improvement in the history of the world and there's plenty of reason to be optimistic if you're inclined in that direction I would say it's best to marry that with a healthy dose of attentive caution because well as I said things can go badly wrong but I can't think of a time in the past that I would trade for now despite all the problems that are also part and parcel of being alive now so do you think these good times will produce weak men or you don't buy that you think in any times we're gonna have weak strong people being produced well I think I think there is a certain danger in in luxury you know we don't know how necessary a certain degree of privation is to motivation you know the typical first generation immigrant story is someone arrives with nothing and this is motivated fully to do it as ever whatever is necessary to make either themselves or their children a success and that does seem to decline that motivation does seem to decline somewhat over the following generations so for example Asian immigrants their children outperform American children in school by a substantial margin but that disappears by about three generations that advantage Wow that disappears in three generations yeah yeah as the as the Asian immigrants become more Americanized their proclivity to excel and understand a concept powerful so I come first generation I'm more disciplined my kid becomes less disciplined my Greg has become less disciplined and two one prior to that you know past that also gets me less disciplined yeah well like I said I mean and you probably face this to some degree because you know you have a lot of resources at your command it's very difficult to provide your children with optimal privation in order to make them to make them stand on their own two feet you know and you you you don't get people to stand up on their own two feet and to adopt responsibility if everything is given to them and that that's that's a real conundrum [Applause] well it's a real conundrum as you become successful because you're in a situation where if your children ask you for something there's no formal reason for you to say no you know because you can provide whatever is being requested but by doing that you steal from them the opportunity to generate that for themselves and that's I suppose one of the dangers of well it's the one of the dangers of prosperity what that does to people over the long run I don't think we understand well yet because most people haven't been prosperous for very long right there's been plenty of privation to go around and of course there still is in many many parts of the world including in the United States and in the West do you think we're getting softer and more sensitive do you think in general especially America because America has been successful now for quite some times we're constantly growing do you think we are becoming softer or more sensitive well I think there's a push in that direction like it there certainly seems to be a technical push in that direction in the Universities why well it's complicated you know might like generally when I try to assess something like that there's a rule if you're a social scientist and the first rule is in some sense to look at context before you look at personality and I think there's been a lot of really radical changes in our society in the last 50 years and we don't understand their consequences the most radical change is probably the birth control pill because it's provided women with voluntary control over the reproductive function and that's a equivalent to a major biological mutation right it's it's it's its consequence is virtually incomprehensible I mean partly one of the consequences is is you know where you where reliable birth control is provided to women first of all they immediately become educated second they're economies tend to grow and third the birth rate falls below replacement and in all three of those factors are monumental you know so perhaps especially the third the falling of the birthrate beat below replacement which is the case in virtually every country in the Western world except the United States softness well look like we don't know exactly what the optimal conditions are under which you toughen up let's say most children now have older parents right because people aren't having children until they're in their 30s and there's a big difference between having a parent who's in his or her 30s and having a parent who's in his or her 20s yep that the 20 year olds are still kind of like kids and they're going to be more usefully neglectful I would say well look wonder one of the things we used to do with my daughter when she was very little was you know well she was about a year and a half is we have her in a room alone and she would usually complain about that for a few minutes and then she'd find a way to amuse herself you know she she liked to take books out of shelves and put them back in and like if if you let her be get through that initial bit of misery then she would learn how to regulate herself and and she got very good at that and then so that's a good example of minor privation having a positive influence but you know children used to have multiple siblings and siblings toughen you up because there's tremendous competition in families among siblings and they had younger parents who had fewer resources and you know now parents are older first of all and second they're more resource rich and so they're more likely to schedule their children to death in some sense to provide them with all the opportunities that they feel would be useful and that's understandable and plus because they have fewer children each child is in some sense more precious you know not like if you have ten children you don't love all of them but you know there's ten of them there's there's only so much excess attention that can go around and they do a lot of socializing each other rather than being socialized by parents but if you only have one child you know you're gonna devote all your resources to providing them with absolutely everything you can provide them with and one of the dangers of that is that you'll over protect them and you'll provide them with too much and we don't understand those dynamics right we don't understand how much you should stay hands off your kids and let them go out there and make their own mistakes and and find their own way and and that's that's well that's tricky and and we're ignorant about it and so I think one of the consequences of that is that we do have a reasonable percentage of young people maybe young adolescents the kind that you hear about at University who have been over protected and over skinned over scheduled and under challenged in some sense we extend that over protection far longer than is helpful you know it's hard though because as I said when you have resources you can use them to make your children's lives let's say easier but the question is like do you really want to make the life of someone you love easier and that's an incredibly difficult question and it's tough because how do you know the whole thing is when your kids go kids friends go and say hey I heard your mommy and daddy are rich why isn't your mom buying you this car why didn't get that behind you this car but it was your underlying message you encouraging us because there's a lot of Latinos in the room here were you trying to encourage us to go out there and have ten babies is that is that what you're trying to do that kind of you're talking they wouldn't make ten babies in a heartbeat if you say that these are professionals that making babies here well I you know my wife and I had two kids and we didn't start late compared to most of the people we knew I think I think our first child was born when my wife was 29 we certainly felt that we would have had more children if we would have started earlier there's no doubt that and that this is a very important thing to know you know there's not that many things in your life that are of central importance there's half a dozen I would say there's your friends there's your family and your intimate partner by family I mean your siblings and your parents but then there's your children there's your career there's your educational trajectory there's how you take care of yourself and protect yourself from temptation and what sort of useful things you do in the time that you're not working but you know children are a third of life something like that maybe more and so I would certainly recommend that you don't miss it it's complicated because of course now in most situations both parents have to work and but it's always been complicated to raise children they they take a look they're a long-term investment but yeah right which is hard what's why it's hard hard to even pay child care workers right because the payoff for having a child doesn't occur until two decades later sometimes sometimes four decades later but it's not something you want to miss that's for sure because it's it's well that's life you know there's it's it's part of the human condition and and little children pay you back immensely if you have a good relationship with them you know if you're on their side and encourage them because they're an unconditional source of joy and love powerful you know the other thing I noticed that that usually that that you should all know is that as you get older your family the family you've produced becomes more and more important you know so we teach young women in particular that the fundamental goal of their life is going to be their career and you know first of all most people don't have a careers they have jobs and those are very different things but you're not a very happy camper so to speak if you're 45 and you have no one and it doesn't go upwards after that so don't miss it so Jordan followup it up I got a question for you very good point follow ups it out with you is you know we're gonna have President Bush here speaking in the next two days I don't know when he's speaking in the next two days but he's speaking I can't say because Secret Service told me I can't give the specific time everyone's trying to figure it out I almost gave you the time some of you guys are waiting for that but you know why is it that so many powerful political families send their kids off to boarding school and I don't know as a clinical psychologist how much research or how much of that are you have you looked at with the link to boarding school teachers independence toughen them up a little bit the whole opportunity to have your kids have a little bit more challenging times for them to go through what are your thoughts on boarding school well I don't think that there's any evidence that there's not a lot of evidence that school quality per se is a determining factor in the outcome of educational processes that actually seems to be a situation there are exceptions and I'm certainly not trying to say that every school is equal but a tremendous amount of what determines whether or not a child is successful at school is their intelligence I mean you people all went to high school to junior high school I mean you know that in a group of 30 kids there's some kids that are so bright that they figure everything out in the first 15 seconds and there are other kids who just can't get it no matter how hard they try and that's one of the really catastrophic and built-in inequalities in the world generally in boarding schools because wealth and intelligence tend to be correlated which is also something you'd expect right you'd expect more intelligent people to be able to make more money or you'd certainly at least expect less intelligent people to be able to make less money this schools are generally of the schools generally produce good outcomes but it's not obvious that it's because of the schools for even and if this is true at higher levels of education to to a degree that people don't really realize so for example at a at a university like Harvard any of the Ivy League's it's very very difficult to get in right so there's far more applicants than there are positions and they use the out of the SAT as one of the entry criteria so you have to have a very high SAT score and then generally you have to be good at at least one or two other things to be considered and a very large percentage for example of Harvard undergraduates and there's only about four four thousand of them so it's a rather small school were valedictorians of their class they have very high SAT scores and the SAT is a proxy for IQ the people who administer the SAT don't like to admit that but there's absolutely no doubt that it's the case because any set of questions that assess general knowledge and problem-solving ability can you can derive an IQ score from and so part of the advantage of hiring an Ivy League graduate isn't the fact that they went to a high quality school it's the fact that it was impossible to get in and so the screening has been done for the employee for the employer by the missions process at the school and the same thing is true of business schools and the business the people who run business schools know that is that the primary value that they offer and again this is not the case with every business school is the fact that if you hire an MBA from their program and it's a very selective program then you have a very high probability of hiring someone who's intrinsically intelligent and and conscientious and that's a great predictor those are great predictors of long-term success so and what would you expect in a society that's essentially meritocratic it's pretty straight forward to think this through not only should people who are faster and smarter be more productive especially if they're hardworking but that's really what you'd want isn't it I mean how the hell do you want to set up your society you want to set up your society so that incompetent people who do nothing succeed that first of all that can't happen so you know and III should say which I should say that I'm very aware of the unfairness of a meritocratic Society of its intrinsic unfairness so let me give you an example I had someone write me the other day he had listened to some of my lectures on IQ and he sent me his IQ scores and he was in the 5th percentile which basically meant that 95th 95% of the people around him were faster cognitively than he was and you know the the letter had it wasn't very grammatically correct and it wasn't very well written although it was very sad and and he said that he had a very difficult time finding a job and keeping one that he was constantly frustrated and and and and unnerved and that's a terrible thing you know because it's not as if it's his fault a lot of what constitutes your innate cognitive ability or your cognitive ability is something that's really granted to you by by fortune and fate and I mean you can make someone stupider but it's very difficult to make someone smarter although hard work definitely is a plus people stack up at the bottom and it's not easy to figure out how to deal with that but because you need the people who are leading the cognitive revolutions to develop entrepreneurial enterprises and to run things properly and to invent the new things that we all use and hopefully to raise the living standards of society in general so do you think you said it's it's easier to make people stupider that's what you said yes it's easier to make people stupider oh definitely well you can do that by depriving of the depriving them of nutrition when they're children I mean one of the things we know and this is from your long Berg's work which I would really recommend long berg has put together a team of economists to rank order problems in the world by return on investment in in solving them so you imagine you know maybe there's a hundred problems that beset the world from starvation to to lack of water to lack of sanitary facilities to lack of education to tyrannical governance to well you you can you can continue the list in your own imagination what Lumbergh did was consult very high-level economists who he put in teams to find out where you get the biggest return for your foreign policy dollar over you know a reasonable stretch of time and and it's clearly the case that if you invest in early childhood nutrition that that pays off at about two hundred and fifty to one and so one of the ways that you can impair our children's intelligence permanently is by ensuring that they don't have enough to eat when they're very young and that's actually something that can be addressed very inexpensively and it's to everyone's benefit so pure so that's one way you can make people oh yes so let me ask you this do you think do you think media makes us smarter or stupider I think it makes some people smarter and some people stupider I mean well look at television debate see you've gotta kind of fragment you gotta kind of fragment the people that you're talking about in two different groups you know it's like asking whether day care is good for kids or not and the answer is if the day care is better than your family then day care is good for you and you know and I actually mean that technically because the studies of early childhood daycare indicate that for some kids it's it's it's perfectly fine and for other kids it's not it's good if your kid is extroverted and and ready to play with other children and so forth there's a lot of individual differences that that have to be taken into account so media in general look imagine that you're a little kid then you know your parents are neglectful and you're in your crib most of the time but the television is on well that's a hell of a lot better than just being in your crib you know and so it is pretty clear to over the last century on average IQ levels have gone up by quite a substantial amount and the reason for that seems to be that the very low end has been pushed up and some of that's going to be a consequence of increased nutrition and some of it's going to be a consequence of the fact that television is a lot better than nothing like infinitely better now whether television is better for you than you know a diet of high quality literature that's a whole different question whether it's better for you than playing properly with your peers engaging in pretend play and all the other things that you have to do to establish yourself as a competent child that's also another question but generally speaking I would say that the dispersion of the media technology we have has made us far more intelligent and the other thing that's worth thinking about too is that computers also make us more intelligent I would say not because of the content but because of the technology you know you've got to be pretty damn organized and sharp to keep your phone and your computer working these are high high maintenance gadgets you know and it actually annoys the hell out of me because you know I was sort of old enough so that computers came along a lot of people my age aren't very good at using computers and and oh and people who are older or even worse I made a decision when the computers started to become omnipresent and so that would have been about 1993 that I was going to spend a year and that was the first year that I was teaching in Boston pretty much doing nothing but figuring out how intel for 86 has worked and it meant there was a lot of other things that I had to put on hold but I did become a competent computer user and I was I'm pretty fast but you know my son it's just annoying as hell to watch him on the computer and on the phone because and my graduate students as well because there's so much faster than me that it's not even funny and I'm not really accustomed to being slower than someone else in the room and so [Laughter] you know we've got the other thing you see too and is that I mean certainly I would say if my son and my daughter both competent technology users my son in particular although my daughter has her her her shining sports to especially for use of social media but you know if I had children now the one thing I would bloody well make sure that they knew was how to use a computer how to program man because if you're smart and you can use a computer you are so much smarter than you are if you're just smart that it's not even funny you know when you talk to people it's in Silicon Valley all the time you talk to people who are expert computer users they are so bloody powerful it is just beyond belief so and that that's gonna do nothing but expand right because Moore's law is not dead and computers are doubling in power every 18 months and and so and who the hell knows where that's going to go so your kids they should know everything they possibly can about how to spin a computer on their finger like a basketball player so so one of the reasons why you love Twitter so much well I had Twitter yeah I have I have pulled back from Twitter almost entirely in the last four months and I can't say that that's done me any psychological harm I've quit reading the comments they know the comments and Twitter are really kind of they're they're such an odd way of communicating because let's say you tweet something out and it goes out to oh who knows I think I have a million Twitter followers it's something like that and I don't know how many of them read what I tweet but let's say ten thousand or something it's just a guess who who comments it's not like it's a random sample you know like if I just pointed to fifty people in the audience randomly and asked for an opinion about something I'd kind of get a good sample of what the audience thought but if I said okay who had an absolutely dreadful morning and as just as bitchy as can possibly be imagined okay so what are all you people stand up okay and then I'll ask the most miserable of you for your opinion that's kind of what Twitter's like [Laughter] you know so it's it's a form of pseudo information it's like you're communicating with people and and you respond to it like you're communicating with people because well you're accustomed to communicating with people and so that's how you respond but you don't know what the hell's going on with the person who's commenting you don't know if they are even real if they're hiding behind some false pseudonym or if they're trolling or or like I said if they just had an absolutely miserable day and need to you know throw a dart at someone to alleviate some of their stress so and it's a problem with social media in general all these new communication technologies that we've evolved we we really have no idea what they're doing to us they're really really hard on young women in particular Facebook and me and you think about it you know when I was a teenager I mean I I did god if I had to write a book about stupid things I did when I was a teenager it'd be a very thick book and it'd be a worse book if there were photographs accompanying it and you know but but I had this advantage that young people today don't have which was well when my day of stupidity was over I could go home and it was not there you know like it wasn't on Twitter it wasn't on Facebook there wasn't 20 of my friends communicating to me about you know what foolish thing I did at the party the night before and and young people now they're just followed by paparazzi essentially constantly and and I've watched that with the young teenage daughters of many of my friends because my kids were a little too old for that to actually have happened to them but god it's miserable and we know that there is some relationship between the amount of time people use Facebook for example and their mental health which meet the more they use Facebook the more depressed they are and it might be that the depression is driving the Facebook use but the causal pathway seems to be the other way around which is you know it's just playing that unbelievably exposed so so game that's hard on people and these aren't trivial technologies you know I mean their shape they're they're transforming the way we communicate with one another and that's and they're they're completely uncontrolled experiments we have no idea what the medium or long term consequences are going to be and we'll never find out either because of course the communication landscape changes so quickly that by the time you get adapted to one communication technology another one that's come along that's even more confusing that you now have to master and so well that's why it's necessary for everyone to develop their own modicum of wisdom I believe because I don't know how else we're going to be able to deal with this technological transformation that's going to come a car is already coming across us like a tidal wave and you know you ain't seen nothing yet the people in Silicon Valley have plans that well that that make you think that the whole place should probably be bombed just for the safety of the rest of us you know because there's there's tremendous danger in that rapid acceleration of machine intelligence and and we have no we have absolutely no idea where that's headed so and maybe it'll be great it's it's possible that they'll be great but power cuts both ways so hopefully we can we can control it with our wisdom and that's pretty much up to each of you to put your lives together so you can make good decisions so let me let me ask you this question this is more for myself this is maybe the audience you can process it any way they want you know we started a company based on a vision of capitalism and I promised myself I'm gonna be talking about this for the rest of my life on me coming here from Iran and understanding how this system works and why so many immigrants come here so I said for the rest of our careers we're gonna be talking about this and we're multicultural we got a lot of different nationalities and in that's 54% of Latino I think the second largest population in this room is probably african-american and then it's gonna be Caucasian and then it's gonna be I can left let out my my Filipino community that we have here as well and then we got a handful of middle Easterns here as well a few hundred middle Easterns but here's my question for you here's my bottle I want everybody to hear I actually don't have a clue what he's gonna say but I'm very curious I don't know for me over the years I like to ask birthdays when your birthdays to me just and I've stored in my mind I said boom there's there any kind of correlation between these night and it's not even horoscope it's just purely a date to me it's not like all your Libra your this I go through dates right and then the next thing I do when I start asking people question is if they're like math or they don't like math so one time we're sitting that we're having a debate politically about capitalism and economy and how money works and all this other stuff and this one person was absolutely against capitalism okay it's like oh my gosh just so capitalism stuff it's you know who cares about the money and who cares about this and I said let me ask a question were you were you somebody that liked math growing up I hated math that's it interesting okay very interesting that you hated math do you think some of us are born with liberal y rank and some of us are born with conservative wiring so it's 40 40 so I've got three kids and they're all different from day one they've all been different right 40 40 and then there's a 20% in the middle that's kind of trying to figure out let me see which argument makes more sense okay this makes sense okay cool I think this makes sense because it's like some people no matter what you say they're just not gonna change and there's no way in the world if 45 percent what the numbers are Democrats and 45% are Republicans let's just say you put that number there you can't say both sides are idiots because one side says the other side are idiots the other sizes the other sides are idiots just you can't sit there and think that it just doesn't make it well they're both right some of the time right so they're both right some of the time but do you think some of the belief system that we have politically liberal or conservative conservative we're born with oh yes you you do think that oh I think the evidence for tell us tell us near tell us why you say well okay so there have been good personality studies done for I would say about 30 years and the reason for that is that we figured out a personality model about 30 years ago that's stable cross-culturally and it was mostly derived this statistically and it required a fair bit of computational power to derive and basically the way that it was derived was that thousands of people were asked hundreds and hundreds of questions and then computers could figure out how the answers grouped so if you were likely to say yes to question a and also to question J maybe that was a tendency across a large group of people and so you could assume that there was something similar about question a and J and you could sort the questions into groups and it turns out that questions about personality sort into five groups and there's some argument about exactly the right number but it doesn't matter it's somewhere between five and seven and you can break the five down into ten but whatever we've got a pretty good overall descriptive structure like the periodic table of the elements for personality and if you're an extrovert man it's like you want to be where the action is you want to be where the party is you're you're telling jokes and you're setting up social occasions and and you smile a lot and you talk a lot and you want people around you all the time and a tremendous amount of that is influenced genetically and you can tell that if you have children because your children are like that from like Dave about it yeah my son's quite extroverted well my daughter is as well but you know he was a flirt when he was nine months old it was ridiculous what was ridiculous my wife used to pack him along on her back on one of those little I would do the same thing one of those little you know those little baby carriers and I can remember one time we were on a cruise ship just taking a small cruise from Maine to to Nova Scotia and we got on the boat and we were wandering through a group of people it was like it was like being with a rock star coz he was sitting in the back of the little baby holder smiling away you know like flirting like mad and waving at everyone then and that that was there right at nine months and so people different extraversion and that's positive emotion they differ in neuroticism and that's negative emotion some people are much more sensitive to depression and grief and anxiety their threshold for threat is a lot lower some people are agreeable rather than disagreeable and agreeable people are very empathic and self-sacrificing and the empathic part is good because you know it's useful to be empathic especially if you're caring for people who are in real trouble but the self sacrificing isn't so good that can make you resentful and and also decrease the probability that you're going to be successful in your salary negotiations and so forth so those of you who are agreeable and I have a hard time standing up for yourself and fighting you know you'll fight for other people but not for yourself it's a very good skill to develop that ability to watch your resentment and see what you need and then make a case for it's hard thing to learn people differ in conscientiousness that's orderliness and industrious and the different creativity which is openness and so and a lot of that's genetic it's there to begin with now you can move that with the environment you know but but you know you have a character it's there Liberals are higher in openness that's trait creativity and lower in conscientiousness especially orderliness and that seems to be because they believe or they're they're they're let's say their niche is an informational they believe that the free flow of information is worth the risk should I be the free flow of people across borders the free flow of ideas across borders the the free flow of concepts across categories they'd rather that the borders were permeable now the conservatives are low in openness and high in conscientiousness especially orderliness and they take the opposite tack they think well yeah there's danger in too much openness there's danger in borders that are too permeable things can change too fast entire societies can become destabilized and everyone can end up not knowing which way is up and the thing is is that both of those attitudes are correct it depends on the time because sometimes [Applause] you know sometimes things are changing so fast that everybody's knocked off their feet and things are falling apart and something times think things are so rigid that there isn't any new water flowing and and everything's ground to a halt you see that in corporations very often where they get ossified you know and and there's no new ideas and then they collapse you know the average fortune 500 company only lasts I think now it's only twenty four years and and the duration of their occupation of the top fortune 500 space is getting shorter and shorter every year you need Liberals because now and then the right thing to do is to come up with something new and you need conservatives because now and then the right thing to do is to do what everybody's always done and the reason you need political dialogue is so that the Liberals and the Conservatives can continue to argue about which of those solutions is appropriate right now and that's powerful Jordan and that's a unifying message by the way that's a unifying message that you're not here yes it today it's not a unifying message that we need each other today it's more worth smart you're dumb and you have no clue what you're talking about and you're trying to take advantage yeah yeah this is hey we need to kind of process oh it's really a bad idea you know like it's a really bad idea because here's another example so you know Silicon Valley tends to be liberal every everyone knows that and the reason for that is that there's a tremendous number of entrepreneurs there and entrepreneurs tend to be high in openness and lower in conscientiousness so they're creative but they're also willing to break rules you know which you kind of have to do often hopefully not to a criminal extent but you have to yeah well you know it's tricky when you're trying to establish something new because look at a company like uber you know they had to bend the rules to be successful in those companies that have rented those scooters out and put them on the streets everywhere you know they just kind of went ahead and did it it's not something an orderly person would do because they'd ask for permission whereas the people who started these scooter rental companies just said well what will happen if we put them everywhere and the answer was that seemed to work but you know you have to have a rule-breaking proclivity in order to manage that but the thing is if you're an entrepreneur you need conservative people because once you've figured out how to do something and then you want to run it algorithmically you know you want to run it by the rules well then it's the conservative types that are gonna be really good at doing that and making sure that the eyes are dotted and the T's are crossed and and show up for work on time and have stable marriages and be reliable and their their problem is it's easy for them to get stuck in a rut so so this is also rule 9 which is you know attend to the person you listen to as if they might know something you don't it's like I really find it interesting to talk to people whose political opinions differ from mine and for me that's mostly meant talking to really strong conservatives because I would say temperamentally I tilt in the liberal direction although being a social scientist has made me more conservative it's very interesting to talk to people who don't share your political views if you listen to the because they'll tell you all sorts of things about why they think that you just don't understand and it's not that they're wrong it's that sometimes they're wrong and sometimes they're right and the the whole point of free speech as far as I can tell the deep point of free speech is that you know it's all as if we're riding on the back of a giant snake and it's twisting and turning all the time and we're trying to figure out how to stay in the center so that we don't fall off the sides you know and sometimes it's time for a bit of a tilt to the left and sometimes it's a bit time for a bit of a tilt to the right and the only way you can tell when that time is is by having a discussion about it and it's oh it's the discussion that keeps thee that keeps us centered it's not the fact that the Conservatives are right or that the Liberals are right they're both necessary annoying as that is so so let me ask you this let me ask you this to follow up on that so it's there is there such a thing because so I sit there and I listen to somebody I was at the Wayne whose house and when he's had a Bill Clinton's campaign manager and win who said George Bush's campaign manager right and so only 40 of us and this is like ten years ago and they're both debating on their argument both very convincing okay they're both very confident convincing and persuasive is there such a thing as a hundred percent truth or is truth always adapting because if what you're saying is its opinions listen to both opinions and see what makes sense and what doesn't make sense versus is there something that I can look for that gets my argument a point to say you know what this is the accurate 100% truth I'm gonna solve it based on this because in math three times three is nine yeah I don't need a liberal conservative libertarian conservative you know whoever it is should tell me right three times three is math is there that as well to look at arguments that say this is the truth based on this or are we are having to still be a little bit nimble to see what both arguments are well I would say two things about that is one is I think there are times when you can establish truths this is one of the reasons I like Bjorn long Berg's work he wrote a book called how to spend 75 billion dollars to make the world a better place and what he did was put together these ten teams of economists he had them rank order the problems in terms of return on investment and then he averaged across their estimates and came up with a final list you know that that's not a bad application of the search interest for objective truth in the political and social domain so and it's relatively a political right because the economists see gathered represented a variety of different political beliefs and and so so I think there are times when there are objective facts that present themselves in the political sphere but most of the time political discussion is more it's more like marital negotiation you know and it's right it's it's right when it works in the world that would be the first thing like let's say you have a plan and you implement the plan and the plan turns out the way that you expected it to it's a pragmatic definition of truth okay that plan flawed no doubt it that it was imperfect no doubt that it was was accurate enough so that when you implemented it it justified its own structure and that's a lot of the way we judge truth in the world right is you you think you're right if you do something and it works and that doesn't mean you're 100 percent right and it doesn't mean it's gonna work forever but because you're ignorant and because your knowledge is limited that's kind of what you've got and so that's one form of truth and then another form is well can we agree in the negotiated manner like we kind of hope that if we're trying to solve a problem that we can talk until we come up with the least bad alternative that both of us can live with is that that's not the truth though we're compromising right it may be your idea is better than my idea I'm not like you know what I'm saying so let's just say your idea is better than my idea but I'm better at convincing you than you are convincing me that doesn't mean the best idea is being implemented right oh that happens all the time there's lots of times when the best idea doesn't win right you know but that's partly why the fact that we're constrained by the world is helpful I mean what you want to do in Polish you know what I'm saying like what I'm trying to say is like so I want to know is there a formula to get to the truth so then I can say this is where I stand on this position or is it all about a lot of going back and forth in this court until I'm kind of like okay I kind of relate to this 100% truth versus 70 percent 80 percent you see I know what I'm asking I think hundred percent truths are very difficult to come by that's where I'm going with you know okay I mean I've been trying to identify hundred percent truths the hundred percent truths let's say that sit at the bottom of our societies and one of the things that I believe to be true is that the idea that the individual is properly sovereign I believe is as true as any idea that human beings have ever come up with I think that that ideal works not everyone would agree with that the more complex the situation the harder it is to extract out something approximating an objective truth and and and so then so much of it depends on negotiation and discussion and and agreement now there are ways of addressing that as well you know one of the reasons that the United States works so nicely compared to many other countries is that well you have a plethora of states and each of those states in some sense is an experiment and all of the sub structures of those states are experiments and you know you because you have so many experiments going on which is also one of the advantages of an open society is you can kind of observe and see with all these solutions being generated which ones seem to be efficient and effective and so one of the ways that you come up with truth from the political level is essentially through a Darwinian process you know if you really want to solve a complicated problem maybe you try to solve it a hundred ways and then you take the best solution got it and look this happens to entrepreneurs all the time to you know most entrepreneurs this is something to know what most entrepreneurs most creative people fail at producing their creative product and monetizing it right so your default position if you're a creative person is you're gonna fail and so and that's because it's hard to come up something new and it's and it's hard to present it to the market at the right time and it's hard to market it like those things are really really difficult and so what successful entrepreneurs do is they just keep doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and eventually if they're fortunate one of their ideas happens to hit the right place at the right time and so that's also dark Darwinian in some sense you know you're creating all these little enterprises that are sort of alive there they're run by people after all and even if your idea is good that doesn't mean it will be successful there's so many things that have to be taken into account so this is partly why persistence and that's part of conscientiousness is so useful it's like you know what are they safe if at first you fail then try try again and and that would probably mean try something different rather than the same thing but persistence is helpful because it enables you to run many many experiments and and you need to know that the baseline is failure you know it's important because otherwise you'll blame that on yourself you know and some of that's useful because there's probably some things that you could improve the boat yourself but it's very difficult to go from zero to one you know it's very fierce starting out as a salesperson for example the hardest sale is the first customer and then you know they get easier with each additional customer but so of course last question for you before we wrap up last question before we wrap up is so say I see somebody in the room here hypothetically and I say oh my gosh I would love to you know have that kind of life I'd love to make that kind of money right and I compare myself to them right on so my gosh what if one day I can be that person what if one day I can have that life right how do I go from there to actually want it to live it and become a reality versus not allowing envy and resentment pinned me against them kind of like you know Cain wanted to be able but he couldn't so he goes in you know kills Abel how do you how do you manage that well the first thing I think you need to understand is that these people that you're comparing yourself to you don't No very well you know and what that means is that you see their shiny outside but you don't see the reality of their life and so what you're you know maybe you're in California see someone speeding down the road in a in a convertible Porsche and you think oh man what a lucky bastard and the truth of the matter is that he's thinking about wrapping his expensive sports car around the next cement pillar that he comes close to you know you can't tell and people have hard lives and and even people who are comparatively fortunate have hard lives and so the the ideal that you're observing that makes you jealous and resentful is in large part an illusion that's created by your own mind and you know I can give you just one example I like I know a fair number of extremely wealthy people and most of them most of the people I happen to know are people who've made them their money themselves and I tell you man they have a burden of responsibility that would would crush me it would crush the typical person they're just work and flat out like 90 hours a week and they have thousands of people depending on them and you know they have their money and and they have their status and that's not nothing but don't be thinking that there isn't a price to be paid for that you know they don't see their families they're often divorced they don't see their children grow up and and they don't have time off now there are wealthy what would you call playboy types I suppose who live out the dreams of wealth of a foolish 14-year old but they're not that common and you have to be careful of what you're jealous of because you don't really know what it is and and then the other thing that's kind of useful is to well to understand that you're different from everyone else and this is especially true as you get older when when you're 17 or 16 or something like that comparing yourself to other people makes a certain amount of sense because 16 and 17-year olds they're kind of the same you know which is why when you go off to university you can make friends so quickly it's like I'm just about 60 it takes me like 15 years to make a friend now you know as opposed to the two months that it took when I was 17 you're you're quite different from other people and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them because they're not like you you know they don't have your family they don't have your temperament they don't have your troubles they don't have your abilities the only person that the only the only person that has those is you and this is why one of the rules I think it's rule 4 is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today and see that's a game you can win because you could be a little better today than you were yesterday and that's a good thing you're a little better that that's a good thing and and you know no doubt there are some things that you could improve you know if you if you sit and meditate for any length of time about what you're not doing optimally answers will spring to mind you know you could be getting up earlier you could be you could be you could be watching YouTube less and less they're my videos in which case you could be watching them more anyways can't believe I said that actually I actually can't believe I said that that's the entrepreneur side of you I'm like comparing yourself to who you are now that's a game you can win and like I've seen this be effective in many many cases in my clinical practice for example it's like you take stock of where you are you know what your advantages are what your disadvantages are and then you start with little humility on the path of incremental improvement and you know incremental improvement compounds and so you can get a long ways and and then it's see because trajectory in some sense is more important in position for human beings I mean if you're starving to death anin deal that's not the situation that I'm describing but you know if you've got the bare necessities of life and so you're not you're not surrounded by absolute privation what you really want is to see that you're on an uphill path you know something that's got the right slope and and and you can start anywhere on that path and you you can improve half a percent a day or a quarter of a percent a day and you think well that's not very much it's like it's a hundred percent if it's a quarter percent a day it's a hundred percent in four years and that doesn't count compounding you know which means it's actually gonna happen a lot faster and that's duplicatable anybody can do that anybody can do that's not just applicable to the most talented person or the know anybody I think that the possibility that you can make yourself slightly better on a continual basis is I think that's something that's accessible to everyone I think that's equivalent to leading a virtuous life and you know I talked about the terrible catastrophe in some sense of differences in intelligence and differences in conscientiousness and so forth and the the downside of the meritocracy but there is something to be said for virtue and truth you know and that is one thing another thing that I've noticed about people who've been phenomenally successful is that they really do they really do everything they can to live a truthful life and that you can get a bloody long ways by being honest it's really something and so you know what one of the things I want he's talking about you never know what people are going through myself Marvin and Jordan were speaking backstage and you know he's been not as active recently as possible with media because of what your personal life what your wife is going through health-wise and he still kept this commitment to come out he have so much respect for someone like Jordan Peterson to still keep his commitment and that's tough to do it's your wife so let's make some noise for Jordan Peterson Jordan [Music]

Channel: Valuetainment

Views: 701,981

Rating: 4.8524103 out of 5

Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, jordan peterson, jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson best interview

Id: vdHJjbHwR38

Length: 65min 23sec (3923 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019